Schools, Signification, and Subjectification

Enlisting the “Wonderfulness Interview” in School Counselling to Respond to Deficit Discourses within High School Communities

Abstract

As a school counsellor working with young people between the ages of 11 and 18, I am conscious that the technologies of measurement, assessment, and evaluation developed in educational and developmental traditions construct a gaze of normalising judgment (Foucault, 1977). This gaze invites teachers to describe young people in relation to their deviation from the “norm”, creating a language of individual deficit that seeks to police students’ identities in specific ways. I am also mindful that these descriptions are often granted a certain authority as an effect of their professionalised nature, the cultural status of teachers, and the power relations between adults and adolescents that invite adolescents into a position of passivity. As such, we can understand that young people in schools are vulnerable to internalising stories told about them by adults and authority figures, many of which pathologise them.

This article thus documents the use of narrative therapy’s “wonderfulness interview” (Marsten et al., 2016) as a way to de-stabilise pathologising stories of students’ learning and behaviour whilst drawing out rich descriptions of storylines that are meaningful to their lives and identities. At the centre of this text is a story archiving the journey of three young women as they subvert the power relations of the classroom and reclaim authorship over their identities.