Understanding classroom trouble through regulative gravity and instructional elasticity

•Regulative flares of classroom trouble expose and contest the regulative discourse.•The regulative discourse can vary in its moral gravity or contextual reference.•Students make trouble in the instructional discourse by stretching moral boundaries.

This paper aims to develop a more nuanced analytic vocabulary to typify how and where classroom trouble can manifest in pedagogic discourse. It draws on classroom ethnographies conducted in non-academic secondary school pathways and alternative programmes in Australian communities with high youth unemployment, where the policy of ‘earning or learning’ till age 17 has effectively extended compulsory schooling. Three concepts are developed and exemplified: ‘regulative flares’, being moments when teachers resort to explicitly reasserting the lesson's social order; ‘moral gravity’ to describe the degree to which the moral order underpinning the regulative discourse is tied to the immediate context or beyond; and ‘instructional elasticity’ to account for trouble originating in the instructional register.