Resisting ‘Empowerment’ and Realizing Power: an exploration of aspects of the GNVQ

This article examines the GNVQ pedagogy of independent learning. It focuses particularly on the key objective of transferring responsibility for learning to students, which underlies the claim that the GNVQ represents an empowering and ‘progressive’ innovation. The article explores a critical case of classroom practice in which students seized their newly acquired freedoms for their own purposes but resisted the accompanying burden of responsibility for managing their own work. Their meaning and actions are readily reconcilable, even predictable, in the light of a wealth of classroom and youth research. The article suggests that this poses problems for programmes which seek to self‐responsibilise learning without also extending opportunities for negotiating the meaning of what is to be learned. Finally, the article considers a possible interpretation of the data‐‐which is that in resisting ’empowerment’ these students in fact exercised their classroom power.