Disciplining and punishing normal technical students : a reading of resistance in a Singaporean school.

Abstract

This paper explores and reframes the common sense understanding that Normal Technical students in Singapore are defiant. To do this, participant observations were conducted in a school and 12 students and 3 teachers were interviewed. Using Foucault’s discipline, this study illustrates that Normal Technical students are not naturally defiant but rather there are factors in the school that contributes to their resistance. Resistance in this paper depended on 3 factors: 1) boring teaching methods, 2) negligence due to school ranking system, and 3) organizational practices of the school. Moreover, to reinforce the argument that Normal Technical students are not inherently “challenging” and “difficult to handle”, this paper demonstrates that it is through normalizing judgements such as punishments that students perceived with such characteristics even exist. Finally, giving a positive spin to the notion that resistance is destructive, this paper explores how resistance is meaningful to these Normal Technical students.