What counts as being smart around here? The performance of smartness and masculinity in vocational upper secondary education

Abstract

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the transport program, a vocational education with strong masculine tradition, in a Swedish upper secondary school. It looks at the ways that notions of intelligence and smartness are culturally produced and used in the daily practises of students and teachers. In the article, I discuss how such notions inform, but also limit, students’ learning and their constructions of identity in school, with possible consequences for their futures, and for the reproduction of social and gender-based inequalities in the wider society. My aim is to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about cognitive ability and school results, and to point to the capacity of the concept of smartness as such to contribute to producing unequal outcomes in a school system, which allegedly offers all students, regardless of social background and gender, equal chances to succeed.