Complicating ‘student behaviour’: exploring the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see.     

‘Special sport’ for misfits and losers: educational triage and the constitution of schooled subjectivities

This paper investigates the recent move by the federal government in Australia to manage more closely the primary sector of education through the use of national performance standards. The increasing importance placed on such benchmarks in Years 3, 5 and 7 raises questions about the perceived need to survey and thereby manage the education systems by using this technology as a means of achieving the goals of performativity - accountability and competition. Setting this agenda in a globalized context, it is acknowledged that although the mechanisms for setting and raising standards are very different across the world, the discourse resonates. The paper documents the specifically Australian, and more particularly Queensland, responses to the culture of performance. In this imperative to improve educational outcomes by using national tests, the paper raises persistent questions about the suitability of such tests for children who, for a host of reasons, are different from the monocultural able-bodied mainstream. Through its argument that inclusive practices in primary education are being jeopardized by creeping standardization practices, and despite policy rhetoric to the contrary, the paper demonstrates the seemingly unstoppable forces of performativity evidenced through national standards.     

The Chinese high school student’s stress in the school and academic achievement

In a sample of 466 Chinese high school students, we examined the relationships between Chinese high school students’ stress in the school and their academic achievements. Regression mixture modelling identified two different classes of the effects of Chinese high school students’ stress on their academic achievements. One class contained 87% of the students. In this class, the students’ stress negatively predicted their academic achievements. For the other 13% of the students, their stress did not predict their academic achievements. Furthermore, we found that gender did not moderate the relationships between Chinese high school students’ stress in the school and their academic achievements.     

‘Nature’ and the ‘environment’ in Jamaica’s primary school curriculum guides

In cases where environmental education is institutionalised within schools, the curriculum can affect what and how students learn about ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’. In Jamaica, schools are considered important settings for environmental education; the curriculum therefore includes environmental issues. Using content analysis, representations of ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’ in the nation’s primary level Curriculum Guides were examined. Findings indicate that although many units emphasise an anthropocentric view of nature, this is tempered by depictions of nature’s fragility and, in some instances, nature’s ‘divine’ dimensions. Several curricular units also facilitate student’s creative engagement with nature, allowing for multiple views of the natural world.     

Longitudinal analysis of Chinese high school student’s stress in school and academic achievement

In previous research, few studies have examined the effects of adolescents’ stress in school on the change rates of their academic achievement. In the present study, we seek to examine the longitudinal relationships between adolescents’ stress in school and the change rates of their academic achievement. The results indicated that for those whose academic achievement significantly declined over time, the students’ stress from teacher–student interaction significantly predicted the change rates of their academic achievement. The findings provided support to the notion that stress was a risk factor in students’ academic development.     

‘An attempt to tip the scales’: music and embodied capital in an English secondary school

This article explores class, capital, and aspiration to social mobility in an ethnographic study of an English secondary school. In particular, the article considers the school’s musical instrument programme as a site for inculcating forms of capital, under the auspices of developing skills for upward social mobility. Bringing together Bourdieu’s conceptions of schooling with theories of materiality and situated learning, we contend that this school succeeds in cultivating new forms of embodied capital among students through the development of communities of musical practice. However, a tension remains between emancipatory aims of the programme and the sanctioning and championing of certain forms of dominant cultural practice. The learning environment of the instrument programme highlights the complex and conflicted impact that schooling can have on the development of cultural capital and on reproducing disadvantage and difference.     

‘Snapchat’, youth subjectivities and sexuality: disappearing media and the discourse of youth innocence

Research on youth subjectivities and disappearing media is still in its infancy. Ephemeral technologies such as Snapchat, Frankly and Wickr offer young people opportunities for discursive agency, harnessing teenage discourses of social positioning. These media facilitate social mobility in teen peer contexts by providing a medium for dynamic and shifting relationships. The transmission of digital images can enable a social flexibility that has a significant impact on youth subjectivities where discursively constructed relational identities are brokered through cyber technologies. We tackle the question ‘what discourses are evoked and produced in the discussion of disappearing social media?’ by exploring two parents’ accounts of their children’s use of this media. We also examine a discourse of innocence that surrounds teens’ use of social media and, in particular, ephemeral applications, by sexting and cyberbullying. We engage in the debate on the use of ephemeral social media to consider the discourses influencing youth subjectivities and the nature of networked publics.     

Between ‘enrichment’ and ‘endangerment’: ‘cultural diversity’ and the politics of belonging in the Berlin school choice discourse

Even though choice is not officially a feature in the German primary school system, some parents intervene in determining which school their child attends. Especially in urban contexts, the informal school market is growing. This demand is based on promises with respect to a certain quality of education as well as on issues that prevail in certain inner city schools. In looking at Berlin, as a global city, this article shows how contrary school choice practices gain traction in the face of ‘cultural differences’ that those practices produce discursively. Cultural semantics are activated with regard to the composition of the student body, when parents chose schools with a bilingual profile, but also when parents engage in the practice of ‘group enrolment’ into schools in inner city hotspots perceived as problematic. Our research shows how school choice practices may become acceptable despite being a public taboo, if parents argue by appeal to ‘cultural differences’.     

Reproducing monocultural education: ethnic majority staff’s discursive constructions of monocultural school practices

This paper investigates the role of ethnic majority staff in the perpetuation of monocultural education that excludes non-western, ethnic minority cultures and reproduces institutional racism in schools. Based on qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews in four ethnically diverse schools in the Flemish educational system, we specifically investigate the role of ethnic majority staff in the reproduction of monocultural school practices through a discursive theoretical lens. The study advances the current literature on institutional racism by showing how situated meanings of monocultural school practices at the micro level of individuals are discursively inter-linked with the macro-level monocultural model of education.     

The Swedish ‘people’s school’ in Finland and the language question: homogenization and differentiation

This paper presents an historical overview of issues around the language of instruction and the curriculum of mother‐tongue education for the Swedish‐speaking minority in Finland during the half‐century after the establishment of the public school in 1866. In a linguistic‐ and culturally‐diverse society like that of Finland it has not been self‐evident that the question of language as a medium of instruction and as a school subject would be understood and shared in the same way by Finns and Swedes. This paper focuses on two collective themes, homogenization and differentiation. Homogenization stands for forces aiming at securing equal opportunities for education, regardless of vernacular languages and cultures. Differentiation refers to the possibility of accommodating the education to specific needs of the Swedish‐speaking population.     

‘Active Citizens’: the case of school governors

ABSTRACT

This article reviews current and historical debates about active, participant citizens and related conceptions of citizenship. In particular it focusses on the prospects for the participation of citizens in the administration of public bodies. It discusses critically the notion of participative citizenship and active citizenship as articulated by Douglas Hurd (when Home Secretary) and also the version contained in the report of the Speaker's Commission on Citizenship. The article then draws upon research conducted for the Volunteer Centre, by the National Foundation for Educational Research and that by Brehony and Deem which is funded by an Economic and Social Research Council Grant (R000 23 1799), on voluntary activity and school governors, respectively. The applicability of the concept of active citizenship to the oversight of schools by school governing bodies is then considered alongside recent work in the United States. The article then considers the constraints upon active citizenship which prevent many governors from participating as much as the role demands and it ends with a reference to the tension between those who see governing bodies as an arena for democratic accountability and the active participation of citizens and those who view them principally as a means by which the local state is weakened and its functions increasingly transferred to the voluntary sector.     

Individuating ‘sparks’ and ‘flickers’ of ‘a life’ in dance practices with preschoolers: the ‘monstrous child’ of Colebrook's Queer Vitalism

ABSTRACT

What are the dominant images of the Child in contemporary Western societies? In order to challenge some dominant images of the Child, this essay explores the possibilities of analyzing an experimental dance practice with preschoolers aged 1–2 years with Claire Colebrook's theorizing on ‘the war on norms’. Colebrook suggests a Queer Vitalism to push the limits of how to understand humanness generally, and more specifically, how to understand processes of subjectification. She moves from a post-structuralist understanding toward the Deleuzian notion of practices of individuation and processes of becoming-imperceptible. In this essay, we draw on Queer Vitalism to show how it is possible to understand children's constructions of subjectivity in events of experimental dance practices for preschoolers. The analysis is performed in close interactions with video-films from these workshops transformed to still photography. We aspire to show how these practices can be understood as counter-power strategies in the enactment of an image of a Monstrous Child. Such an image might transform the taken-for-granted image of the Child and preschool practices in subversive ways.     

‘They might as well be Black’: the racialization of Sa’moan high school students

This article explores the processes of racialization imposed on Sa’moan youth through policy and practice in one urban, US school district and at one high school in particular. Specifically, I use the methodological practices of defamiliarization and counter‐storytelling to examine the contradictory practices of racialization and the simultaneously oppressive and transformative potentials these practices catalyze. The analysis of this process is framed by the Critical Race Theory concepts of colorblindness and Whiteness as property, which powerfully illustrate how this racialization both disrupts and reifies reigning local and national racial norms and hierarchies.     

Urban high school students’ perspectives about sexual health decision-making: the role of school culture and identity

Studies across fields such as science education, health education, health behavior, and curriculum studies identify a persistent gap between the aims of the school curriculum and its impact on students’ thinking and acting about the real-life decisions that affect their lives. The present study presents a different story from this predominant pattern in the literature. Through a year-long ethnographic investigation of a health-focused New York City public high school’s HIV/AIDS and sex education program, this study illustrates a case in which 20 12th grade students respond positively to their education on these topics and largely assert that school significantly influences their perspectives and actions related to sexual health decision-making. This paper presents the following interpretation of this positive influence: school culture influences these students’ perspectives and decisions around sexual health by contributing to the formation of students’ identities. This paper further shows how science learning in particular becomes important for students in relation to decision-making when it is linked to issues of identity. These findings suggest that, in addition to attending to the design of classroom curriculum, HIV/AIDS and sex education researchers and curriculum developers (as well as those in science education focusing on other controversial science topics) might also explore the kinds of relational and school-wide factors that potentially influence students’ identities, decisions, and responses to school learning.