Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

provide an exhaustive list of student types within schools but because these stereotyped groups are those most likely to be represented in each school and because they are likely to have had different experiences and to have attempted to “move” in different ways. Thus the data represent a diverse set of perspectives because each of these groups inhabits a different position within the power relations of school hierarchies. It is important to note that these groups are not intended as a definitive or exhaustive list of the possibilities and experiences of schooling. Rather, they offer a way to gather information from students from a cross-section of the population so as to give breadth to their experiences of school. To choose the individual student participants that met the criteria for each group, each site set up a small group of staff that nominated students for each group. In each school, the group included either the principal or deputy principal and the year 11 coordinator, because these people had a good working knowledge of the ways that students perform in each school.

Summary

The good student as envisioned within contemporary education is illustrative of the ways that the individual is made subject through a multitude of discourses that are informed by wider social practices and norms. In this sense, the way each student enacts and enunciates his or her subjectivities is a political act. Highlighting the gridding of subjectivity presents an opportunity to see how students can and do move within this performative terrain. This book is about exploring how students understand the good student in their schools and how they understand their own potential within these enclosed spaces. The student voices represented here provide empirical evidence as a means of unmasking those commonsense assumptions that contemporary society has come to accept in schools and schooling. This book’s purpose is not to paint a vision of schooling as grimly oppressive or as a violence forced on young people (although at times this reading may seem appropriate) but rather to examine what may be, and is, possible in the communities that young people are immersed in.