Who is the Good High School Student?
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Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

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Carspecken and Apple (1992), who argued that schooling is an inherently uneven set of processes that privilege some and marginalise others.

Through problematising the vision of the good student, my research joins a body of literature that advocates social and institutional change as a means of addressing problems of privilege and disadvantage. I perceive schools as places where certain types of power are deployed—again, in order to maintain the status quo—and where the rhetoric of the good student is placed within a nexus of power relations that construct certain kinds of subjectivities. Through unmasking these notions of the good student, I seek to understand how different sites construct these sensibilities. Like Popkewitz, I seek through research to challenge the commonsense assumptions behind current practices and I challenge conventional views of schooling (Popkewitz, 1998a). Interrogating the dynamics of power relations through the construct of the good student is part of this challenge. My position reflects Foucault’s work problematising power and subjectivities. Foucault argued:

I would say that we try to bring to light what has remained until now the most hidden, the most occulted, the most deeply invested experience in the history of our culture—power relations. In this series of lectures, I would like to show how the political relations have been established and deeply implanted in our culture, giving rise to a series of phenomena that can be explained only if they are related not to economic structures, to the economic relations of production, but to the power relations that permeate the whole fabric of our existence. (Foucault, 2000, p. 17)

I applaud and have attempted to borrow from the work of Smyth, Angus, Down, and McInerney, specifically their methodological motivation that in order to understand what is happening in schools one must “get [one’s] hands dirty,” undertaking empirical work rather than simply theorising about what school must be like for young people (Smyth, Angus, Down, & McInerney, 2008). The empirical nature of this book sees schools as case studies and recognises that students have unique perspectives and insights into how schools operate and how they, the students, place themselves within these terrains.