Kelly meets Foucault: Understanding school underachievement

Abstract

"Underachievement" in school is seen as a failure in traditional theories of education. An alternative construction of school underachievement is offered If based on Michel Foucault's (1975) approach to power and George Kelly's (1955) principle of elaborative choice. Instead of being construed exclusively as a measure of good education, school success can be seen as the effect of normalization based. on the power of discourses dominating in a society. By the same token, underachievement can be seen as a form of resistance to dominant discourse, as well as a way of defining one's identity through marginalized discourses. Kelly's notion of elaborative choice is used to expand upon a Foucauldian analysis of school underachievement.