Abstract: The good student: power, subjectivities and schooling Schooling has become one of the core, generalisable experiences of most young people in the Western world. This study examines the ways that students inhabit subjectivities in school through the normalising vision of the good student. The idea that schools exist to produce good students who become good citizens is one of the basic tenets of modernist educational philosophies that dominate the contemporary education world. This study takes a different position, arguing that the visions of the good student deployed in various ways in schools act to produce various ways of knowing the self that are ultimately concerned with behaviour and discipline rather than freer thought and action. Developing the postmodern theories of Foucault and Deleuze, this study argues that schools could be freer places than they are, but current practices act to teach students to know themselves in certain idealised ways through which they are located, and locate themselves, in hierarchical rationales of the good student. Part of the promise of schools lies in the ways that students become negotiators and producers of their subjectivities, albeit in narrow and limiting ways. By pushing the ontological understandings of the self beyond the modernist philosophies that currently dominate schools and schooling, this study problematises the ways that young people are made subjects in schools. Part of this modernist tradition is found in the institutional tendency to see students as fixed, measurable identities (beings) rather than dynamic, evolving performances (becomings). Schools and schooling largely appear to make sense to us because we think we understand what happens and what should happen in schools. The good student is framed within these aspects of cultural understanding. However, this commonsense attitude is based on a hegemonic understanding of the good, rather than the good student as a contingent multiplicity that is produced by an infinite set of discourses and experiences. I argue that this understanding of subjectivities and power is crucial if schools are to meet the needs of a rapidly changing and challenging world. This study utilises socially critical case study research across multiple sites to investigate those micropractices of power in schools that produce the normalising vision of the good student. Data from three school sites was gathered using a variety of techniques including interviews and focus group research.

Hemsidor är väldigt populära idag. Där finns mycket information som påverkar vårt sätt att handla, tänka och interagera. Samtidigt kan hemsidorna ha information som kan analyseras och tolkas på olika sätt med hjälp av olika teorier. Denna studie utgår från Bourdieus socialaklassteori och Basil Bernsteins teori om pedagogiska identiteter. Studien analyserar två gymnasiehemsidor. Bilden av den goda eleven studeras noggrant samt de olika stereotyperna på hemsidorna. Denna studie gör en diskursanalys av sexbilder som pekar på elevernas aktiviteter på två kommunala skolor och på skillnader mellan dem. Det gäller en kommunal gymnasieskola i centrala Stockholm ochkommunalgymnasieskola i en Stockholmsförort. Studien visar att det finns en polarisering mellan skolorna. Norra Real Gymnasium som är skolan från centrala Stockholm inriktar sig mot samhällets elitoch eleverna därverkar ha mer symbolisktkapital och haraktiviteter som utvecklardetta vidare. Tensta Gymnasium, som är gymnasieskolan iförorten,fokuserar mest på integrationgenom att göra aktiviteter som utvecklar elevernasätt att integrera sig i samhället. Det är ganska vaga aktiviteter såsomattklistra in olika färger frånhänderna på väggen. / Website pages are very popular today. There is a lot of information that affects our way of shopping, thinking and interacting. At the same time, the websites may have information that can be analyzed and interpreted in different ways using different theories.This study is based on Bourdieu's social class theory and Basil Bernstein's theory of educational identities. The study analyzestwo high school websites. The image of the good student is studied carefully as well as the different stereotypes on the websites. This study makes a discourse analysis of six images that points to the students' activities at two municipal schools and on differences between them. This applies to a municipal upper secondary school in central Stockholm and municipal upper secondary school in a Stockholm suburb. The study shows that there is a polarization between schools. Norra Real Gymnasium, which is the school from central Stockholm, focuses on society's elite and the students there seem to have more symbolic capital and have activities that further develop this. Tensta Gymnasium, which is the secondary school in the suburb, focuses most on integration by doing activities that develop students' ways of integrating themselves into society.It's quite vague activities like sticking paper hands of different colors on a wall.