Thank you for taking the time to read what I wrote @shanibeer! I very much appreciate it! Thank you for such a thoughtful response as well.

[Interesting. This plays out alot within communities (or societies or cultures) and I used it a lot when I was teaching in community education. The people who came to the sessions had mainly 'failed' in the school system, in the sense they had not achieved qualifications (nor had they enjoyed school), however, they were in interested in learning, and wanted their lives to be different.]

I can very much relate to this. I was kicked out of school, and spent most of my bouncing around from job to job, with long spells of unemployment. I tried to learn where and when I could, through places like the library, but long hours and low pay meant it was difficult to do any 'institutional' education. However, life offered me the opportunity of attempting to do a degree half a decade ago. I was ill, unemployed, and had the time, and through low interest student finance loans and grants I was able to actually afford it. So jumped at the chance, and have just recently graduated. It was a pretty common thread running through a lot of the other students as well.

I've always argued that not enough attention is paid to the individual student and their life experiences. It's sort of a neoliberal idea that individuals are fully responsible for who and how they are, but social construction plays a huge part in who and how they are. While this is pretty well known in psychology and social psychology, there's a hegemony in society that the opposite is true - especially as we become a more and more neoliberal society. It has changed a lot over the years though, thankfully! I've met many teachers who are not quite as quick to write off their students, and look at their circumstances at home, at school, personality factors, and much more, and attempt to help them through that sociocultural lens.

[One week, we ran a session called "Dealing with Difficult People". I thought the man focus would be about neighbour and community relationships. However, without exception, it was about relationships with schools and teachers. The session was packed, we didn't have enough chairs, and the supporting playcentre (this was an after school session) was also over-subscribed.]

That's pretty surprising, I would have thought the same as you going from the title - that it would have been about community relationships and individual relationships. Though it is kind of uplifting to see that more and more people are realising the importance of relationships with schools and teachers. Don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate teachers (much more than I did when I was younger anyway!), and they have a terribly difficult job. Even more difficult these days as the government attempts to force through an agenda of privatisation. I also think there's a lot of cases where the parents expect too much of the teacher, or sees their child through rose-coloured glasses. However, sessions like this would be a great way to produce a two-way dialogue, and improve our schooling systems and the way they are run. Much respect to you for running it, and for allowing it to flow in a natural direction, even if that direction was a different one than expected!

[For many people, the value of this session was that they were listened to, they found that they were not alone in their experience and they started to share ideas about how they could do things differently.]

This is another thing I can fully relate to. It made a huge difference to me and my study when I found out that there were so many others like me. In the online forums for students (I did my degree through the Open University) there are a lot of people questioning themselves, and asking if anyone had been through similar experiences to them, and finding that so many of us gives them confidence that they can do it.

[There's a lot of work now about cultural competence in public services.]

That's excellent news!

[I'm quite interested in anthropology and ethnography, although I was hard-pressed yesterday to explain the difference between those subjects and sociology and social psychology. Could you help?]

Hmmm, those are pretty complex questions, and I'm not an expert but I'll do my best!

Sociology is more focused on studying the group processes and the groups themselves, how they work, how the function, and the like. However, the focus remains on the group itself. Whereas with social psychology the focus is on the individual, and how the group affects the individual's psychological process, and how the individual affects the groups processes.

Anthropology is the study of humans, and all aspects of them. It's a pretty wide ranging field that has a lot of cross-discipline, and studies culture, social aspects, language, and more. Whereas ethnography is more of a methodology of studying the group (say a community or culture), and usually done from within. Very similar to studying a group through the sociocultural lens. Does that help at all? I could go through my notes to dig out deeper nuances if that would help?