An academic at Ulster University within the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Susan is the Principal Investigator for the Taking Boys Seriously (TBS) research project, a longitudinal participatory action study aimed at addressing disparities in educational outcomes for boys from working-class communities. The research adopts an educational ecosystem perspective to examine how compounded disadvantage shapes boys’ educational experiences.
This excerpt unpacks “the bricks in the backpack”: the compounded weight of poverty, confused masculinity and ill-fitting education that holds boys back. Hear the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
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Madalina Todica
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For almost thirty years, boys—particularly those from disadvantaged communities—have been falling behind in education, right through the pipeline, from primary school to university. Governments have studied it. Researchers have intervened. Funding has come and gone. And almost nothing has changed. Susan Morgan, the principal investigator of the Taking Boys Seriously research project at Ulster University, has spent 7 years trying to understand why. She’s spoken with thousands of boys and educators, and what they told her is not what you might expect.
Boys and young men are achieving less. This gap in educational outcomes has been in place for probably 30 years. It’s a very stubborn problem, as, despite the many interventions, nothing has changed in any significant way.
Why are they falling behind? The gap in outcomes isn’t just in Northern Ireland but across a lot of the Western world. When I took on this research, I thought we needed to make a difference, so from the beginning, a guiding principle was: ”Are we making a difference?” If it’s something that has the potential to actually make a difference for boys and young men or be transformative in some way, we’ll do it. If it’s not, we won’t.
We thought the best way to approach the problem of educational underachievement was to ask the real experts, the boys and young men themselves. We also asked the other experts, their educators, teachers, youth workers, parents, and peers. And we used a process called Appreciative Inquiry to counteract the negative narrative that follows boys and men. We definitely didn’t want to reinforce that stereotype.
In Appreciative Inquiry, we steer clear of negative judgments about boys, young men, educators and schools. We come from a place of “what works well.”
For our research, we asked boys:
“What are the things that are working well for you?
What are the things that inspire you?
What are the things that enable you to grow?
What are the things that enable you to develop?”
Then we asked educators:
“What do you like about boys?
What do you like about working with boys?
What are the things that you appreciate that they bring into the room?
What ways do you see them responding to you when you use particular methods or styles of practice?”
We wanted to build a way of responding positively to boys in education that might make a difference. It has been incredibly interesting research for many reasons, but Appreciative Inquiry has been one of the biggest successes. We find that people are inspired to talk about what makes them grow, feel enriched, and like they have some control over what happens in their lives.
It was really important for the schools as well, because they’re often on the front line of judgment and criticism. So for schools to be able to talk mostly about their best practices and the things they do well invited them to engage with us in ways that can be difficult for schools to engage with researchers. And for the thousands of boys and educators that have talked to us so far, that process was very helpful. Their answers form one of three ways we frame our research.
Earlier you asked, “What’s wrong? What are some of the issues?”
We talk about bricks in a backpack, an analogy to help people understand some of what holds boys back. Each brick in the backpack makes it more difficult for a boy to successfully make his way through the education system. There are three sets of bricks. The first set, and the main indicator of educational underachievement, relate to poverty. Working-class boys often don’t have access to good schools, personal tutors, travel, or the arts. Maybe there’s a negative association with education in their families or communities that gets passed from generation to generation. While those things are outside the classroom, they are enormous indicators for how people develop emotional intelligence, social mobility, and cultural capital. Those are some of the bricks in the backpack.
The second set of bricks is masculinities. If you look at how patriarchy and power have been held by men, while that’s been challenged in the past half century and society has changed significantly, there’s a backlash to it. In the 90s and the noughties we talked about a crisis in masculinity. Now we have manfluencers and the manosphere. If you think about this in sociological terms, some are a direct reaction to the change in how power is held. When a social movement changes the dynamics of where power lies, power has to be lost somewhere to some degree, which creates new dynamics that change society. How that’s experienced by boys and young men is a kind of confused masculinity. They are caught in the middle of all of these dynamics.
In Northern Ireland, with our history of conflict, what happened in communities that didn’t engage with the state and the ensuing violence… Boys and young men trying to work out who they are, as all adolescents do, are caught in the middle of all of these dynamics, which can be very confusing. When we talk to boys, they speak about feeling great pressure to be powerful, strong, brave, intelligent, mature and in control; all of which we associate with masculinity. They also talk about actually feeling powerless, weak, judged, dismissed, misunderstood and blamed.
The third set of bricks in the backpack is educational approaches. We talk a lot about the need for education to swing from instrumental to relational approaches because the former just doesn’t work for boys today. Didactic education, for example, asks them to sit still in a classroom with no interaction for seven hours a day, with examinations being the ultimate goal. This approach gets in the way of boys succeeding in school.
Poverty, confused masculinities, and ill-fitting educational approaches are the three sets of bricks in the backpack. Our research is aimed at making a difference, and we do that by removing the bricks. Most of what we’ve done to date has been talking about how to take some of those bricks out of the backpacks to enable our boys to do better in their education.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if you like it, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.
Editor’s Note: This post is comprised of edited excerpts drawn from The Gifts of Trauma podcast transcript. Selected passages have been carefully woven together to create a cohesive narrative that speaks in the guests’ voices and faithfully represents their perspectives. – Rosemary Davies-Janes
