Ghosts from the past: Exploring community cultures and school cultures in relation to poverty

Ghost stories

Alwyn’s ghostly presence

Alwyn evoked an atmosphere that we could imagine accompanied the stories miners told each other crouched in dark, damp tunnels, hundreds of feet underground. As he recounted, a shiver ran down my spine. The ghost stories came from his grandfather who used to be a collier and who he mentioned at least nine times in our interview. He mentioned his father about four times, his mother once and he did not mention his two older brothers, who according to a teacher, were ‘on drugs’. Alwyn’s father is long-term unemployed and his mother is a housewife. His teacher said, ‘He doesn’t get much support at home’.

Alwyn had grown up roaming the landscape around his house in a south wales valley town exploring sites, where new buildings are being constructed on top of old mines, ancient clay works and old washeries. He spends a lot of time outdoors and has become attuned to the ex-industrial environment. He is particularly aware of the fault lines, of the holes and crevices through which the otherwise dormant life of past mining activities pushes up through the surface as if to re-exert its presence:

I have been in the new school [building site] at the top of the colliery, they had a boring machine – down to 30 metres – they were boring by my father’s allotment – I could feel a little rumble in the ground. Water came up two metres, there was a stream down there. They bored down, they pulled the whole thing up and they . . . you could not stop the water, they looked, the thing up there was 5 inches wide – they could not stop the water. They rammed in posts down it – they ended up putting cement in it, that did slow it down but then the water came through again – so much pressure in the ground.

Alwyn spends his time combing the surface of the land to find holes through which he searches for small treasures from the past. He regaled me with another story:

It was a on a coal track. It was a big black hole someone dug out, there was a bottle in there. I was stupid . . . I walking down, I was . . . fence going down, I saw a pitch folk in the hedge, walked home with it, started digging. My friend Paul Green came up with me – he was digging in one corner. He came across pottery, pieces of jugs. There was an over hang, he was cutting through, then I saw.. you know like when copper goes black, after a while . . . ‘wow’. I put my hand through, put my hand so close to it. What was that then? Rubbed it with my finger. Queen’s crest, with a tiger on the top with its crown. . . . can’t be . . . like this . . . dreaming like. I said, ‘wow’.

To a boy who materially has very little, his finds are described as sacred objects. His excited exclamations ‘(it) can’t be’ and ‘dreaming like’, are more appropriate to finding vast treasure than a small coin. His poignantly exaggerated reaction to the objects suggests that he uses them to compensate for lack and even loss:

Went back a month later. Ran over, like . . . an old clay pipe. Not a scratch on it . . . when I think of it now, it was three years after my nan dies . . . a kind of sign, finding that, then the pocket watch, then the clay pipe and I found a little bottle . . .

He linked these finds mystically to his greatly missed grandmother who ‘had passed away’. His stories were about the underground, hauntings and things that glittered, treasures just out of reach.

The bike was found when he went with his father to a house that had been occupied by a relative who died. He described the outside toilet and plaster peeling off the walls. The bike, which had been rusting away outside, was from the Second World War era, he said, and had deflated tyres, a rusting frame and rod brakes that did not work. Alwyn laughed as he described painting the bike with old aircraft paint that he had found hoarded in his grandpa’s garage. ‘I was riding it up and down that lane with no brakes, ah marvellous bike’. The bike was only ‘marvellous’ to one who values the past. It was never going to be roadworthy because it is was a wreck, and no one could afford the bits to recondition it.

Alwyn had absorbed a huge amount of knowledge about the ex-industrial landscape. He told of exploring a building site on the ‘old washeries’. I asked him what the old washeries were and he said,

That’s where they used to clean the coal. They cleaned the coal from the slag, steam coal and also household coal. If you put steam coal on a house fire, my grandpa said, the coal will burn so hot it would melt the grid on the bottom. Now you don’t want that, do you?

It was poignant and disturbing to listen to this boy who was very bright, very alive and yet who seemed to be caught in a hybrid place somewhere in the past, inhabiting an imaginative world of his grandfather and grandmother’s era. He seemed to make sense using powers of association driven by his vivid imagination, loss, maybe grief and a searching for good things such as treasures to bring memories of his grandmother back. His poverty along with his outdoor wanderings, enabled him to develop a rich fantasy world that fuelled his narratives. In doing so, he was becoming increasingly disconnected from his peer group. Within the school, he was recognised as ‘different’.

He had developed a rich narrative code, which had the same kind of engaging and lilting cadence that drew the listener in when old miners told stories. As many scholars have pointed out, oral narrative structures are not recognised in schools as legitimate texts (e.g. Filer, 1997; Heath, 1983). Indigenous forms of knowing often go unrecognised and unvalued in schools (Cole, 1985; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989). Alwyn had picked up the indigenous idiom of his mining forbears as can be seen from the resonances between his ghost stories and those of the colliers on the http://welshcoalmines.co.uk/forum cited at the beginning of this article. While the colliers’ written ghost stories do not capture the rhythms of the miners’ oral tradition, we find similar topics to those in Alwyn’s stories.

Working-class codes revisited

While Alwyn was tolerated with affection by many of his teachers and, some recognised his storytelling prowess, none could make the link between his ways of knowing and the academic requirements of lessons. So, although Alwyn gained a 4 out of 5 for one of his presentations in English, his teacher told him that he could not have a 5 because he had shown a video rather than written a text for his PowerPoint presentation. Alwyn needed the teacher to help him to translate between his oral narrative style and the kinds of written stories that would count as legitimate knowledge in English (e.g. Lee & Majors, 2003). Indeed, his ways of talking and knowing, his attention to material detail, and his situated, context-dependent, deep knowledge of mining processes and environments were not being harnessed as school-appropriate knowledge.

Alwyn said that he wanted to become an archaeologist. When we asked him whether he knew what qualifications he might need to become an archaeologist, he switched from imagining a career to having a hobby as an archaeologist. He said you need history and science, but he said he was not good enough in these subjects at school. He was receiving extra help for literacy and numeracy. His narrative code was not helping his to be good at science in school. Later in the interview, he suggested he could become a blacksmith instead. His knowing is a knowing from the past, it is rich and vivid, but he needs someone to help him to bridge between his narrative code and the written skills that could help him to gain the qualifications he needs to pursue his ‘natural’ archaeological intuitions. At school, a bright new building, he is recognised as an oddity, treated with affection but written off in terms of academic achievement. In many ways, Alwyn epitomises the challenges of schooling in ex-industrial valley communities. To use Basil Bernstein’s term, Alwyn has a different code to the school code.

Scholars are returning to the work of the sociologist Basil Bernstein to re-examine the extralinguistic elements of his code theory. If we look back to the origins of Bernstein’s code, it is clear that he wanted a theory that would stretch beyond language to embrace culture and society. Bernstein’s (1974) theory is based on a distinction between code and its realisations, in which realisations are ‘a function of the culture acting through social relations in specific contexts’ (pp. 173–174). Codes operate at the level of culture, and the theory explains how some codes and not others come to dominate in society and in schools. Thus, learning a skill is also about coming to be recognised as a person within the community of practitioners who value the skill. By teaching himself to tell stories, Alwyn was also becoming one of the miners, and he did indeed seem to take on their values. Just as the miners attuned themselves to the underground environment where they needed to be wary of sounds that might indicate danger such as a sudden escape of methane gas, so Alwyn attuned himself to sounds, textures, ripples as well as cracks and crevices that opened up into the underground world of mining shafts. In one story, he told of finding a pitch fork and digging into a black hole, which ‘mimetically referenced’ (Wulf, 2011) a collier hewing the rock with his pickaxe.

Dell Hymes points out that Bernstein attempted to articulate codes as intra-contextual speech displays and negotiations of order that can be recognised as practical accomplishments. We can see that Alwyn’s oral code has been acquired outside school, as a practical accomplishment, gained by hanging out with his grandfather and other ex-miners. Alwyn remembered their stories and practised storytelling with whoever would listen to him. While researching in a secondary school in the valley areas of south Wales, I invited Alwyn to take part in an interview that involved sorting pictures depicting skills in different contexts (work, home, school and leisure) into groups. The aim had been to investigate young people’s social representations of school-based and work-based skill. The interview set up a one-to-one encounter between Alwyn and me, and right from the beginning, he took the initiative to tell me stories. In another secondary school, in a different valley, I met Owain. He was an intelligent boy who was incrementally removing himself from an academic track in school to align himself more closely with a future that reflected his close-knit community values. Owain could have gone to university, but he felt more at home with the idea of becoming a builder.

Owain: becoming social ¹

Owain, aged 14 years, had numerous tattoos and body piercings, which he spoke about with pride in casual conversation and in interview. He showed us his nipple piercing and where one of his tattoos had gone wrong. He was one of the bigger boys for his age group and regularly worked out in the gym. He had plans for two more tattoos and explained that he had to be careful where to get them done because it was illegal to have tattoos before the age of 16 years. His next tattoo was going to be his nephew’s name. As the bus drew into the schoolyard, Owain said, ‘You unplug the iPlayer, take off your hoodie, roll down your sleeves so they can’t see the tattoos and put on the tie’.

Owain used to spend his lunch times with boys from the top set. However, he now spent lunchtime with boys from the set below him who were also some of the boys he met up with after school. Owain was a part of a recognised group who had their own territory, which included the hidden smoking area in the schoolyard and a specific table in the dining hall that no one else would use. On a typical day, he went home by bus, changed his clothes, had something to eat and left on the 4:20 p.m. bus to the next town. He said that he was one of the only young people who made the trip out instead of socialising in the street around their house, a practice that Owain said set him apart from his peers in school.

He lived in one of the housing estate 4 miles from the town centre that was known to be one of the rougher estates. He drew a rectangle to depict the four streets of his neighbourhood; he then marked seven houses where most of his extended family lived.

He spoke with warmth of the family parties and rituals such as ‘sitting on the steps outside, talking’ that created mutual bonds of affection. While the strength drawn from this strong affective base seemed to give him the confidence to strike out and explore further afield, he also spent times babysitting his 2-year-old cousin, helping out in the house and being around the men.

Owain’s dad was working on a construction site in the city approximately 30 miles from the valley town where they lived. He and his dad did carpentry together at home, and Owain had aspirations of owning a carpentry business in the future and building his own house. He said he would ‘never live in the city’ and imagined his future on the housing estate where he lived. His body practices of going to the gym and staying fit recreated the toned, strong and masculine body that mimetically referenced the man-boy of industrial activities.

He spent his weekends with a group of about 25 friends who went into town to do ‘Well, stuff that we shouldn’t’. Sometimes they would ‘camp out’ all night. Others in his class identified Owain as one of the boys who was part of a large group known for drinking and taking drugs. Although Owain admitted to ‘doing things we shouldn’t’, he was not a follower and gave the impression of someone already older than his peers in school. One of his classmates identified Owain as older than his age saying ‘He’s going to be having babes soon’.

Owain lived in a family with three siblings. Two were from his mother’s previous marriage. Like many families in the study, Owain’s father brought up two non-biological children as his own. We asked whether he wanted children.

His seemed to genuinely embrace the (adult) responsibility of looking after children. It seemed that having children was intricately tied to his sense of adulthood. Owain’s family and community provided him with a strong sense of belonging and his ambitions were to stay and literally build his future home in the place where his family had lived for generations. Owain’s account revealed the social bond and solidarities of his community. The link between past and future was perhaps most poignantly signified by his wish to have a child now and his desire to mark his skin (tattoo) with the name of his young nephew, a symbolic reminder of a future life unfolding and a community under threat renewing itself.

Community survival in time of poverty

We can see throughout these interview accounts how values and ways of being echo the past, when communities had to stick together to manage in harsh environments where men’s labour was required for the mine and steel industries. Young people become members of communities by taking part in the everyday practices that constitute the ‘way things are done around here’ (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Lave, 1988). Practices are revitalised, recontextualised and reworked through everyday routines such as hanging out together, getting tattoos, getting dressed to go out, yet also through looking after children, sitting on steps chatting with neighbours and doing carpentry with your father. While Owain was mimetically recreating activities he associated with his father, Alwyn was reproducing the practices of his grandfather’s generation. These rituals of everyday life (Wulf, 2011) come from the available repertoire of performances circulating in communities and constitute affective body practices in which patterns of movement structure desire.

Miners had to work in difficult, dangerous and dirty conditions underground. The communities that grew up on the steep, narrow valleys and mountains of south Wales, a good 30–50 miles from the nearest towns, were initially isolated places. Communities emerged in these remote and harsh landscapes solely to extract coal from the ground. Boys growing up in these places were destined to work as miners and so from an early age had to be prepared to develop strong muscular bodies, to be able to work in dark, noisy and extremely hot conditions where they would be cramped into crevices to wield an axe with skill. With the prevalence of accidents, when mine shafts collapsed or when methane escaped from cracks in rocks and ignited, bringing about major underground explosions, men were killed and wives and children were left. The presence of imminent danger and loss motivated people to support each other. Children were fed, or looked after by neighbours. The everyday practices of solidarity, of looking after other people’s children and making do, developed through hardship and cemented ‘the ways of doing things around here’ that produced the bonds, which made members of the community ‘feel safe’ (Walkerdine, 2010; Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012, p. 75).

The eventual complete collapse of the mining industry in 2002 followed a brutal struggle between the miners and the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Around 200 years of insecurity took a new turn with mass unemployment giving rise to all kinds of lack, poverty and depression. The community bonds of solidarity which had developed over the previous years took on a different function as people clung together in the face of what must have felt like existential annihilation (Walkerdine, 2010; Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2012).

Re-enacting everyday practices in the same way as in the past seemed to provide communities, like the one Alwyn belonged to, with a second skin, a way to carry on in difficult times (ibid.). Part of this protective cloak seems to be furnished by stories. Alwyn had picked up stories telling skills from the old miners who told ghost stories about horses, sightings and hauntings from the past – a past filled with spirits that were not going to rest. As Alwyn said, ‘so much pressure in the ground’. Throughout our fieldwork in three mining communities we heard ghost stories from many children. We came to understand that these stories were told and retold within families as a way to manage the trauma of loss, not just the loss of the jobs, but a loss of a way of life and sometimes the untimely death of an infant, a brother, an auntie or a nan.

We have been exploring the consequence of this for young people, who are the next generation of survivors of post-industrial trauma (Ivinson, 2010, 2012, 2014; Ivinson & Renold, 2013a and b; Renold & Ivinson, 2014, 2015) and how this relates to schooling.

The skills debate

Historically, within schools, strong boundaries have maintained the division between mind and the moving body. Skill can be defined as ‘the intimate connection between hand and head’ (Sennett, 2009, p. 9). Skills have generally been defined as embodied practices (e.g. Flyvberg, 2001; Lave, 1988). The skilled body has generally been legitimated only outside classrooms and laboratories, in the gym and playing fields. Furthermore, the alignment of high-status knowledge with upper-class masculinity, epitomised by the rational, individual, autonomous intellect, ensured that the school curriculum accommodated elite boys to the exclusion of girls and the working classes up until the 20th century. Historically, the working classes were exempt from a full-academic curriculum because their labour was valued outside schools and was crucial to the industrial economy. Educational institutions have disenfranchised working-class groups since compulsory schooling became a legal requirement for all children in the United Kingdom in 1944. Right up until the Education Reform Act of 1988, students did not have a legal entitlement to all subjects of the curriculum and so could be funnelled into vocational courses and simply dropped from core subjects such as Sciences and Languages. Defining the curriculum in terms of skills rather than academic disciplines looked like a way to break down the historical boundaries between mind and body, pure and applied knowledge, and the liberal and entrepreneurial purposes of education. Breaking down the boundaries between applied and academic knowledge is laudable and most likely a necessary step for future prosperity. Schools have been accommodating this by introducing more vocationally oriented course in the curriculum.

Schools with sixth forms have extended the curriculum to include a multiplicity of hybrid, outwardly facing, or what Bernstein calls generic, skills-based courses that are supposed to train young people for the workplace. These courses have been undergoing scrutiny (Wolf, 2011; Wright, Brinkley, & Clayton, 2010) because there is a danger that they neither fulfil the ideal of a liberal education nor are they a genuinely useful preparation for the workplace. Instead, as welfare provision is withdrawn from 16–19-years-olds, schools become holding places before they take up their positions in the ranks of those denied the opportunities to work.

Furthermore, these shifts in understandings of school knowledge often only work at the level of rhetoric and fail to recognise the social structures that have anchored the mind–-body split within the academy. The origins of divisions in elements of the curriculum, and their continuing boundary maintenance, are linked to social-class structures (Bernstein, 1996/2000). Visionaries of skills-based curricula seem to want to expand the curriculum for the middle classes while hoping to transform working-class young people into middle-class citizens.

In reality, many young working-class people in post-industrial areas are faced with a black hole at the end of compulsory schooling at age 16 years. In the United Kingdom, post-compulsory vocational education and training (VET) provision available to young people from working-class backgrounds is deeply inadequate for their needs and those of society (Wolf, 2011). Those not destined for university education for a range of reasons are caught in a trap; either they are forced to undertake job training of such low quality that they become stigmatised with low-level certificates (National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 2) that mark them as educational failures or they enter low-paid ‘bad’ jobs that allow no possibility for progression (Keep, 2002, 2005). Stuck at the bottom of the training or bad jobs ladder, they become caught in a cycle of meaningless and monotonous labour, unable to escape. Third-generation unemployed young people who have watched their parents and relatives enter this cycle are responding to their circumstances in a wide range of ways. A popular view is that working-class young people lack the incentives and aspirations to succeed. Findings from our studies refute this, and the following sections suggest the need to shift thinking away from working-class educational failure to encompass a broader view of relationships between skills, place and community.

The widening gap between life in poor communities and school life

The next generation of young people face dilemmas. While the bonds of sociality forged around the necessities of industrial life are re-enacted through everyday practices life in their communities, these practices are functionally, if not affectively, out of date because they are not recognised in school. While older generations could afford to wait out their time in school because they were going to enter industrial jobs, today’s young people are being held in place through affective bonds of sociality passed down by older generations, yet a the same time, have no other viable choice than to succeed in school. Instead of the communal codes of solidarity, academic success requires individualistic, competitive codes as well as access to private and not communal space. There is a deep tension between the individualism required to achieve in school and the bonds of solidarity that create a second skin for post-industrial communities. This third generation have watched their parents and relatives enter into cycles of worklessness, yet schools remain oriented to the needs of the professional classes.

Working-class young people have funds of knowledge (Quinn, 2013) gained outside school. Both Alwyn and Owain, in their different ways, had developed codes and ways of being outside school that were either suppressed or invisible within school. The patterns of practices that make up the culture of secondary schools were out of line with their own patterns of practices. In school such young people have to hide the cultural anchors and values circulating in their communities. These were the very values that enable communities to survive the harsh conditions of increasing austerity. Alwyn’s rich empathetic and intuitive storytelling competencies had an oral and a narrative structure that he could not translate into legitimate text in English lessons. Owain was in many ways too mature for school. He was already imaginatively fit for the world of work and fatherhood. Fifty years ago, he would have been about to go into an industrial job. If he were economically active as a miner or builder, his ‘other activities’ would not have attracted any public scrutiny and instead would have been judged as appropriate masculinity.

The gap between the educational needs of children and young people growing up in poverty and educational policies that focus on achievement is growing (Gale, 2011; Sellar et al., 2011a and b). Social and educational research has consistently demonstrated that academic success correlates with the socio-economic background of children’s parents. In the valley communities of south Wales, as in other industrial places, there is nothing new about the mismatch between schooling and the codes of solidarity valued by communities. Schools were accepted to function in favour of those who were not going down the mine, and while a few sons of miners may have succeeded in finding other jobs, they often contributed to the life of the mining communities as merchants, accountants, teachers, preachers and doctors. However, as post-industrial places lose all their economic activity, there needs to be something more than an academic curriculum need to be on offer for young people.

The market model of schooling does not work in places where parents have no choice about where their children go to school, because they are too poor to afford travel costs or to move to different areas. Effectively, the grounds for a market approach are not met. In many ex-mining communities, families live in social housing, or in places where house prices are depressed. The local school is often the only viable place to send their children. In these places, schools have to work with the children of the surrounding neighbourhoods and they struggle to recognise and embrace the local community cultures. We have attempted to make young people’s coping strategies visible in a bid to get them recognised as viable knowledge that encompasses many of the entrepreneurial qualities that are valued in a neo-liberal agenda.

Perhaps, most importantly, policymakers have failed to recognise the importance of place, and the history of place, as part of the coping strategies required to manage scarcity and lack. In studies of poverty and educational achievement, we have once again come to recognise that culture matters (Appadurai, 1996; Gale, 2011; Kenway & Hickey-Moody, 2011; Sellar et al., 2011a and b; Smith, 2011). By presenting accounts from Alwyn and Owain, we hope to suggest that culture and specifically the role of place is fundamentally important to the way young people find the coping strategies to feel existentially safe. While learning can only start once young people feel secure (Ivinson, 2012; Ivinson & Renold, 2013a and b; Renold & Ivinson, 2015) that next challenge is for schools to help young people to translate their alternative ways of knowing into something that is valued by the society.

Schools should be permitted to move away from the rhetoric of quality, effectiveness and achievement. We met many good, and often disillusioned, head teachers in post-industrial communities who recognised the specific qualities of the young people in their schools. The narrow language of achievement, league tables and comparators is stifling many of their initiatives. Schools, heads and teachers are at the sharp end of managing the tension between community codes and educational codes and they are increasingly aware of how schools are failing poor students.

We would like to challenge policymakers to take seriously the commitment that teachers need to be able to teach and the desires of young people who want to learn. We would like to draw attention to the effort, affect and embodied practice of both teachers and learners, as well as the inter-class negotiations and the complex role-taking that go on in classroom settings – arenas that have been seriously underplayed in recent years. By paying attention to the effort of teaching and learning, it might be possible to make visible the point that bodies are socially positioned, and that pleasure is constituted through the historical formations of class, gender and race. Becoming aware of affective patterns that become desire and build implicit motivations might be a first step in broadening our understanding of the intergenerational transmission of poverty.