| Abstract: | Education systems are expected to enhance both social regulation and emancipation of school students. The contradictions between these aims are visible in the everyday life at school in tensions between control and agency. These tensions are explored in this article by analysing the first two weeks in secondary school, on the basis of ethnographic data collected in the project "Citizenship, Difference and Marginalization in Schools: with Special Reference to Gender." Multilayered processes and practices are involved in the induction of new students. Banal instructions in the "official school," the construction of differences and continuities in the "informal" school, and the ways in which bodies of students are placed in the time-space paths in the "physical" school are explored. The authors ask how school students are taught to become "professional pupils" routinized in the everyday life of their new schools, and how students themselves construct competences through negotiation, withdrawal, or resistance. |
