This thesis with the use of Bourdieu’s spotlight disrupts the silence around the inequalities that manifest themselves and are entrenched in the everyday practices of schools, specifically in this case, DEIS schools designed to ameliorate social class inequalities. Pupil voice is a significant method of improving school and classroom practices as it enforces us as Teachers to really reflect on the ways we are ascribing value in schools. By listening to the pupils it also highlighted the danger of the “power of suggestion” (McGillycuddy & Devine 2018) that we hold. Bourdieu informed understandings around the multifaceted factors and complex processes affecting pupil engagement and identity in DEIS schools. It also demonstrated how the school as the dominant culture produces acts of symbolic violence and in doing has a powerful role to play in habitus formation and re-formation. While this study is not saying middle class pupils cannot also feel alienation from school procedures and practices (see Hamiliton & Canny 2018), it does put forward the argument that this alienation is even more exaggerated for our working class pupils. The higher demands placed on working class pupils’ identities to bridge the habitus gulf between home and school is the central argument of this study and gives much needed attention to the huge psychological and emotional demands being placed on working class pupils on a daily basis, which to this point it has not been acknowledged in Irish literature. The complexities around identity were explored through the many ways pupils indicated resigning their habitus by putting on an act in school. This form of restricted self they took on in school, forced them into consciousness through constant self-monitoring of their behaviours. This portrays how
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class becomes internalized for our working class pupils in schools and is a tale of inferiority, self-doubt, anxiety and insecurity as they are never afforded the luxury of “the ease of the well-born” (Bourdieu 2000:163). In schools striving to emphasise wellbeing and human flourishing we must first evaluate the classroom conditions needed for this to be achieved. This type of schooling demands an inclusive, collaborative school climate that truly values the lived experiences of pupils. There is much we can learn from the pupils in this study and while change is slow I do believe schools can be “tools for social change towards greater equality and equity” (Manion & Menashy 2013:235). As Greene poetically puts it and to end on a hopeful note, “out of the dread, out of the inequalities, out of the contradictions, and the cruelties, and the misunderstandings, there may be a vision of marvellous. The dialogue, the wonder, the openings” (2000: 279).
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