Chapter 17: Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Messenger: Discourses, Dialectics and Deficits

A recurrent and important issue in the sociology of education is the fact that some measures that have been developed to improve the educational achievement of indigenous, ethnic minority and low-SES students do so at the expense of those cultures. In effect, these approaches hold the home setting of these students responsible for their failure: they are regarded as being in deficit. Before addressing deficit approaches to education, I start with a brief examination of a current multiethnic project aimed at improving the educational achievement of at-risk students. Next, I examine the dynamics of the deficit hypothesis, and re-visit an earlier piece of research in relation to which, despite an ideological abhorrence of it, I was accused of adopting a deficit approach. I analyse these events using three complementary perspectives: personal narrative, reflective practice and Foucault’s genealogical analysis.