Student Moral Entrepreneurship

A Reflection On Conflicts, Tensions And Ambiguities In The School Environment

Abstract

This paper discusses the social role of students in the classroom context. I will focus on the way students themselves construct interactions from what I conceptualize as moral entrepreneurship, school professionals appear as mediators of the tensions raised by these relationships. I intend to think on how the students themselves construct and condition actions in the school environment. The mobilization of four key concepts guide the analysis present in the paper: a) the notion of moral 'entrepreneur', brought through a rereading of concepts by Becker (1977; 2008); b) the legitimacy of the actors of the school institutions thought from the formulations of Goffman (1975; 2010); c) the deinstitutionalization of the subjects (DUBET, 1998; 2005); and d) common sense as a cultural system (GEERTZ, 1981), with emphasis on the search for a logo (TÜRCKE, 2001) within this system. The paper proposes a reading of classroom dynamics based on a perspective that allows students to be conceived as active agents of the school space. Since the students would not only be subjectified by the school world, they would constantly update it. And much of this update would come from common sense references.