Educators' perceptions of student behavior play a critical role in determining both immediate academic success and long-term educational trajectories for learners. However, within globally pervasive neoliberal frameworks that tie teacher efficacy to standardized outcomes, educators - often reflexively - defend their professional identities by attributing non-normative behavior and underachievement to deficient student and family practices, beliefs, and values, rather than looking to their own instructional techniques, biased conceptions of effective teaching and learning, or broad systemic inequities. Situating itself within critical scholarship on teacher identity, discourse, and meritocratic beliefs, this critical discourse analysis investigates how educators call on narratives of effort, merit, and individual accountability to form and reinforce educator and student identities that preserve teachers' image as effective, moral professionals. This study contributes to the field by exposing these educational identities and the deficit discourse used to reify them. Ultimately, this work offers actionable pathways for school leaders and educators to dismantle restrictive definitions of student 'effort' and 'achievement', reframe professional morality, and foster the mindset shift necessary to better serve students who exhibit effort in non-normative ways, while also providing potential entry points for future research.
Outside of school walls, globally young people are expressing their concerns about environmental issues and have been pressuring for action through youth-led movements. Inside school walls, programs that inform students about environmental issues such as sustainability have been critiqued for not enabling students to act on their concerns. There are issues of class and inequality in both climate activism and in school-based student voice. While there has not been a thorough analysis that breaks down demographic variables of the young people who have participated in activities organised by youth-led movements, it has been anecdotally suggested that white and middle-class girls are over-represented in strike participants. The data generation occurred in 2019 at a primary school located in an affluent suburb in Melbourne where students were attempting to take action through a student voice sustainability initiative and includes focus groups with students and interviews with teachers. I turn to Bourdieu to think about student voice on the issue of sustainability as a 'game' and Ahmed's 'sticky objects' to consider the struggle over the limits of what is possible, within school, in terms of action on sustainability, and the limits of student voice.
This paper explores how educational transitions among working-class students are constituted, mediated, and shaped by affectivity. Through in-depth qualitative research conducted in German and Austrian higher education, the study utilises biographical storytelling to prioritise the experiences of students navigating these transitions. Employing a relational lens informed by Bourdieusian sociology, the paper develops the concept of affective-habitual dispositions to illuminate how affects become sedimented within the habitus and shape educational trajectories. The analysis points to distinct affective practices permeating working-class students' educational experiences: shame, melancholy, and joy contribute to the formation of affective-habitual dispositions, shaping how working-class students make sense of their pathways. By focusing on the often-neglected affective dimension of educational transitions, the study uncovers that affects are pivotal not only in perpetuating inequalities but also as transgressive forces that foster belonging. Ultimately, the conceptual insights derived from this study enhance a critical understanding of affectivity as both reproductive and transformative in relation to social inequality.
