WP211 The burden of smartness: Teacher’s pet and classmates’ teasing in a Danish classroom

Schools are socio-historically situated battlefields about what it means to be a ‘smart student’, and about which students come to be viewed as smart. Struggles around smartness are a problem for educational scholars and teachers because they can foster social inequity in classrooms. 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, and using the theoretical frameworks of social identification and participation, 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.