Mostly Roughs And Toughs Analysis

Diane Reay is Professor of Education at Cambridge University and a sociologist working within the area of education. In 2004, she published an article titled ‘’Mostly Roughs and Toughs’: Social Class, Race and Representation in Inner City Schooling’. This qualitative study report draws two main aspects of the Economic and Social Research Council project of children’s transitions to secondary schools in two London boroughs. On one hand, it depicts the positioning of inner city schools (with a predominance of working class and minority ethnic students) within local and wider social imaginaries of demonization. On the other hand, Reay’s work reports the strategies and understandings of different groups of working-class students in relation to
The intentions were to know if the processes of exclusion make sense within children mind. At the same time, she tried to discover how the working class is experiencing exclusion in secondary schools (especially schools with a bad reputation). She so gathered their impressions of local secondary schools, their choices about it (what was the reflexion and how they dealt with it) and finally how they reacted if they did not get a place in the school they selected. With her colleague, she also focused on how they were copping with this big step in their life at their age; anxieties, fears or fantasies. In my opinion, the talking method is great to collect children’s opinion while a questionnaire would be too demanding for them to fill in. Furthermore, in focus groups, they might feel more confident and open to talk if they are gathered with pupils of the same age. On the other hand, it might be a disadvantage. Young children may not be mature enough to express themselves in front of classmates with whom they disagree in everyday life. They might not differentiate clashes within the playground apart from serious research and become shy or unwilling to express open
Ethnography ‘encompasses any study of a group of people for the purpose of describing their socio-cultural activities and patterns’ (Burns 2000; 393). Using it, she would have got to know people in a different way, by the eyes of an observer. We know a change of people’s behaviour remains possible in those cases and ethnography is extremely time-consuming and involves a high cost (especially to get access in so many different schools). But at some point, pupils would have act more realistic because they are in their natural setting (this is especially true for children). In addition, she would have time to interpret children’s behaviour with recordings or written