Learning to Act Your Age in the Playground: Age and the Social Lives of Secondary School Students

In this chapter, I turn to look at how age is negotiated in the informal social lives of students in the school. In Part I of the chapter, I consider how age and other aspects of identity are reflected in the way that students position themselves in physical space. Here autobiographical narratives shed light on how students make sense of age as part of their current, shifting sense of self by making comparisons with an idea of themselves located in the past (and the future). Part II then looks at how students negotiate and make sense of their social interactions with students between different year groups, while Part III moves on to explore the relationships between peer groups within different years.