A multidisciplinary exploration of the language of school exclusion

Westwood, Kathryn (2024) A multidisciplinary exploration of the language of school exclusion. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Existing research demonstrates that young people who are excluded from school are frequently positioned in disempowered situations by discriminatory social practices. The results can be catastrophic for excluded young people in social, economic, and educational domains. Research also notes how young people’s voices can be significantly curtailed in the process of school exclusion, thereby contributing to these catastrophic consequences. Thus, excluded young people are burdened and isolated by discriminatory social contexts, and further isolated and burdened by being unheard by adults. This thesis takes a unique approach – combining Critical Discourse Studies and Youth Participatory Research – to explore the macro level discourses leading to discriminatory social practices, and how excluded young people navigate and resist these at the micro level of interaction. Data was generated via qualitative, creative, ethnographic and participatory methods with excluded young people, their parents, Pupil Referral Unit staff, and mainstream school staff. Through this approach, the thesis identifies how macro level social discourses of youth, risk, deviance, class, gender, ethnicity, and criminalisation, work intersectionally to reproduce discrimination in youth-adult relationships. The excluded young people in this project illustrate the existence of these discourses via their narration of the impact it had on their lives, and ultimately their exclusion from mainstream education. The young people further demonstrate the lived expertise they draw upon to navigate the resulting disempowerment. The multidisciplinary focus on language, both in generating and framing the results, differentiates this research from previous research on school exclusion. The thesis contributes to understandings of school exclusion through focussing on the relationship between micro and macro level discourses via centring youth voice in the process. Additionally, it contributes to Critical Discourse Studies and Youth Participatory Research through the Power and Participation model, created specifically for this project to guide a discourse-informed analysis of youth participation. Finally, the thesis draws on the young people’s voices to inform language-based recommendations for policy and practitioners in education.