Identity matters: Language, practices and the (non)performance of rudeness in a Pupil Referral Unit

• Published in: Linguistics and education 2017-04, Vol.38, p.44-54
• Main Author: Dray, Susan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alternative approaches; Banter; Classroom communication; Classrooms; Ethnography; Identities; Identity; Performativity; Politeness; Practices; Referrals; Science and technology; Secondary education; Semiotics; Sociolinguistics; STS
• ISSN: 0898-5898; 1873-1864
• DOI: 10.1016/j.linged.2017.02.001

•Interactions in a Pupil Referral Unit are analysed as material-semiotic practices.•‘Banter/boyin’ practices are normatively incompatible with teaching practices.•Being rude is an identity effect of a clash between these incommensurable practices.•Lessons stutter less when alternative identities are crafted by skilled staff. Combining linguistic analysis of interactions with tools from the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS) I explore the material-semiotic character of practices to understand how ‘rude’ identities were achieved in Manchester’s Secondary Pupil Referral Unit (England). Using ethnographic methods, I identify three distinct subaltern practices, banter, boyin and chatting shit, and show how their entangled linguistic formats and normative assumptions were incommensurable with the interactional formats of British secondary education classroom practices. I show that when these incompatible practices overlapped people might become rude, but they might also emerge as wits, winners, gibberers, liars or gossips, and which identities came to matter was contingent on the socio-material relations in play. I conclude that one way in which harmony was maintained during precarious moments of difference in a lesson, was through skilled staff who, in being able to participate in both classroom and banter/boyin practices, were able to mediate between the two when it mattered by crafting alternative identities.