Identitet neuspešnog učenika

Abstract

The subject of our research is not limited only to students’ personal constructs of their school achievement, but is also an observation of the issue of school failure in a more complex and comprehensive way – as a person’s self-definition. The choice to avoid investing in achieving high school results represents the decision to be a certain kind of person and is not an individual and isolated act. School achievement, in other words, is the domain of experiences related to a person’s essential constructs, which make up the experience of self and thus provide orientation in the morally defined social order. This facilitates a deeper understanding of how the dedication of time and personal potentials to extra-curricular activities, instead of studying for grades, may represent the achievement of broader life plans and the struggle for a certain way of life. Also, the institutional system, on the basis of analyses and the standardization of the individual’s concrete activities, produces subjectivizing discourses, thus creating the image of the unsuccessful student as a stable and recognizable identity. Some students agree to identify with this image, while others create counter-identities, creating resistance to the unfavorable institutional etiquette. The book sheds light on the complex dynamic between the identity of school underachievers as the personal sense of self and as the ‘outside’ imposed position of subjectivity.