ON SCHOOL SOCIABILITY THROUGH THE SCOPE OF STUDENT’S CRITICAL OPERATIONS

Entering any public school has been a fruitful source of multiple experiences. It began in 2004 within a research project devised to sociologically discuss how citizenship education made its entrance into school by way of public policies and actions intended to guide the schooling processes.

In fact, in the late 90s of the last century, the political leaders of Portugal’s Ministry of Education expressed their concern on the lack of interest among adolescents and young people for political issues.² The knowledge of the extent of this detachment is given to them by the results of innumerable surveys applied in the country or by several European Union’s institutions at the time, aiming to have a notion as close as possible to the reality of the type of attachment or detachment of adolescents and young people from the political phenomenon. The greatest concern of those in charge of these observation techniques and their use is to assess, through their results, the degree of quality of democracy. And, according to those results, that degree is not a very positive one. A wide range of young people and adolescents are abstaining because they do not participate, through the vote, in electoral acts; among those who are already working at the time, a high percentage are not unionised; many are unaware of public causes, etc. Namely, the political involvement of the younger generations shows a lack of commitment to political activity - in terms of active and frequent involvement.

In the face of this general concern, since 2004, our aim has been seeking to discover the grammar of reasons for this disinterest turned into a public problem. According to data brought by political sociology at the time, “sufficient empirical evidence on the relationship of young people with politics” is shown (^{RESENDE; DIONÍSIO, 2005}, p. 673).³ However, the formal departure of adolescents and young people from political issues is counterbalanced by other unconventional engagements, that is, engagements not formatted according to the canons of official democratic participation. It is this other side of political involvement that has been our finding through successive immersions in school spaces over the past 15 years.

The mentioned research angle, resignified in the shape of a change in the meanings of adolescents and young people’s way of political engagement, has forced us to widen the space of public action of these beings. They are no longer bounded by an institutional definition of democratic implication, like, for example, the degrees of electoral abstention or political militancy in parties or other organizations constituted for that purpose, to consider their connection to public action through inorganic movements (sometimes more episodic) or their involvement in more recent public causes - such as the defence of animals, the environment, in favour of life or the decriminalization of abortion, for or against homosexual marriage, in favour or against adoption by same-sex couples, etc.

It has been through this scope that we have been observing school sociability. In order to test, from the beginning of the research, what the best insight is, as is to say what is the best sociological outlook to capture the active modalities of adolescents and young people at school in everything that concerns their attachments to the discussions on issues of public nature, and the most appropriate tread (because it is the most promising one), it has been analysed how school sociability is made, either among peers, or among the statutory figures categorised as students, or between the latter and their teachers. It is through school sociability that has been questioned how political socialization is operated in the educational institutions where secondary education takes place.

Bringing critical operations to light is to give students a voice but in their figures of adolescents and young people. This has been another innovation in our studies. When bringing to the centre of sociological inquiries their judgments on issues related to situations, moments, occurrences that students consider to be unfair, that is, matters that they manifest in a visible or in a whistleblowing way (the school lashing produced by the rat - the invisible informer), the sociability arrangements have been constituted as the best way to understand the meanings of these beings’ critical operations, who, in the transition from Basic to Secondary School, are going through the temporal arc that goes from the end of adolescence to the beginning of the young age.

It is precisely at this age transition that the passage to the last learning cycle occurs within schooling, determined as mandatory by the State. That is why this change - of age and schooling cycle - has been an interesting moment to explore the meanings of their critical faculties regarding problems that students announce to us, both in the context of exploratory conversations and in semi-directive interviews they have provided to us. In these common interactions, which go beyond the simple moments of formal or informal exchange of words, our observations capture individual or collective action modalities that are supported by a set of equipment that students constantly manipulate at school: cell phones, laptops and other similar objects that are, in a sense, artifacts that mediate, or even interfere, with their sociability among peers and with adults - whether they are teachers, education auxiliaries, psychologists, youth workers or other cultural mediators who work with them at school. It is through these artifacts skillfully used by students that teachers have been signalling the entrance of cultural industries in schools, expressing that their arrival produces acute tensions between curricular learning and the knowledge absorbed from internet platforms. And it has been through the social uses of these artifacts that we have verified its importance in their sociable involvements (sometimes tense or even conflicting) both with colleagues and those who they qualify as friends or with older beings who present themselves with another status within school walls.

What these beings, in this age transition and learning cycle, have been able to do in terms of school commonality with multiple voices has been our guideline in the consecutive researches carried out. And if at the first stage the purpose is to apprehend how political socialization is operated through the public action of a giving school time specifically dedicated to citizenship education, in subsequent stages, the research subjects are based on other anchors left open by these first endeavours into school territories. In fact, in the first itinerary research, the guiding needle of our questioning is limited mainly to the qualifying work that is demanded by the political socialization conceived by the judgement of the teachers with whom we developed the theme of the entry of citizenship education in the secondary school curriculum at the beginning of the new millennium (from the late 1990s to the early years of the 2000s). What is curious is that, when examining with the teachers how they operate, through teaching, but also through their coexistence with the students, the problem of citizenship education at school, they raise other problems that are problematised with the support on other axes that densify the analysis of what the questioning on the formulation of a citizen education along an increasingly long compulsory schooling brings.

The axes that they raise in their inquiries about the difficulties and challenges in mobilising students to discuss problems that they consider to be public make us shift our attention to other dilemmas and disputes that students summon, such as school and relational inequalities, humiliation issues and their judgments on other injustices committed during their passage through compulsory schooling. Thus, this broadening of scope greatly densifies the analysis of the arts of making the common in the plural in Portuguese state schools.

THE COMMON IN THE PLURAL IN SCHOOL SOCIABILITY BETWEEN EQUAL AND UNEQUAL BEINGS⁴

School institution has been, over the decades, a central subject of sociological analysis. Among the (profuse) production developed and shaped by different theoretical and methodological frameworks, topics related to its functioning stand out as a privileged angle, focusing particularly on school performance inequalities produced within it - and their consequences in terms of social inequalities (^{THÉVENOT, 2011}). In this set of questionings that guide the inquiries on the suitability of educational policies concerning the access to schooling, combating school inequalities and fulfilling the project of a democratic school, the analysis on the functioning of educational systems is conducted from the perspective of school meritocracy and equal opportunities as central principles of justice for the accomplishment of the goal of a fair school (^{DUBET, 2004}; ^{SCHILLING; ANGELUCCI, 2016}).

However, an examination of the judgments produced by actors in the school space allows us to account for different perceptions of injustice that emerge on the critical operations that these actors produce regarding the functioning of the educational system and the project to build a democratic school. Namely, an ethnographic immersion, focusing on the moral vocabulary underlying these critical operations, allows bringing to light different principles of justice evoked from problems and questionings raised by experiences that result from school sociability and that trigger feelings of injustice (^{RESENDE, 2010}; RESENDE; GOUVEIA, 2013; ^{BOTLER, 2016}). These judgments produced by students show the existence of problematic areas in schools, which are caused by events that agitate the daily life or situations caused by actions carried out by peers and/or teachers.

Indeed, the judgments that students (but also teachers) produce around school sociability transcend issues concerning equality and merit as principles of justice - in this case, mobilized in inquiries related to school results obtained (a fair grade distribution) or referring to the learning processes in the pedagogical relationship with teachers (^{DUBET, 2009}). It is, first of all, the issue of respect (^{PHARO, 2001}; ^{RAYOU, 1998}; ^{RESENDE; GOUVEIA, 2013}) that surfaces, as a central justice reference mobilized by students, constraining actors’ freedom of action so as not to infringe the immanent value recognised to each individual and disconnected from contingencies of hierarchy between the different beings.

This polarisation on the idea of respect in the judgments produced must be framed, secondly, in a more comprehensive problematic. Indeed, in the context of the actors’ relationships within contemporary institutions, a moralization of social criticism (^{ZACCAÏ-REYNERS, 2008}; STAVO- -DEBAUGE; DELEIXHE; CARLIER, 2018) can be identified, in which the appeal to the semantics of respect appears in parallel with the emergence of issues such as hospitality (^{STAVO-DEBAUGE, 2017}), recognition (^{HONNETH, 2011}) or decency (^{MARGALIT, 1996}) when actors critically comment on institutions’ functioning and on ways of making the common.

Effectively, the access to the moral judgments that students erect, both concerning the relationship between equal and unequal individuals (^{RAYOU, 1998}; ^{RESENDE; GOUVEIA, 2013}), allows us to understand how sociability is built within school space, through the different grammars that support their actions in making the common in school - to access the concepts of justice and acting logics that guide young people’s action (RAYOU, 1998; RESENDE; GOUVEIA, 2013) by penetrating the different repertoires of moral and political character through which students regulate life in common with the group of actors that inhabit the school space.

One technique can be particularly fruitful for accessing the moral frameworks that guide students’ conduct in school territory. This observation technique is named scenario survey (^{DANIC; DELALANDE; RAYOU, 2006}). In a brief description of its fundamental premises, respondents are presented with a hypothetical narrative, of a dilemmatic nature, raising different possible moral and political judgments structured by different regimes of engagement and grammars of commonality (^{BOLTANSKI; THÉVENOT, 2006}; THÉVENOT, 2006).

The narrative is accompanied by a set of exit propositions or hypotheses for the presented dilemma towards solving or remedying the injustice committed, with respondents being invited to order - from the unfairest to the fairest - the different evaluations that these propositions contain within them. Finally, respondents are also asked to carry out their evaluation of the presented scenario by writing a justification for the proposition that they consider to be the unfairest (which is subject to later categorization by the researcher), making direct reference to the moral and normative references that underlie their position.

The scenario presented⁵ in this article focuses on a student with a physical limitation that restricts his ability to move. Because of this vulnerability, the student arrives at a class already after the school bell rang, finding the remaining colleagues already seated in their respective places. His (repeated) delay in arriving at the classroom on time - delaying, consequently, the beginning of the lesson - motivates the teachers’ intervention. The admonition takes place in front of the rest of the class, and it is precisely on this remark that the focus of discord between these two characters resides.

A teacher opens the classroom door for the students to enter. With all students already seated, the teacher goes to the door to close it but notices one of her students is still heading for the classroom - Ricardo, a boy who has a lame leg. The teacher then says out loud: “Darn it, Ricardo! You, more than anyone, should be cautious in going to the classroom right before the school bell rings. Haven’t you noticed that you constantly leave the whole class waiting for you?”.

To the teacher’s remark, Ricardo replies: “I go to class when others go; I don’t see why I have to be different”.

The teacher immediately responded: “Be careful how you speak! Don’t you know you have to be on time?”.

Put the solutions set out below in ascending order, from the unfairer (nº1) to the fairer (nº5), placing only one letter in each case.

A. Given the situation experienced in class, the teacher shouldn’t have made any comment.

B. The teacher was right to comment the way she did.

C. The teacher’s comment should have been made after class, addressing the student directly.

D. Ricardo should have accepted the comment without replying to the teacher.

E. The teacher’s comment was incorrect and Ricardo was right to answer. (own translation)

The situation described can be understood as a moment of tension between different justice criteria, and the dispute it contains raises questions on the composition of the common. In particular, the narrative places the respondents in face of a duality between, on the one hand, the accommodation by the teacher concerning the application of the school regulation (in this case, concerning the time of entry in the classroom) by taking into account the student’s in question condition; or, on the other hand, the perspective of equality of all students, leaving the handicapped student the responsibility of adapting to the codified norms that regulate the conduct of all actors in the school space - which entails, as the teacher advocates, him going earlier than his classmates to the classroom. On the other hand, in the assessment made of the situation, there is also the question of the teacher’s approach. Publicizing the student’s vulnerability that her conduct causes is also subject to critical appreciation by the respondents.

An analysis of the justification categories around what respondents consider to be unfairest - the denial of justice as the starting point for accessing moral and normative references around the conceptions of a fair school (^{BOTLER, 2016}) - allows us to identify the plurality of confronting grammars in the way respondents judge the situation at hand. The justifications appear structured, namely, in three major poles.⁶

Firstly, we can identify justifications that fall under the category Equal treatment of the student/ Non-discriminatory attitude, corresponding to 36.2% of the students in the sample. In a convergent perspective, 21.1% advocate that The teacher must treat the student differently/must be in solidarity with the student.

Focusing on relational justice issues, 22.6% of students are critical of the teacher’s conduct due to the publicising act that it entails (Non-publicizing of difference). Convergingly, 4.3% of the students in the sample defend that The teacher should have spoken differently.

In a different perspective, 7.6% put themselves in a civic perspective of preserving equality among students, oblivious to any particularities in the judgment of the situation (Equal compliance with the rules by the student). Finally, it is worth mentioning 4% of respondents who, in a composite perspective, while assuming the same positioning of equality before the codified norms that regulate all actors’ conduct within the school, also advocate an approach from the teacher that safeguards the student’s exposure to his colleagues (Non-publicizing of the student’s difference by the teacher + Equality in compliance with the rules by the student).

To analyse in greater depth the diversity of perspectives in confrontation, and the contrasts and affinities among them, we proceed to the presentation of some of the justifications that integrate the most representative response categories.

MAPPING THE PLURALITY OF MORAL POSITIONS

Finally, to understand how the constellation of justice principles at stake, but also the relationship of these moral judgments with a set of characterization variables of the student population inquired,⁷ we take a distinct look through a multiple correspondence analysis. The factorial plan obtained allows us to display in the graph’s different quadrants the plurality of judgment frames produced by the respondents (including the relations of confluence and opposition to each other), while also drawing different profiles through the social characterisation data (Figure 1).

Source: Survey applied within the research project “Gender, Inequality and Humiliation: feelings of injustice in school”, 2010-12 (N=716).

FIGURE 1 FACTORIAL PLAN 

In the case of the first identified profile (profile 1), it is composed of judgments that focus, on the one hand, on relational justice issues (with respect as moral vocabulary), but also, on the other, in terms of hospitality and criticism of logics qualified, from the civic world, as discriminatory.⁸

The characterisation variables allow us to account for the socio-economic profile of the students whose opinions fall into these categories. Firstly, the respondents attend the teaching institutions of the sample that host the least socially favoured school population - namely, schools “A”, “B”, “E” and “F”, where students from the lower social classes are predominant, despite the contrasting geographical locations (see footnote 5).

Regarding the mother’s socio-professional categories, these are associated with the lower levels of the secondary economic sector - Industrial workers, Self-employed and Executing employees. The low socio-professional status is reinforced by the mother’s educational levels, characterised by a schooling level limited to Basic Education. In terms of their profile as students, these are students from Languages and Humanities and enrolled in the Technical and Professional courses, as well as Education and Training Courses (ETC) - teaching tracks that predominantly receive students from more disadvantaged social contexts. Moreover, this profile is also characterised by students who present, at least, one failure counted throughout their school trajectory.

This first group appears, in the factorial plan, in a relationship of opposition with profile 2, which is characterised, in turn, by an evaluation of the scenario in which the focus is placed on compliance with the school rules, in a perspective of equality of actors under the normative orientations inscribed in the school regulations as a civic device for the governing of behaviours (departed from any particularisms).⁹

In this case, the characterisation variables reveal a different social context. It is composed of students from school C, located at the centre of Lisbon, and attended predominantly by middle-class students. Concerning the mothers’ socio-professional categories, this group includes the two highest categories. They are, namely, children of Entrepreneurs, Managers and Liberal professionals, as well as Technical professionals. This socially advantageous landscape is also reinforced by the mother’s academic qualifications variable, with the Post-graduate category (namely, Master’s or PhD degree) integrating this profile. Regarding the course attended, they are students from the Scientific-Humanistic field, specifically Socioeconomic Sciences.

In the case of profile 3, it corresponds to the group of respondents in which the criticism of the inhospitable character of the teacher’s conduct resulting from the publicising of the student’s vulnerability is articulated with the perspective of civic equality of all students under the set of codified rules in the regulations, thereby invalidating differentiations.¹⁰ Also in opposition to the profile that judges the situation by recommending a different approach by the teacher, this profile includes students whose mother hold a graduate or bachelor diploma and that attend Visual Arts courses, along with Sciences and Technologies - the latter being typically an educational route that predominantly hosts contingents of students from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds.

Finally, a special reference for the gender variable should be made. It is relevant to point out that if male students are located in the lower quadrants of the factorial plan - where the understandings related to the relationship towards the rules (positive discrimination or equality under the rules) are situated -, while female students are located in the two upper quadrants, where issues of relational justice predominate and where the problematic of respect and publicising in the teacher’s conduct appear more emphasised in the moral judgments and qualifying evaluations.

MAKING THE COMMON IN THE PLURAL: RECOGNITION IN THE RESPECT FOR DIFFERENCES

Having arrived at the end of this analytical path, it is worth highlighting some interpretative lines based on the scenario presented to the final year students of six Portuguese secondary education state schools. In the mapping that we have produced from the research data, in other articles (^{RESENDE; GOUVEIA, 2013}) it has been possible to show that students from different secondary schools distributed across different regions of the country are bonded to the common in the plural when they are faced with dilemmas of similar nature to the one which appears in the intrigue narrated in the scenario. Instigating plots like this, it should be noted, do not arise from chance. They are part of everyday school experiences and are constantly revealed by students and teachers when, in the course of a conversation about school environments, we ask what events occurred that impel them to think about their commonality. In the presentation of scenarios where the unequal is unequally treated, the manifestation of these differences, not only are not forgotten but are experiences that affect them intensively. And we took seriously the data that our initial informants brought to us on these physical vulnerabilities and its consequences.

And, if there were any doubts, the treatment of the information taken from the answers provided by the respondents indicates that the intrigue exposed there, on the one hand, did not leave any respondent indifferent and, on the other, the way the story affects them mobilises different principles of justice raised to a high level of generality, often combined with other regimes of engagement of greater proximity and familiarity (^{THÉVENOT, 2006}). And it is, from the creative modalities on how students compose their justified positions in the face of a disturbing situation, that we find that the common is built in schools, not in a unilateral, homogeneous way, but in a plurivocal one - that is, in multiple voices.

The sociological significance of the compositions skillfully drawn up by the respondents has profound meanings, since their experiences resulting from school sociability combine relative stability with frequent (often unpredictable and other times surprising) detonations. And if in the altercations between students there are treatment inequalities derived from the knowledge of the school results, that is, from the classifications obtained in school tests and assignments, the equality in the procedures of how to treat each other gains increasingly more notoriety, even when some do not express it loud and clear, out of fear or because of shells that hinder their body expression necessary for that purpose (^{BREVIGLIERI, 2007}).

Even when the playfulness, the joking or humour enter softly or abruptly into conversations about problems that affect the ways of treatment used among peers, or, how appears in the story, the way a teacher treats a particular colleague (friend or not), that treatment is an integral part of the unplanned menu of making the common in the plural in Portuguese schools. This means that the issue is a sensitive problem, both at the relational level among students studying in the same class and that hang out with others during recess, at school breaks that are common to all classes, or between the student category (in the figures of adolescents and young people) when they confront teachers who, for example, do not reply to their greetings - “good morning, teacher” or “good afternoon, teacher”.

And only a minority of respondents present themselves stuck to the formal use of the general treatment rules inscribed in school regulations. And within this low percentage, there is a proportion of them who do not lack giving attention to the treatment issue, since they oppose the way the teacher reacts when she closes the classroom door and realises that Ricardo had not yet entered. If their normativity is based on the belief in formal equality of treatment that is inscribed in the regulations understood as conventions whose rules must be applied equally to everyone, disregarding any particularism, they are sensitive to the destructive ways of the self-esteem caused by the public criticisms addressed by adults or colleagues, in many situations that make up the daily life of a school, to figures of lesser worth (^{BOLTANSKI; THÉVENOT, 2006}) who exhibit vulnerabilities, such as the case of this story’s protagonist.

In the plurality of beliefs on which their moralities are based, the issue of mutual respect among each other is something that permanently confronts them with themselves and in the continuous relationships they maintain with colleagues, friends, but also with beings of greater worth (^{BOLTANSKI; THÉVENOT, 2006}), as is the case with teachers. It is through this path that vigorously enters in schools the questioning about recognition in the face of everything that differentiates them as human beings, such as the colleague who notoriously presents, in his corporeality, a motor disability. If the majority of respondents indicate that the teacher must attend to this detail, allowing the student to arrive a little later to class because, despite his limp, he has the equal right to enjoy for the same period, an even major problem is the public exposure that the colleague suffers from the aforementioned deficiency made out in the open by the teacher.

The teacher’s public remark that the class doesn’t start immediately due to his permanent delay, and that his lagging in entering the class is a result of his difficulty to walk swiftly, is generally considered to be unacceptable, and in some of the justifications is considered intolerable, i.e., as a public demonstration difficult to bear. The students’ critical operations on the teacher’s form of acting in an attempt to adapt to the tension caused by Ricardo’s delay demonstrate that the common side of students (even in their plurality) is very sensitive to the consequences of the controversies that expose in public the dignity of humanity that each one carries in its corporeality.

Displaying in public, even if in an unintentionally spiteful way, the vulnerability of a colleague, in this case, a body that exhibits a motor disability, is a reprehensible way of being with everyone at a school, namely in classrooms, privileged spaces in school to learn how to make the appropriate and adjusted coexistence among each other. In the bonding between each and everyone with their environment, in the classroom or outside the classroom, the big discomfort that is conferred by the tribulations guided by the publicising of statements performed by the teacher turns these territories into uninhabitable spaces.

This has been another discovery that has taken place with these successive immersions in school institutions over the past 15 years, designed to examine how students have been, over time, exercising the arts of making the common in the plural. The enigmas around how habitability of school space is made have led us to consider the importance of how different generations (in terms of age, but also of their seniority in a given educational institution) accommodate people who enrol every year.

It is through this acute sense that the problem of mutual respect - respect is necessary - cannot be considered, conceived as a sociological problem, within the scope of school sociability, if there is no increased attention in linking it to other modalities of creative action that result from the processes and procedures associated with welcoming, inhabiting and providing school territories as spaces of good accommodation - namely, as spaces where qualitative forms of hospitality are invested for the newcomer that arrives, with the differences manifestly brought by the corporeality of each one. These are also the sphinxes that encourage us to continue this journey of looking for other paths that are present in school governance exercises aimed at building an inclusive school. This presupposes that qualified good school governance attends to everyone since the inclusive school cannot drift to exclusionary schooling.

We must not forget that there is no school without schooling. The reverse is true, placing schooling at the centre of the analysis is a decisive bet for us, considering that school sociability establishes bridges with the formats forged by the learning processes. It is important to note that those formats give form and content to the acts of schooling, conceived as instruments that provide students with their knowledge and their wisdom - which are part of their multiple experiences and that involve them in many of the events that take place at school.