Old questions for new schools: what are the students doing?

Abstract

This study was conducted in a lighthouse school with a long and successful history of restructuring. In this article we describe our (surprising) impressions of shadowing Jake, one of the highest achieving students in the school. We present a researcher's account of Jake's classroom experience over the first four periods of a single day and an analysis of what happened in terms of the idea of studenting. We employ an actor-oriented view of studenting, comprising four aspects-pacing, attending, conforming, and selecting. We contrast this with a structure-oriented view of studenting and draw parallels with the notions of students-as-participants and students-as-beneficiaries in school reform. Finally, we discuss the problems and possibilities of engaging and involving students in the process of reform