“You heard me swear but you never heard me!” Negotiating agency in the Pupil Referral Unit Classroom

This study explores the exercise of student agency in an alternative educational setting in England by considering students’ verbal interactions during an art lesson where they created masks, and in an engineering lesson where they developed model rockets. We build on Rainio’s (2008) operationalisation of student agency by drawing attention to some of the more particular linguistic features which characterise the exercise of agency in immediate classroom situations. Our findings demonstrate that the participating students were responding to, renegotiating or resisting their teacher’s agendas in subtle ways, depending on the contingencies of the moment.