ABSTRACT
In order to study initial encounters between teachers and pupils (and their impact upon each other) I observed a class (1Y) in all their lessons during their first halfterm in Victoria Road, a boys’ comprehensive school in South Wales. Lower School, in which the study took place, was a separate unit housing the first year and was isolated from the rest of the school. As the fieldwork got under way one of the aspects which immediately began to attract my attention was the rapid emergence of what I termed a form-wide ‘fraternity’ of pupils which would expand and contrast as occasions allowed. Within it, boys possessed different roles, namely: core members and instigators; ‘jokers’; ‘the sillies’; ‘dumboes’/‘spastics’; ‘tactical muckers’, or occasional participants; and a very small number of isolates and non-participants. In what follows I focus exclusively on the formation, behaviour and identity management of the boys who gathered around David King: they constituted the fraternity’s core members mentioned above and were the principal instigators of ‘mucking’ and ‘sussing’ during these early days. I became interested in the strategies they employed to find out about classrooms and type teachers; the specific nature of the ‘knowledge’ they required; and the means they employed to (in their words) ‘suss-out’ teachers. To investigate these I engaged in participant observation; made audio-recordings of classroom interaction; and extensively interviewed pupil and teacher informants. The combative strategies utilized by the boys often had more than one simultaneous function (for example, ‘playing’ was both a means of ‘sussing-out’ a teacher and of rendering the boring bearable). However, their primary purpose (repeatedly testified to by the boys) during the opening week of term was to control, as well as facilitate pupil-pupil typing and the rapid creation of a viable alternative (and ‘enjoyable’) culture to offset the threatened domination by the official school procedures into which all pupils were then being ‘grooved’.
