A critically-engaged syncretic language narrative of two building trades students and their families: developing identity-resonance for self-actualising minorities’ right to be, believe and belong.

Abstract

The recurring patterns of under-achievement and inequality emerging from the imposed Standard British English (SBE) amidst Further Education’s widening participation, provokes questions about what attainment of the monoglossic SBE, usefully confers and promotes amongst heterogeneous minorities, whose recontextualisation-efforts typically default to the instantiation of protean English- variants. The thesis reflexively explores an emancipatory, generative collation of theoretical, narrative, and empirical applications for rethinking the inequity of social fields whose shifting flows of capital overlook their impacts on minorities. For circumventing minorities’ vulnerability to the hurtful, exclusionary, and self- devaluing experiences of marginalisation and oppression, a collaborative autoethnography addresses the established thinking around variant-language and how it symbolically signifies the identity of two FE Building Trade students, their families and me. A social constructionist epistemology frames how the mutually- constituted and inter-related meanings and semiotics of the mediating contexts, are understood. Data elicitation occurs as a decoupage of actual and fictionalised narrative-storying – emanating from reflexive-dyadic interviews; intertextuality of metaphor, symbolism, poetry, and journaling; and material and immaterialised semiotics and literacies garnered from community walks, artefacts, and memory. An adductive process enables the construction of meanings contingent upon collaborants’ subjective positions amidst their perceived identity deficits, lack and insufficiencies. Scrutiny of the resources collaborants drew from, revealed functionalist dispositions, surpassing the award of value to form in favour of meaning (variants vs grammatical correctness; reality vs ambitions; to survive vs expire). Themes echoing inclusion, acceptance, and belonging directly informed semantics of integration. A process of inwards-sharing returned our dichotomous separation from the mainstream as an equation of life in-between, of contradiction, but also, of possibility. Confronting our otherness in solidarity made explicit our dislocation, by which we forged self-resonance and the valuing of our distinctiveness as an embodiment of our humanity and place within it. Understanding variants as translanguaged, syncretic analogical transfers and as resources for the transformation and empowerment of ‘Self’ advanced the notion of anastylosis, for redefining our national linguistic identity, by which we might progressively develop identity-resonance for self-actualising our right to be, believe and belong.