Transition education, student contestation and the production of meaning : possibilities and limitations of resistance theories

Abstract

One of the major developments within the sociology of education is the

recovery of the role of human agency within what had previously been considered to be

determining structures. This article looks at one aspect of such agency, namely the

meaning production engaged in by a group of largely working-class students within

transition programmes in three secondary schools in New Zealand. Their contestual

industry in receiving, reinterpreting, re-creating and rejecting meanings provides valid

spaces in which critical and conscientising education can occur. It is argued, however,

that this same activity hardly warrants the optimism evident in contemporary educational

discourse relating progressive change at the micro-level of the school to changes in the

larger social formation. Some of the factors which subvert the transformative potential of

contestual and resistant activity are therefore explored.