The School Makes a Difference. Ethnicity and Institutional Practice

Abstract

The study, which is a dissertation study, examines how ethnicity is turned into a central category for the social organisation of the school and used to emphasise differences, whereby students are categorised as Swedes and immigrants. Interest is also levelled at how ethnicity constructions are bound up with social complexity and interact with other relations, especially gender and class.
The study is based on ethnographical field studies in a comprehensive secondary school, primarily consisting of participant observations of classroom situations, staff meetings and informal discussions where teachers talk about their work and students.
The study shows that the differences that are generated and sustained through the school personnels actions, argumentation and interactions with the students are complex, varied and closely bound up with the school context. This means that individual students are not only and alternately identified as immigrants or Swedes, but are dependent on contexts also understood in a variety of ways. For example, students who are successful in their schoolwork are, to a lesser extent, identified as immigrants.
One important observation is that the school personnels everyday work and contact with the students are ambitious when it comes to justice and tolerance, but that these intentions are seldom combined with insights into the power aspects associated with social relations. Daily practices are instead overshadowed by the need to accomplish certain teaching elements, where attention is focused on the classroom situation in preference to highlighting or discussing students individual experiences and living conditions. The school personnels intentions and possibilities of working towards equality and against discrimination are thus transformed so that the school instead produces and sustains relations of inequality.

Keywords

Education, Ethnicity, Gender, Institutions, Difference

Publications

Gruber, Sabine (2007). Skolan gör skillnad. Etnicitet och institutionell praktik. Linköping: Linköpings universitet

Gruber, Sabine (2008). När skolan gör skillnad. Skola, etnicitet och institutionell praktik. Stockholm: Liber