|
|
a chaotic set of possibilities for the organisation of popular education, modern forms of schooling came to gradually take a shape they still possess today” (Kendall & Wickham, 2003, p. 123). Investigatingthe normalising vision of the good student entails problematising the organisation and processes of contemporary schooling. Methodologically, this practice of Foucauldian problematisation of commonly accepted truths forms the core of this study. This strategy of problematisation requires questioning those practices that seem “normal” or “commonsense” but are in fact contingent and dynamic—“accidents of history” (Kendall & Wickham, 2003, pp. 5–6). Choosing an approach that best allows this problematisation of the good student is crucial to creating an authentic study, a study in which the methodology engages the theory.
Theoretically, this problematising imperative found voice in the postmodern theories of writers like Foucault and Deleuze and in a desire to explore what these theories offered the modernist educational world. I locate my critical examination of schools and schooling within this tradition. My position is informed by the work of researchers such as Patti Lather, who has argued for an awareness that “de-centring the author” is an imperative in research to ameliorate the inscription by discourses of the author or researcher (Lather, 1991, p. 9). To do this, Lather advocated that the researcher become “multi-voiced,” challenging the tendency to see the author as “a singular, authoritative voice” (Lather, 1991, p. 9). I have incorporated this strategy in my research by giving voice to the unvoiced, principally by creating spaces for students to be heard and to tell their own stories—stories that are central to their self-governing.
Symes and Preston pointed out that schools are a moral technology concerned with the “selection and categorisation of human beings” (Symes & Preston, 1997, p. 273). Research supports the notion that schools are places where social inequities are produced, reinforced, and deployed in a number of ways (Smyth, Angus, Down, & McInerney, 2008). I see the institution of the school as one that has been set up to create certain kinds of students as a means of maintaining the status quo, of inscribing and reinscribing the forms of privilege and disadvantage that dominate so much of Western society. In this sense, I agree with critical researchers such as