ABSTRACT

In this chapter we set out to illustrate how the pressurised, emotionally charged environments of contemporary education, configured by what we have described previously as ‘performance and perfection codes’ within a culture of ‘performativity’ (see Ball, 2004a and b, and below) contribute not only to some of the difficulties that vulnerable young people experience in schools but to the way in which teachers and others respond to them pedagogically and emotionally, often in very ‘unhelpful ways’. We go on to suggest that, even if a different, altogether ‘nicer’, range of emotions is to be fostered, these also need to be handled not just with greater sensitivity, heightened knowledge and different forms of understanding but within pedagogical relationships in which control over communication (over the voice of education itself, as well as over whose voice is recognised and heard) is much more evenly shared.