Simon Edwards

Strangers are friends I haven't met yet:a positive approach to young people's use of social media

ABSRACT This article reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated young peoples use of a range of prominent social media tools for socialising and relationship building. The research was conducted by a way of online survey. The findings suggest that this sample of British young peoples socialising and relationship-building practices via the range of prominent social media tools reflect similar behavioural categories used offline. The use of these social media tools provides young people with an opportunity to manage, simultaneously, different categories of relationships in a multiplicity of ‘spaces’ created by these tools. The findings challenge the widely held belief that young people expose themselves to risk on social media as they indiscriminately befriend strangers. There is an absence of evidence of ‘unjustified’ intent to harm others. Indeed the findings indicate a strong desire to primarily support and protect those with whom relationships have been carefully established. The research suggests in fact that online engagement through social media can be positive and constructive for young people. It appears to provide them with a challenging ‘space’ to practice identity and relationship management strategies.

There are two sides to every story: young people’s perspectives of relationship issues on social media and adult responses

ABSTRACT This paper reports on a recent research project undertaken in the UK that investigated how young people negotiate their identities and relationships online, including how they experience interventions by adults. Drawing on qualitative interviews with young people in two schools and a voluntary youth organisation in England, we argue that young people engage rather successfully in practices of self-governance. Our findings based on this sample of young people’s agentic practice and care for their peers challenge some dominant perceptions of young people’s online practices as risky and/or harmful to themselves and/or others. Furthermore we found a lack of evidence concerning the effectiveness of, and need for, interventions orientated around surveillance and zero tolerance.

‘Man up!’ bullying and resilience within a neoliberal framework

ABSTRACT This study investigates perceptions in relation to bullying, with a particular focus on discussions around resilience, drawing on data from focus group interviews with young people (mean age 14 years old), parents and teachers (N = 40). We view self-conduct and the governance of human behaviour as situated within a neoliberal framework, locating accountability and responsibility within the individual. Our methodological framework consists of a multi-level ‘synthesised’ discourse analysis. Firstly, drawing on discursive psychology, we focus on the interactive accomplishments of talk, such as managing facts, blame and accountability. The second level of discourse analysis focuses on the wider discourses that participants draw on to make sense of themselves, including common sense discourses and ideologies. In their narratives, the participants construct resilience in relation to bullying in terms of individual empowerment, responsibility and ‘manning up’; a skill that can be taught and acquired. Not only that, long-term implications of bullying are negated in favour of a neoliberal approach towards self-responsibility in the here and now. This has implications for strategies in relation to bullying and supporting young people in building resilience. More research is needed to establish key notions in relation to resilience, and the multidimensionality of protective factors in relation to bullying.

Reflections from Former Students and a Wider International Perspective

To conclude I consider the impact of this relational pedagogy on former students’ and their families’ social and academic development. I interview former students who I worked with in the settings discussed in this book and ask them to describe how I worked with them and discuss what they think I did that helped them re-engage their education. I also interview one of the parents of these students and explore the impact of this relational pedagogy on their relationship with their child. I locate the findings and the relational pedagogy developed in this book in a growing global focus on the role of parents in students’ learning by considering developments in China, India and the USA.

A Policy Cul-de-sac: Student Disengagement and Political Intervention

This chapter presents an overview of social, economic factors and political discourses influencing education policy since the 1890s. The role of education as primarily sustaining economic growth is contextualised within the conditions of high modernity. I claim identity has shifted from given to task where meaning making and knowledge construction is managed in collaborative relational processes. This discussion forms the backdrop to an issue encountered when fourteen students attending an alternative curriculum programme attempted to complete a GCSE Teamwork assessment. Students were required to complete a task and reflect on their teamwork. Conflict was identified between students’ and school curriculum concepts of teamwork, which appeared to fall at the confluence point of opposing discourses about self-identity. Thus forming the basis for a small ethnographic study.

Deleuze, Cinema and Time

This chapter critically analyses and discusses the students’ use of language and the corresponding relationship building strategies managed with adults and peers. Deleuze’s (Colebrook in Gilles Deleuze. Routledge, London and New York, 2002) notion of cinema and time frames these relational practices and linguistic processes as scenes within reflexive encounters with adults and peers on the school site. Thus reality and selfhood was co-constructed within the processes of these social practices but stands juxtaposed to current school curricular concepts of selfhood that values and promotes autonomous individuation and self-responsible notions of freedom—a process that can lead to increased anxiety and conflict in the classroom for these students. I call for relational pedagogies that relocate learning into students’ social worlds to support academic knowledge development and the co-production of a self-narrative.

Challenging Perceptions of the Self and Notions of Personal Freedom

In this chapter I extend this discussion to claim the traditional roles of family, parents and in particular that of teacher were ascribed roles - no longer given, signified by the title presented within the school site. I locate this assertion within a range of existential questions informing the students’ practices that suggest an ontological and epistemological shift in their understanding of how being human is managed and how knowledge is understood and developed within this processes. This position, stands at odds with current education policy though, which provides a framework through which to answer the question “How ought I to live?” but locates that framework within neo-liberal notions of selfhood. I illustrate these juxtaposed positions drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (Bauman 2000; Foucault 1985).

The Issue of Student Disengagement and Exclusion

For increasing numbers of young people transition into secondary school is unsuccessful, resulting in disaffection and academic failure.

Coastal electronic information systems

Abstract Electronic Chart Display Information Systems and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in Coastal and Marine Environments Workshop, University of Portsmouth, Hants, UK, 14 February 1994.