The sound of misbehaviour: deficit thinking and language policing in school discipline policies

Abstract

What does ‘misbehaviour’ sound like? This article answers this question by analysing 563 behaviour policies from the 34 largest multi-academy trusts in England, contextualising this within a long history of deficit thinking which perceives marginalised families as lacking adequate language and discipline. Combining insights from anti-deficit perspectives and language ideologies, I interrogate the co-construction of ‘im/proper language’ and ‘im/proper behaviour’, examining how these allegedly objective categories interact to produce ideologies of idealised linguistic personhood. I show how behaviour policies hear–that is, how normative categories in spoken language become imbued with positively encoded behavioural traits and how non-normative categories get construed as imagined signs of misbehaviour which require policing. I argue that these language ideologies are a fundamental part of the philanthropic logics on which the academies agenda is founded on, which sees the disciplining of allegedly deficient speech as an efficient means for marginalised children to escape racial injustice and poverty.