The present investigation develops an ethnography of the school that inquires into the aims, limitations and emergence of student participation mechanisms within the School Government of San Benito de Tibatí School, located in Bogotá, Colombia. In this work the School Government (GOBES) is understood as a government technology in which there are multiple relations of opposition and hierarchy and not only as a state regulation of the Ministry of National Education, in order to identify the possible student agency within this complex network of power relations that represent the school. The research is the result of a fieldwork of about one year (2015 - 2016), in which an interpretation was made of the perspectives of students, students and teachers on the meanings and implications of student participation and their respective tensions and oppositions within their own educational institution, highlighting methodological and theoretical aspects of what it means to do an ethnographic exercise in school