Pedagogies of becoming in an end-of-the-line ‘special’ school

In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English ‘special’ school for boys designate as having ‘social, emotional and behavioural difficulties’. I offer a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the boys' responses to this. I suggest that the teacher's pedagogy, and the classroom, are marked by movements and flows of bodies, practices, affectivities and subjectivities. Following from this, I argue that this mobility opens up the possibility of identification and recognition as student and learner to boys who have previously been judged to be beyond the bounds of intelligibility in prevailing education discourse. I explore whether sites such as this one might offer a useful space for thinking about the possibilities for pedagogies that move beyond normative notions of the school, the teacher, the student and the learner.