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Palgrave Macmillan

Schooling and Social Identity

Learning to Act your Age in Contemporary Britain

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Patrick Alexander

    1. School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

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  • Explores age as an aspect of social identity within the context of formal education
  • Questions why age remains such a crucial aspect of self-making in contemporary society
  • Examines the self-making of both pupils and teachers in a secondary school in England

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxv
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  2. Age in Society: Framing Social Structure

    • Patrick Alexander
    Pages 1-43

  3. The Concept of Age Imaginaries

    • Patrick Alexander
    Pages 45-64

  4. An Archaeology of the Recent Past: Age and Schooling in Historical and Contemporary Social Context

    • Patrick Alexander
    Pages 65-107

  5. Learning to Act Your Age in the Classroom

    • Patrick Alexander
    Pages 109-162

  6. Learning to Act Your Age in the Playground: Age and the Social Lives of Secondary School Students

    • Patrick Alexander
    Pages 163-199

  7. Learning to Act Your Age in the Staffroom: Age Imaginaries in the Lives of ‘Younger Teachers’

    • Patrick Alexander
    Pages 201-241

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 243-289
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Keywords

About this book

This book examines the nature of age as an aspect of social identity and its relationship to experiences of formal education. Providing a new and critical approach to debates about age and social identity, the author explores why age remains such an important aspect of self-making in contemporary society. Through an ethnographic account of a secondary school in the south-east of England, the author poses three principal questions. Why are schools in English organised according to age? How do pupils and teachers learn to ‘act their age’ while at school? Ultimately, why does age remain such an important and complex organising concept for modern society? Cutting across lines of class and gender, this timely book will be of interest to students and scholars of self-making and identity in educational contexts, and others interested in how schooling socialises young people into categories of age as the foundational building blocks of modern society. 

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

    Patrick Alexander

About the author

Patrick Alexander is Reader in Education and Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, UK.  He is also Director of the Oxford Brookes Centre for Educational Consultancy and Development.

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