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result of this is the creation and maintenance of a hierarchical sensibility that locates students within complex social systems that in turn inform how one acts, behaves, and thinks. This set of processes tends to judge individuals and trains them to police themselves so that they act in normative, rather than in freer, ways. Students relate to the multiple possibilities of the good student that they display through the normative value communicated to them. This leads to a notion of performativity whereby students are seen to conform to certain expectations of type. However, it is evident that this performativity is rarely creative; rather, it conforms to accepted hierarchical expectations that act to limit the possibilities for the self to act and think in freer ways.
The hierarchical discourse of the good student also leads students to become skilful at classifying themselves against idealised forms of the good with which they play and within which they negotiate their positionalities. Positionality refers to the ways that subjects arrange themselves and are arranged within modern institutions such as schools. The strategies of power—watching and evaluating, normalising, individualising, and categorising—continually function to create these positionalities. The student’s strategy, then, is to locate the self in a way that maximises the return on comportment—the complexity arises when one plays off contending, contrasting, and contradictory claims on goodness. This is the play of power that coalesces around the normalising vision of the good student in secondary schools.
A Note on Methodology
The research in this book was undertaken as part of a PhD conducted at Murdoch University. I wanted to problematise the idea of the good student and the ways that it is deployed and negotiated in secondary schools. The methodological frame used in my research is predicated upon a socially critical view of the world and of those institutions that society has come to accept as part of the landscape of contemporary life. Kendall and Wickham made the point that looking at the school in a Foucauldian sense means seeing it as a result of chance: “Out of