Reproducing disaffection

This article reports on a study on school disaffection captured in the views of a teacher, a Learning Mentor and a group of six young people at a school in south London. The study critically examined how the discourse of disaffection was produced, consumed, simultaneously resisted and reproduced, and analysed the complex set of negotiations that educational practitioners and young people made in their attempts to reconcile contradictions in their narratives about their experiences of teaching and learning. The adults' explanations for young people's lack of engagement with learning oscillated widely between attributing disaffection to the individual young people themselves, to curriculum relevance and its organisation, as well as to a range of other out of school factors. On the other hand, the young people's narratives pointed to the significance of the influence of peers as a contributory factor in their disconnection from learning but more importantly, the extent of their engagement with curriculum subjects emerged as contingent on the quality of the relationships they had with their teachers.