top of page
Writer's pictureSociology Blog

Embodied Citizenship in Primary School Life

Becoming Citizens of 'Post-Secular' Britain: Religion in Primary School Life is a

project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the project team is made up of Dr Anna

Strhan (University of York), Dr Peter Hemming (University of Surrey), Professor

Sarah Neal (University of Sheffield), and Dr Joanna Malone (University of York). The

project involves ethnographic fieldwork in four contrasting fieldsites in the UK (two in

England, one in Wales, and one in Scotland). In a previous blog post, we discussed

the rationale behind the project and some of the initial findings from child-centred

activities focused on community and belonging – please the find blog post via this

link. I (Joanna Malone) have recently completed fieldwork in the first of these

fieldsites: an ethnically and religiously diverse school in a low-income neighbourhood

where I worked across two classes in Year 5 (aged 9 and 10) over the summer term

(April 2022 – July 2022). During the fieldwork I undertook interviews with children,

staff, and parents. I also undertook child-centred research activities and observed

everyday school life within and beyond the classroom. With fieldwork in one school

now completed and children and teachers on their summer holidays before the

autumn term, this blog post reflects on some of the things I observed in my first

fieldsite, and in particular, the embodied nature of citizenship and belonging between

children through shared everyday activities. Dance, song, and food have been an

important part of what I observed in the classroom and wider school day. In the

interviews with children, they also came up as being key to shaping and revealing

interactions and the children’s shared social lives, as well as important aspects of

children’s faith identities.


All names have been changed in ethnically sensitive ways to protect confidentiality of

the participants and the school.


Dance, Song, and Food

Within everyday school life, embodied activities such as dancing, singing, and the

eating and sharing of food all played an important role in developing a sense of

citizenship and belonging amongst children. Within our project, we see citizenship as

something which is lived, and following feminist analyses, recognise the

shortcomings of rights-based approaches to citizenship. For us, citizenship is not

limited to legal status but is rather a lived practice bound up with people’s identities,

sense of belonging to (or exclusion from) smaller and larger communities, and their

participation (or non-participation) in different groups and contexts (Nyhagen &

Halsaa 2016). When it comes to children’s citizenship, then, we want to understand

their sense of participation, rights, duties, identities, and belonging – including their

sense of national, ethnic, and religious belonging and identity – and how this is

shaped through their place and space in the world, for example, what they engage

with and the use of their bodies.


Song and Dance


During my time at the first school, music played a central role in everyday school life

– from hymn assemblies, Year 5 representing the choir for the Year 6 end-of-year

performance, to a Year 5 performance with songs and dance developed by an

external music teacher that linked to what the children had been learning in English

and Geography. These seemed an important embodied means through which the

school sought to shape a sense of collective belonging to the school. These

instances highlight quite a structured engagement with music and performance for

the children I was working with. There were varying levels of enjoyment and

engagement from the children, and they sometimes resisted the teachers’ efforts to

include everyone in these performances. For example, when I took some children for

interviews, they were happy they didn’t have to practise the songs for the Year 6

performance, with one girl, Summaya (aged 9) explaining that she didn’t like the

songs because they were ‘too Christian’ and it was ‘against her religion’. The hymn

practice/singing assembly also highlighted a tension with religion in some instances.

From my observations, I noticed that a number of children from non-Christian faiths

did not join in with the Christian hymns they were being encouraged to sing

(although some did) but these children would join in with the more ‘secular’ songs.

The presence of Christian hymns as excluding for some children was something also

mentioned in a handful of interviews. For example, Adrianna (aged 10) who is

Muslim, said that she did not like the Christian songs and expressed her wish for

Muslim songs to also be included in singing practice. Savannah (aged 10), a

Christian child, agreed with Adrianna and explained how it can be boring when

everything is Christian-centred, and she recognised that children from non-Christian

faiths in the class might feel uncomfortable about this. These examples show how in

quite structured contexts around music in the school, religion can be quite central,

and the ongoing prominence afforded to Christianity can be something which does

not necessarily create a sense of community and belonging amongst all children in

this multifaith community school.


In contrast, the more unstructured instances of music and dance within the school

highlight how children created forms of belonging that cut across religious difference

by drawing on the cultural resources at hand to them, e.g. TikTok.


Instances of these more unstructured engagements with song and dance include

passing moments in the classroom and on the playground. In the classroom, I

noticed that girls, in particular, were often singing songs together or doing a

choreographed dance together. Upon asking them about it, these songs and dances

are often ones they’ve seen or heard online via platforms like TikTok. Whilst I

observed some of these TikTok dances in the classroom, they were more frequent

on the playground, specifically in the wooden structure pictured below (Figure 1).

This wooden ‘hut’, as it was referred to, was a place several of the groups took me in

the photography exercise, as a place which was important to them and where they

felt they belonged. When probing the children to tell me more about this, several

explained that often girls, and sometimes boys, will perform their TikTok dances and

songs here, and sometimes there would be ‘dance-offs’ (an informal competition

between different groups for the best dance to a particular song). This mixture of

girls and boys dancing together stands in sharp contrast to a structured music lesson

in which children were asked to practice the Waltz with others in the class, when one

boy and one girl got paired together, which caused a lot of giggling and

embarrassment.


On witnessing a few of these children-led performances myself, what struck me was

the manner in which these play-based and unstructured examples of song and

dance seemed to cut across religious difference. These playground interactions

tended to be collectively organised by the children, with a children from a variety of

different religious and ethnic backgrounds taking part together. In contrast with the

more structured examples of music described above, in these kinds of play contexts,

the children did not appear to attach much social significance to religious difference

but focused on what they had in common in terms of their shared enjoyment of

music and dance. As these interactions happened in a shared place, this was the

playground for Years 4, 5, and 6; what was also evident was the mixture of ages

taking part in these collective activities.



(Figure 1, photo of wooden ‘hut’ on the playground)


Food


The consuming, sharing, and rituals around food within the school were things that

had a notable presence in the first field site. Food was something that children

mentioned at various times throughout the project – in interviews, in child-centred

research activities, e.g., drawing activities, photography activities, and through my

observation of daily life.


For example, in an interview with Sam and Michael (both aged 10), the boys

discussed the importance of food in their everyday school experience. Food was

both a key element of what they did and did not like about their time in school – be it

the discussion of the noodles being too dry, or the delicious chicken pasta (that Sam

insisted I should definitely try if I hadn’t already!). It was not just these everyday

encounters of food which were important to Sam and Michael, however – they had

fond memories of trying different types of food and cuisine through events put on by

the school. They also enjoyed it when they had class parties and they got to have a

lot of food donated by parents. Indeed, the day of my interview with Sam and

Michael was the day of the school’s celebrations for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee –

that afternoon a class party ensued, and Sam called me over to tell me that, in light

of what we’d chatted about in the interview, it was actually the food at the Jubilee

party that surpassed all others.


Food was interwoven with different aspects of the children’s citizenship in school life.

In terms of decision-making processes in the school, Sam and Michael explained to

me that in the past they’d been able to request new food on the school menu through

the Pupil Panel (a selection of children from each year who are voted to be a voice

for the year group) and once this had led to new food at lunch time on one occasion,

but it was something that never got added to the menu longer term – this was a point

the boys raised when they were asked what they’d change about their school

community to make it better. Recognising the multi-faith nature of the school and

accommodating religious difference, the school also provided Halal food for Muslim

children and were particularly sensitive to the needs of children who decided to fast

for Ramadan.


In the more everyday observations of daily school life, discussion of food was

common. For instance, at the beginning of the school day or in between classes,

discussions would often erupt regarding food – e.g., which flavour crisp was the best,

what everyone’s favourite food was, what people ate at a party, or what was on the

school menu that day. These conversations often would include me and the class

teacher. During break and lunch times, some children would take great interest in

what I was eating, often asking if I could give them some too!


This important, communal, and present nature of food in the everyday rhythms of the

school also came to light during the photography activity I did with the children. In

groups, I asked the children to take me to places in the school that were important to

them and where they felt they belonged. Many of these places related to eating, as

evident in the pictures below of the folded away lunch tables that were set out every

day (Figure 2), as well as the outside benches (Figure 3) where children could go in

the summer when ‘grab bags’ (a cold school lunch) were on offer from the school

canteen.



(Figure 2, photo of the dining tables folded away)



(Figure 3, photo of the outside benches where children could eat)


Occasionally children observed in the interviews how food could be a marker of

religious difference, for example, in terms of commenting on whether particular

children ate ham or Haribo when talking about their friends’ religious identities.

However, for the most part, how they spoke about food with each other was a way in

which these children actively created their own forms of belonging with each other in

which forms of religious difference were pushed to the background. In these

encounters, they focused on their shared experiences, likes and dislikes, whilst also

recognising and taking for granted points of difference between themselves. Here,

social and religious difference is something that is recognised but it is also part of the

social fabric in which the children are able to operate.


Next Steps


Although we remain in the early days of our fieldwork, the findings from the first

fieldsite highlight the rich and embodied ways in which children can form a sense of

belonging and community with one another. At the same time, we also see the ways

in which more structured forms of activities that seek to shape their sense of

belonging to the school can be resisted and challenged by children, highlighting their

agency in negotiating their involvement with certain elements of the school day. As

we prepare for the next phase of fieldwork exploring the role that religion plays in

children’s citizenship and belonging, we will be considering further how this relates to

social class, race, and ethnicity across our different fieldsites. Whilst these examples

of embodiment are just one element of how citizenship and belonging are being

created and sometimes contested by children, we greatly look forward to undertaking

fieldwork in the three remaining schools and to understand how these embodied

dimensions of belonging and citizenship are being shaped differently, or similarly,

elsewhere.

159 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page