ABSTRACT
This material has been taken from the report of a three-year observational study in primary and secondary schools, which explored how children through day-to-day interactions with teachers and fellow pupils formed concepts of themselves (their ability, status, identity) and developed consistent patterns of behaviour appropriate to their self-concepts. As Nash argues elsewhere in his book, ‘the essential cultural messages of the school are conveyed through an incalculable number of interactions between teachers and pupils. These messages are only marginally concerned with school learning in the normal sense of the term but they have everything to do with the child’s status, with his self-image, and with his aspirations for the future’. The two small-scale studies reported here (the first in a primary school and the other in a secondary school) support the author’s interactionist stance and demonstrate how close were children’s and teachers’ perceptions of the class positions of individual pupils. Nash’s work suggests a partial explanation of why working-class children are in general less successful in school than their middle-class counterparts. It may be that teachers’ lower expectations for working-class children, documented in a number of studies, are conveyed directly or indirectly through day-to-day interactions to the pupils who use them to build up their identities which in turn influence their future behaviour and progress in school (see also pp. 246-50).
