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Teaching timetables framed the rhythm of the day and distinguished between times when student teachers were in the classroom and time they were able to spend in other areas of the school, usually in preparation for teaching. They also affected the routine journeys, often amongst a suite of rooms designated for maths teaching, which teachers would make around the school. The student teachers did not usually remain in the same classroom for any longer than a teaching period of about one hour, which meant that, after an organised dismissal that underlined their authority in the mathematics classroom, they had to move into the corridors, which were the school’s main networks of communication.

The routine movement of pupils and teaching staff between classes in English schools could be surprising:

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That was not the case at my school because students would stay in their classroom and it is only the teachers moving around in between lessons.

(Giana) Close to the maths classrooms, student teachers would meet colleagues from the maths department, and carry with them the authority they had accumulated in the surrounding classrooms. Elsewhere in corridors and playgrounds, in contrast to amongst the organisation of desks in classrooms, this authority could be difficult to negotiate: they were without familiar members of staff, and there was always the possibility of chance encounters with unfamiliar pupils, and situations that might require disciplinary intervention. Although the student teachers were expected by the school to carry out this role, Giana, with her reference to ‘big groups of students’, suggests the concerns that some might have in doing so.

This situation might be made easier by knowing other staff from mingling in the staffroom, or by knowing other pupils, either through participating in pastoral duties, such as being responsible for tutor groups, or by being involved in extra-curricular activities. Participation in such activities, which are a valued feature of English schools, does not necessarily match the expectations of schools and teachers in other countries, where the main duty of a teacher is to teach groups of pupils (Pepin, 1999). This way of demonstrating ‘investment in the game’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2007:98) was often made more difficult by the way in which these activities might represent local and national traditions, meaning that student teachers might not be able to use their own leisure interests and capital: for example Pilvi, a good handball player, did not have the opportunity to play the sport in English schools.

On the other hand, for some, in certain schools, religious observance offered opportunities to participate. Imane attended, in a religiously appropriate manner, the weekly congregational prayer, the Jumu’ah, and this observance and her own religious dress led to her being recognised, and greeted, in the corridors by pupils:

They were very respectful because it was almost like 70% Muslims and even the classes that I didn’t teach, when I will be walking in the corridor, they will say, you know, they’ll greet the Islamic greeting to me, ‘Salaam Aleikum, Miss’. That means ‘peace be upon you’. And I was surprised because they weren’t the

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children I used to teach. And they used to tell me that. It shows that they are very respectful.

(Imane) Imane had taught briefly in Algeria, and her surprise at being greeted by pupils she did not teach underlines the different priorities and responses of teachers from outside the UK to which I referred earlier. It is interesting to note how the respect she found so remarkable was paid to her not only as a Muslim but also a teacher, in the way in which the traditional Muslim greeting was immediately followed by the titular of Miss, commonly used for women schoolteachers in English schools. Imane did not report that the Islamic greeting was used in her class, and its use in corridors demonstrates the possibilities for and the importance of different practices and relations between staff and pupils that are afforded by public spaces throughout the school.

Imane’s contact with Muslim pupils was similar to the contact that some student teachers had with pupils who had migrated from their own countries, whether or not they taught them. For example, Doina said of a Romanian pupil, that:

[I]f he would do badly then I would tell him off straight away and say he should be embarrassed. At least maths, because it’s not the language so much. Maths is more international, so yeah it’s good to have high expectations.

(Doina) Here we see that Doina has a sense of responsibility for the boy from Romania, and would use her own knowledge and experience of Romanian mathematics education to reprimand him immediately for poor performance in mathematics. Doina expressed a translocal positioning by using the phrase ‘high expectations’. She simultaneously employed a term that is in common usage in the discourse of raising standards in English schools and acknowledged the high standards of mathematics in Romania, of which she herself was a product.

This strategy of double voicing was also used by Christophe when he was contacted by a mother who had migrated from Africa and was having difficulties with her son at home:

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[T]he mother called me and said ‘Only you can talk to him. He will listen to you. He won’t even listen to me’. I call him, I tell him that ‘If I hear your mother complain to me again about your behaviour, trust me young man, you’re not going to get it easy, I’m going to step my foot down on you, all what you’re doing wrong’ and when I speak to them from that perspective they see.

(Christophe) Here, in the syntax of ‘I’m going to step my foot down on you’ there is an ambiguous use of English, inflected by forms from Africa, that might be inappropriate in the rest of Christophe’s professional performance. Like the use of the greeting ‘Salaam

Aleikum’ for Imane, it draws its power because it is juxtaposed with other, more

familiar, forms of local English. It indexes both the home and school life of the pupil, and, combined with his performance as a man, allows Christophe to draw upon authority from ‘that perspective’ outside the school. Imane also spoke from this other perspective after prayers:

They were like [...] when I [...] actually I was the only teacher praying with them and when I come out, they will look at me and they will be, ‘Miss, are you praying? Did you pray?’ And I used to use that, you know, with the boys if they were like misbehaving and I said, ‘Did you pray Jumu’ah and you’re acting like that?’ ‘Oh, how did you know, Miss?’ ‘I was with you. I prayed, and that’s what the Imam said [...]

(Imane) Here, Imane appeals to the disciplinary discourses and practices of the Muslim religion, although relatively unacknowledged in a state school, to support her practical authority in maintaining school expectations for the behaviour of pupils. This usefully draws attention to the ethical question of which translocal practices teachers may use in their performance as teachers in English schools.

In all these examples, the teachers were able to exercise power in their encounters with pupils, in a way that throws a useful light on to the processes of being a role model, something often cited as a reason for diversifying the teaching workforce. In spite of the difficulties of recognition and performance that all the student teachers in this sample experienced in classrooms, these examples indicate the part they can play in improving communication with the superdiverse communities served by London schools.

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7.5 CONCLUSION

This chapter has shown how the design and layout of the school premises contributes to how staff and pupils meet and interact as they work and move around the school site during the school day. Sometimes this results in configurations of space and time in which there are chance meetings and fleeting identities. On other occasions, for example in areas where mathematics is taught, an order and a routine are established by the assumptions and requirements of the school timetable, and these offer, in the development of repeat performances, the reassurance of familiarity and habit. Spatialising the school premises has allowed the study to acknowledge the complications of these different performances and how the boundaries of classroom, staffroom and departmental area are maintained through the assumptions, and practices, of power.

This chapter has shown how trainees can be positioned differently according to the power of institutional practices and chance encounters with colleagues and pupils. Although the student teachers are sometimes initially surprised by the positions into which they are hailed by false recognitions, and perhaps, find it difficult to respond depending on their prior expectations or communicative repertoires, the metaphor of navigating these spaces (Kostogriz and Peeler, 2004) gives a good sense of the agency they developed. It distinguishes between the fleeting identities they might perform in staffrooms and corridors and the possibilities of habitual performances in spaces where they spend time with colleagues or pupils. The conversations they have in this respect contribute to their professional learning and their understanding both of how they are perceived by others and of themselves as teachers who are part of a superdiverse workforce.

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importance to all the student teachers, the struggles they experience in engaging their habitus with the field are frequently invisible. There are several ways in which this invisibility can be acknowledged and shared, ranging from the professional acquaintances and friendships they develop to the more formal arrangements for mentoring provided by the PGCE training, either at the university or via the subject mentor. Mentoring conversations have provided a useful way of analysing the processes of these relationships. Exploratory talk, in which the mentor builds ‘acquaintance and comfort by means of moves consisting of discussion and eliciting comments’ (Tillema and van der Westhuizen, 2013:1309), has been shown to be useful at all stages, and especially early on, to allow the trainee to express the confusion they experience as their habitus engages with the fields throughout the school in which they perform their professional identities. This is of particular importance for the student teachers in this study, in that it gives them the opportunity to discuss their own migration trajectory as opposed to being isolated by it on the more or less unlikely assumption, that, in a superdiverse population, colleagues in the school are untouched by, and unaware of, the processes of migration. An analysis of these conversations has built upon Erel’s (2010) discussion of migrant adaptation, by documenting both the development of confidence and the development of the processes of target setting as a result of an experienced mentor giving prescriptive advice and engaging in a process of evaluation that helps student to become aware of the process of professional adaptation. This is a process to which the Teachers’ Standards can contribute by providing a framework for comparison and reference throughout the school placements and into the early years of teaching. Using the standards for judgement, however, especially without the confidences of exploratory conversations, brings difficulties of confidence associated with what Puwar (2004)

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refers to as ‘super-surveillance’ and the ‘burden of doubt’, both of which can result in uncertainties among trainees about their authenticity and their suspicions that ‘they are not quite proper’ (Puwar, 2004:59). In this context, mentoring conversations that allow the student teachers to articulate their experience without fear of being judged inadequate, and to share their own emerging positionings through exploratory talk, are an essential element of the PGCE training for student teachers of migrant heritage.