Learning to Labour

### Participant Observation in the Context of Education

Given the practical and ethical
problems of conducting participant observation in a school setting, there are
only a handful of such studies which have been carried out in the UK, and these
are mainly historical, done a long time ago. They are, nonetheless interesting
as examples of research. Below I consider two classic participant observation
studies: Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1977) and Mac an Ghaill’s (1988)
Young Gifted and Black.

### Learning to labour

Learning to Labour by Paul Willis
(1977) is an ethnographic study of twelve working class ‘lads’ from a school in
Birmingham conducted between 1972 and 1975. He spent a total of 18 months
observing the lads in school and then a further 6 months following them into
work. The study aimed to uncover the question of how and why “working class
kids get working class jobs” (1977: 1) using a wide range of qualitative
research methodologies from interviews, group discussions to participant
observation, aiming to understand participants’ actions from the participants’
point of view in everyday contexts.

### Sampling

Willis concentrated on a particular
boy’s group in a non-selective secondary school in the Midlands, who called
themselves ‘lads’. They were all white, although the school also contained many
pupils from West Indian and Asian backgrounds. The school population was
approximately 600, and the school was predominantly working class in intake. He
states that the main reasons why he selected this school was because it was
typical working class pupils.

### Data Collection

Willis attended all school classes,
options (leisure activities) and career classes which took place at various
times. He also spoke to parents of the 12 ‘lads’, senior masters of the school,
and main junior teachers as well as careers officers in contact with the
concerned ‘lads’. He also followed these 12 ‘lads’ into work for 6 months. NB
He also made extensive use of unstructured interviews, but here we’re focusing
on the Observation aspects.

Participant observation allowed
Willis to immerse himself into the social settings of the lads and gave him the
opportunity to ask the lads (typically open questions) about their behaviour
that day or the night before, encouraging them to explain themselves in their
own words…which includes detailed accounts of the lads fighting, getting into
trouble with teachers, bunking lessons, setting of fire extinguishers for fun
and vandalising a coach on a school trip.

### Findings

Willis’ most important finding was
that the lads were completely uninterested in school – they saw the whole point
of school as ‘having a laff’ rather than trying to get qualifications. Their
approach to school was to survive it, do as little work as possible, and to
have as much fun as possible by pushing the boundaries of authority and bunking
as much as they could. The reason they didn’t value education is because they
anticipated getting factory jobs which didn’t require any formal
qualifications. They saw school as a ‘bit cissy’ and for middle class kids.

Willis does not include an account
of how he approached the ‘lads’ and built rapport with them. However
considering the responses of the ‘lads’ during discussions and interviews,
seeing that the ‘lads’ openly talk about their views and experiences and allow
access to work at a later stage of the research, Willis seems to have built
rapport effectively.

*For more details*
the findings of this study see the Neo-Marxism section of the ‘Perspectives on
Education Hand-Out’

### Practical Issues with Learning to Labour

The research was very time
consuming – 2 years of research and then a further 2 years to write up the
results.

It would be very difficult to
repeat this research today given that it would be harder to gain access to
schools (also see reliability)

Funding would also probably be out
of the question today given the time taken and small sample size.

### Ethical Issues with Learning to Labour

An ethical strength of the research
is that it is giving the lads a voice – these are lads who are normally ‘talked
about’ as problems, and don’t effectively have a voice.

An ethical weakness is that Willis
witnessed the lads getting into fights, their Racism and Homophobia, as well as
them vandalising school property but did nothing about it.

A second ethical weakness is the
issue of confidentiality – with such a small sample size, it would be
relatively easy for people who knew them to guess which lads Willis had been
focussing on

### Theoretical issues with Learning to Labour

Validity is widely regarded as
being excellent because of the unstructured, open ended nature of the research
allowing Willis to sensitively push the lads into giving in-depth explanations
of their world view.

Critics have tried to argue that
the fact he was obviously a researcher, and an adult, may have meant the lads
played up, but he counters this by saying that no one can put on act for 2
years, at some point you have to relax and be yourself.

Something which may undermined the
validity is Willis’ interpretation of the data – he could have selected aspects
of the immense amount of data he had to support his biased opinion of the boys.

Representativeness is poor –
because the sample size is only 12, and they are only white boys.

Reliability is low – It is very
difficult to repeat this research for the reasons mentioned under practical
factors.

## Research Methods

Observations

Interviews

Quota sampling