The burden of smartness: Teacher's pet and classmates’ teasing in a Danish classroom

Publication date: August 2019Source: Linguistics and Education, Volume 52Author(s): Ulla LundqvistAbstractSchools are sites of negotiation of what it means to be ''smart", and which students are viewed as smart. This is a pertinent problem for educational scholars, teacher educators, and teachers, because struggles concerning smartness foster social inequity. While much research accentuates the inequity that occurs when those students who do not fit the “smart” category are marginalized, the inequities that emerge when teachers prefer the smart student have not received much scholarly attention. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in a primary school in Copenhagen, Denmark, this paper explores how one student, over the course of two years and two months, comes to inhabit the “smart” role, and must then cope with being favoured by the teachers and ostracised by peers. Dual pressures such as these have implications for education and research.
Source: Linguistics and Education - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research