Learning to Act Your Age in the Classroom

Chapter 4 focuses in to look at how particular ideas about age and social identity are cultivated and articulated in the day-to-day social interactions of the classroom at Lakefield School. In Part I of the chapter, I set the scene by showing how, in the case of Lakefield, age imaginaries are embodied through the various levels of control placed on physical movement and interaction within classes in different year groups, and in students’ tacit acceptance or overt contestation of this control. In Part II, I focus on how age imaginaries emerge both in the content of the curriculum and in the processes through which students and staff negotiate the delivery, or avoidance, of the curriculum in the day-to-day lessons. In Part III, I consider how both students and staff narrate their experiences of negotiating age in the classroom, paying particular attention to the ways in which age is imagined relationally between staff and students as the latter shift positions in the hierarchy of the school.