|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
period. Familiarising myself with each school community required four to five weeks of fairly constant exposure. The interview process took anywhere from four to eight weeks, depending upon a diverse range of factors. The immersion period in each school varied from 10 to 20 weeks, largely depending on how easy it was to talk with students.
The study uses a number of data-collection methods, including field observation, discourse analysis of key school documents, interviews with principals, discourse analysis of the physical architecture of the schools, contextual analysis of local areas surrounding each school, and focus group interviews of selected students. Most important in this research was the diverse collection of student voices heard through focus groups as students themselves reported their experiences of what and who a good student should be. I prioritised student voices because I believe students themselves are best able to recount how they experience those micropractices of power that inform their performativity. I concur with Davies and Hunt (1994) and Haraway (1988) that addressing those “marked” and “subjugated” offers a unique insight into school and schooling. I wanted to understand how students speak from the subject positions made available to them because discourses of the good student mark all students—albeit some much more than others—in a multitude of ways.
The focus groups were asked a set of open-ended questions about their knowledge and experiences of the good student. They were encouraged to discuss their answers with each other to allow them to explore their experiences and to share thoughts with each other. In each school, I interviewed four focus groups of three students, all in year 11, who had been selected from the student cohort. To select these students, I used a protocol that I developed in a previous study (Thompson, 2008). I asked the principal to organise a selection panel to target certain categories of students. These categories were as follows: students who excelled in mainstream sports (sporting achievers), students who had the most recorded instances of formal discipline, such as detention and suspension (rebels), students who had received the most academic awards (academic achievers), and students who tended to be almost invisible (quiet students). I used these groups of students not because they