Positional identities are concerned with ‘the day-to-day and on-the-ground relations of power, deference and entitlement, social affiliation and distance’ (Holland et al., 1998:127); teachers position others in their school, and are in turn positioned by them. In some cases, position becomes disposition, but as Holland et al. say, ‘position is not fate’ (p45); once someone comes to be part of and understand a figured world, then they may come to use the cultural resources of that world to become liberated from it. As explained in chapter 3, this process of liberation is often triggered by ‘processes of objectification’ (p142), a rupture, as one comes to see oneself through the eyes of another and recognise what one has become.
The role of Year 6 teacher getting results is what Holland et al. (1998:18) would refer to as a ‘subject position’ within the figured world of the primary school. Such subject positions are taken up differently by different teachers according to their history-in-person and ability to improvise ‘using the cultural resources available’ (p18). Anna, Bernard and Claire work with the subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results in very different ways. I begin with Anna whose narrative is imbued with stories of positioning in relation to the subject position, and then describe Claire and Bernard whose stories of positioning are less significant to their overall narratives.
8.1.2.1
Anna – ‘It’s a huge vote of confidence.’
Anna describes herself as having enthusiastically taken up the available subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results. She talks about being flattered to be offered this position so early in her career and considers this as a ratification of her worth as a teacher. Aspects of her history-in-person appear to chime with this subject position, notably that she is competitive and good at mathematics, and any improvisations described by Anna serve to amplify rather than deviate from a focus on getting results. In Anna’s narrative, there is a strong connection between Anna’s position and her disposition, and rather than position becoming fate, it appears that her fate was to hold the subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results. Holland et al. (1998:49) describe how ‘people have the propensity to be drawn to … these worlds’ and it feels as though Anna has indeed been ‘drawn to’ the subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results and works constantly to maintain this high status position.
Anna describes various ruptures in the form of people expressing their surprise at her being the Year 6 teacher; through these processes of objectification, she has come to understand that others position her as either at best atypical or at worst unsuitable. She describes being both amused and worried by this, and talks about being determined to show that being young, inexperienced and female is not a barrier to being a good Year 6
teacher getting results. She describes her predecessor, Brian (an older, experienced,
male) as an ideal symbolic figure of the Year 6 teacher getting results and articulates the feeling that she is positioned by others in relation to him, especially by parents (positioned as ‘lawyer parents’ (A-int1)) and her class TA (who was Brian’s TA).
In her narrative, Anna tells me that she is doing a good job in this tough, high status role. One of the ways she tells me that she is good is through comparisons with her colleagues. For example, Anna describes the Year 3 teacher’s lack of knowledge about fractions as a way of introducing her own strong mathematics knowledge. And she describes Julie (the Year 5/6 teacher) as less of a Year 6 teacher getting results because she uses images and manipulatives whereas Anna works ‘in a numerical sense’ (A-int1) in preparation for tests and transition to secondary school. Ultimately, Anna knows that she does a good job as the Year 6 teacher getting results because the children achieve in tests. For Anna, these results are worth working hard for because they secure her position and status, because you’re only as good as your last set of results and therefore cannot ‘[rest] on any laurels’ (A-int3).
8.1.2.2
Bernard – ‘I do it the proper way.’
Similarly to Anna, Bernard describes herself as having been ‘rewarded’ (B-biog) with the subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results. They differ though in that for Bernard this means that she has a great responsibility to do a good job for the children. She improvises on the subject position with her history-in-person (including as a member of the community and as having been the nurture TA) which result in her being concerned for pupil welfare and having different motivations for achieving results. She positions herself as the best person to teach these children.
Bernard positions others in her narrative but says little about how she is viewed in return. However, one incident that stands out is her retelling of a bullying incident between the children, and her comment that ‘some parents objected’ to how she had called ‘their child a bully when they’re a bully’ (B-int2). This event acts as a rupture, a process of
objectification through which she comes to realise how parents see her as a teacher (which is different from how she saw herself a member of the community and as one of them).
Bernard tells me that she does a good job because she does things properly, as the pupils deserve. Like Anna, her stories of her colleagues serve to support this self-positioning. For example, she tells multiple stories of Year 5 colleagues who she positions as lazy, cheating and of thinking of themselves rather than what is best for the children (like the teachers in Pratt’s (2016) research who over-stated achievement in one year and put pressure on the next teacher). Bernard does author as worried that she overcomplicates things in mathematics and positions her Year 6 partner, Vicky as having superior teaching skills because she appears to naturally know what is the best way to teach mathematics.
8.1.2.3
Claire – ‘I’ve got a little bit of sway at present.’
Claire tells me that when, upon her appointment to the school, she was offered the subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results, she expressed her disinterest in this as it is not a position that she wanted or was flattered by. Drawing on her history-in-person – especially the sediments from her professional experiences – Claire describes how she resists this positioning. This improvisation and Claire’s subsequent liberation from the focus on results is facilitated by Christine, the Headteacher, who deploys Claire as the teacher of the bottom set with a ‘licence’ (C-int2) to focus on pupils’ learning rather than on test results. When she describes this deployment, Claire says that Christine told everyone that she wanted the ‘teachers who teach well with the children that can’t do it’ and positioned Claire as ‘in tune with how mathematical reasoning develops’ (C-int2) and thus as the best person for the job.
In her narrative, Claire positions herself as an expert mathematics teacher and as both ideologically aligned with me and as my equal. She describes herself in her pen portrait as having a ‘teaching methodology’ and positions herself as well-informed and well- connected. She talks about how others position her as an expert in mathematics pedagogy, and how she is advising the school’s subject leader and Headteacher about how mathematics should be taught. Like the MaST graduates in research by Barnes et al. (2013), MaST appears to have provided Claire with a warrant to influence the practices of others. She also positons herself as an expert on what Ofsted look for in mathematics
lessons and this connection to the mechanisms of performativity appears to add to her status.
Claire’s colleagues do not have the same ‘licence’ that she has, and she positions them as working differently from her and engaging in practices which are about maximising results as ‘you do have to do in Year 6’ (C-int1). These colleagues are described by Claire as not having had the same professional development experiences that she has had (they don’t have the necessary history-in-person) to be able to improvise on the subject position, and Claire is sympathetic to this. Claire’s story tells of a rupture at the end of the year, in the form of disappointing SATs results and the subsequent realisation on the part of Christine and the Year 6 teachers that their pedagogical practices have been unsuccessful, while Claire’s approach – her ‘teaching methodology’ – has resulted in one of her pupils achieving the pass mark. This rupture results in Claire being positioned as of even higher status, and when she is approached for advice, she says she gave it at length.
8.1.2.4
Cross-case comparison
Anna, Bernard and Claire all respond differently to the ‘subject positions afforded one in the present’ (Holland et al., 1998:18). In their cases, the ‘subject position’ is that of Year 6
teacher getting results. There are however some consistent features in their narratives
including their reference to ‘the day-to-day and on-the-ground relations of power, deference and entitlement, social affiliation and distance’ (p127).
Firstly, each of them self-positions in relation to others to say something about themselves. For example, Anna tells me that she is good at mathematics (in contrast to her Year 3 colleague who lacks knowledge of fractions), Bernard tells me that she does things properly (unlike her Year 5 colleagues who are lazy and cheat the system), and Claire tells me that she teaches according to her well-informed ‘teaching methodology’ (whereas her Year 6 colleagues teach to the test).
Secondly, each of their stories features a rupture and subsequent moment of realisation which ‘often seemed to motivate (plans for) action, sometimes even life-changing action’ (p142). For Anna and Bernard, this is a process of objectification through which they see themselves through the eyes of others, whereas for Claire, the rupture is experienced at an institutional level as the Headteacher and Year 6 teachers recognise that teaching has not resulted in good results and that a new plan for teaching in Year 6 must be adopted.
Finally, their history-in-person has an impact on the nature of their improvisations on the subject position of Year 6 teacher getting results. Claire’s improvisation is the most extreme but the Headteacher facilitates this by deploying her to work with the bottom set. In an age when ‘institutional loyalty and compliance with organisational values’ is expected and ‘conformity has an even higher value than before, while dissent is increasingly constructed as disloyalty’ (Reay, 1998:185-6), it is interesting that the Headteacher, Christine, deployed Claire as she did. It is as though she deliberately avoided potential conflict between Claire’s perspective and ‘the school perspective’ of achieving high results, and her deployment with low attaining pupils was a way of keeping Claire happy, and quiet.