IDENTITY AND STUDENTSHIP

With the diversity of students entering FE (see Section 2.1.3), concomitantly there will be the likelihood of differing approaches to studentship. The concept of studentship within this study relates to the level that a student actively engages with learning and the curriculum, and therefore this draws in their level of disposition to the learning conditions. As Bloomer (1997: 148)

indicates: ‘it is important for concepts of studentship, disposition and identity to be relocated within the various contexts of their evolution and unfoldment’. Bloomer (ibid: 179) adds that changes in ‘perceptions, ‘horizons’ and dispositions’ can have a profound impact on studentship, which may then have short-term or lasting implications.

For some their studentship may be fixed within certain boundaries due to unmoving dispositions to certain conditions and therefore their learning may become unresponsive to accommodating new appreciations of knowledge and learning (ibid.). In some instances this could be viewed as a

student being recalcitrant, but there may be other issues not immediately evident. For example, a dyslexic student could be resistant to answering direct questions from a tutor in a group context, or giving an individual presentation to their tutor and cohort due to poor memory and information recall affecting their confidence. This could especially be a significant barrier if they have a history of tutors unsympathetic to their needs. Bloomer’s (ibid: 83) research identifies how there may occur some divergence in studentship. Therefore where some may adopt a strategic compliance to teaching, others may demonstrate retreatism, innovation and some may even rebel against it. This indicates a degree of agency towards curriculum, pedagogy, tutor behaviour to students, or conflict in views of knowledge (ibid: 96). Consequently how ‘students ‘acted upon’ their courses’

(Bloomer, 1996: 142), can be perceived as their studentship.

The differing levels of studentship, even within one cohort, could be considered as stages of being, or becoming a student, or even resisting studentship. With the latter, it is worth considering the value of Agamben’s (1993) notion of a ‘whatever being’ who is someone with, ‘neither apathy nor promiscuity nor resignation’ (ibid: 9).

A whatever being, ‘is able to not-be’ (ibid: 35). Situating this within a student cohort it could be considered as a belonging not bounded by being a student, but more being part of the social community within the cohort, even if there is not an active learning participation. A whatever student, potentially, ‘asserts no preferences; it neither affirms nor rejects’ (Dean, 2010: 68). This can be reimagined as an, ‘in-difference that resists identification while not excluding any property of the thing’ (Düttmann, 2008: 34); as such it, ‘does not result from a lack of belonging’ (ibid: 35). Therefore, a whatever student can be positioned within a cohort, although they may not fully participate with the coursework. That is not to say that they lack capability, or potential, unless they are ‘properly whatever’ (Agamben, 1993: 35). A whatever individual lacks the identity to fully integrate into the social context they are in and the expected norms (Dean, 2010). Within education there would be no active participation and therefore in mainstream education this would be an untenable position. Therefore someone who is not properly whatever can be construed as being in a liminal state, betwixt and between, but with the potential to be awoken by a stimulus, or a need.

By discussing studentship under notions of being a student, there needs to be some reflection on how levels of power and identity can be shapers in students’ levels of engagement with their work. To all but the most committed of students – but even they will have a history that forms this

engagement with coursework and being, or becoming a student, and concomitantly those that deter or distract this from occurring.

Power within education was discussed in Section 2.1.2, relative to FE tutors’ working conditions. For FE students, power will be reconsidered as more whatever it is that influences, or discourages their studentship. The result is their response to education, or some aspect of it and therefore that part of being a student. Giddens stresses the relevance of frames of meaning: ‘we must emphasize the creation of frames of meaning occurs as the mediation of practical activities’ (Giddens, 1993: 120 original emphasis). In a classroom context, frames of meaning for a student could be what education represents for them, or the culture within a cohort, or an individual tutor’s practices, or particularly technologies and their symbolism within cultural practices. These may be rationalised and used to adjust their practices around.

For Foucault (1970; 1977), identity and therefore students identification with being a student can be shaped through discourse and discursive practices and may produce a subject who is either docile (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982), or forms a ‘resistance identity’ (Castells, 2010: 8). Jackson (2013: 840), with a focus on Foucauldian methodology and the spatiality of power suggests that power, ‘rather than containing things, it makes things’. Again, power may be an inappropriate term to represent what it is that influences students and could be adjusted, in this instance, to whatever it is that affects identity and induces a particular aspect of it within certain conditions behaviour.

For example, a student may use a college computer to communicate with friends while they are in a classroom; they then become engrossed in a social discourse for those moments. This may be strategic, if for some reason they are not engaged with their studies and they do this because they are bored, or it may be that they just need a short break. In this sense it could be, as touched on above, that this is part of their cultural expectations when using any computer, or digital device. In these periods any notion of the formality of being in a specific place that others, expect specific behaviour, vanishes in the moment. This will be discussed further in Section 2.3, but at this point this aims to illustrate the fluid and faceted nature of identity. In this movement, or shift in presence, from one aspect of identity to another, in one place, there is a need to consider the strength of any particular anchor for identity that shapes contextual meaning. This may be what that place is identified as, and similarly for the resources available and thus what students perceive they can achieve within that context. This in turn can revert back to disposition and what can affect disposition within that environment during a particular period of time. As Rutherford (2007: 155)

comments:

We are always in the midst of language and we are always in the process of making identity. We can speak of identity, but its passage through time, its multiplication and difference, disperses its narrative coherence. Identity begins to lose its meaning and in losing meaning it searches for new meaning. We struggle to occupy an identity in order to anchor ourselves in the world. It is the phonetics of our belonging. It demands our reflexivity…

The formation of identity, and therefore the potential for ranging levels of studentship, or being a student, emerge as being complex, shifting and internalised. Yet with any human trait they are open to external stimulii, and are bounded in values of being, becoming, or something altogether other. As Rutherford (ibid.) comments, identity is no longer static and therefore susceptible to change. As digital technologies are so ubiquitous and readily accessible, and therefore a constant in many lives, then perhaps their polyvalent nature is now becoming one such anchor for identity. If this is to be considered, then discrete places and the potential range of meaningful real and digital spaces that exist within them have representational value. These may then be identified with by whatever exerts the most value, or need at one moment of time.

Identity and culture, as formed through what changes or sustains them can consequently be viewed as heterogeneous multiplicities that are context sensitive and therefore capable of rupture and subsequent acts of repair and re-joining. A demotivated, whatever, student can be imagined as entering a classroom and through some distraction, or event they become estranged from that facet of their identity they had as a student. It can also be imagined that, in such an instance, if there was an active and supportive peer learning culture conjoined with a pedagogy that facilitated learning, a vulnerable state could potentially be repaired.

The affective value of communities and cultures of learning has been lightly approached in the previous sections. Community learning has been distanced from formal learning conditions, but the following section will examine this within the notion of a student cohort as a community.