Discipline diversity and agency : pedagogic practice and dispositions to learning

![CDATA[What, then, makes discipline good? .. .is not discipline-all discipline-essentially a restraint, a limitation imposed on man's behaviour? If life is good, how can it be good to bridle it, to constrain it, to impose limits that it cannot overcome? (Durkheim, 2002, pp. 32 & 35.) These questions posed by Durkheim in his course on moral education at the Sorbonne in 1902-3 get to the crux of the dilemma in understanding the nature and role of discipline, namely its ability to both constrain and enable.1 Foucault, likewise, explores this apparent contradiction most notably in Discipline and Punish. Unlike Durkheim, however, who places emphasis on the enabling potential of discipline in the formation of individual moral capacities, Foucault views the utility that discipline can provide as largely a mechanism of subjection. While his later work around the care of the self gives greater acknowledgment to its capacitating effects (Foucault, 1990), most application of his work appears to focus on the negative aspects of disciplinary power. This seems especially the case within education where theory and practice tend to neglect the agentic potential of discipline and the ways in which an embodied self-discipline provides the condition of possibility upon which successful academic engagement depends. Drawing on recent research into the differential achievement and dispositions to learning of Chinese-, Pasifika-and Anglo-background primary school students in Sydney, Australia, this chapter examines the contradictory nature of discipline. It considers how various home and school practices in which these students engage constitute different modalities of discipline, an enabling and disabling discipline of control and a discipline that promotes either engagement or disengagement in learning. With some attention to ethnographic detail the chapter explores how these disciplines are embodied by students engendering different capacities that, while linked to students' ethnicity through a process of cultural pathologising, are rather a function of the forms of governance their home and school pedagogies generate with certain forms of discipline proving more conducive to educational labour than others.]]