‘Fractured’ learning spaces: the emotional impact of damaged, working class learner identities, and the implications for attainment

This paper will employ the ideas of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘A Production of Space’ (1991) and Diane Reay’s ‘Miseducation’ (2017) to examine aspects of the educational experiences of workingclass students. It will look at how those experiences, in conjunction with broader and wider concepts of socio-cultural positioning, create a powerful dynamic between class inequality, emotion and attainment. The disadvantage gap in England is persistent and is a feature of primary, secondary, further and higher education. The attainment 8 measure was introduced in 2016 and is used to identify issues around attainment at significant moment in a student’s journey from secondary school into HE or FE. The gap between disadvantaged and other pupils has been identified as over 10 points year on year. The mental space where learning takes place is semi-public and semi-private (Lefebvre, 1991) and is constituted as an abstract and fractured space that exists within and throughout each individual learning journey, via different educational settings. As those individual educational journeys unfold, socio-political conflicts come into play and the individual ‘abstract’ spaces of knowledge production consistently make visible how this is a space used as a tool for domination. Within abstract space students experience the attempts that are made to destroy difference and impose an abstract homogeneity around what constitutes valuable knowledge. Clearly this maintains disadvantage gaps and inevitably impacts disadvantaged student experience and attainment. For students who possess damaged learner identities (Reay, 2017) when they enter university, the control of the abstract space where knowledge is produced and where working-class knowledge is denigrated and viewed as culturally inferior has far reaching emotional and psychological effects. Students in this position harbour feelings of isolation, being misunderstood, futility and worthlessness and constantly study under the shadow of failure. The history of working-class education has been one of control and cultural domination where the lack of a curriculum that draws on the strengths and values of being working class (Reay, 2017) creates the ‘othering’ of class experience. This systematic political and cultural domination coupled with a fractured and abstract learning space works to maintain structural boundaries that continue to privilege some groups above others. This presentation will speak to Reay’s explanations of why working-class students continue to fail educationally in comparison to other social classes, specifically; the relational nature of class experience, the influence of wider social and economic conditions, the shifting of educational responsibilities during the 1980s onto families and the implications of assuming that university education for working class students is a means to ‘escape’ working class lived experience. It will align Reay’s explanations with Lefebvre’s theories of the relationship between power and knowledge within abstract space. It will ask three key questions; firstly, what are we really doing to make universities fully inclusive, thereby reducing the negative emotional experiences of particular groups of students? Secondly, can the conflict that takes place within abstract space be resolved and finally, what practical steps can universities and educators take to develop a more equitable exchange within abstract space for working class students?