Since the 1990s Greece has become one the most popular immigrant receiving country of Europe and nowadays appears to have the highest per capita rate of immigrants in European Union. This migratory wave has spawned an increasingly large number of school aged children with emigrational background, representing the latter 10% of total student population. While the educational landscape is being transformed and its ethnocultural and religious homogeneity is becoming past, great challenges are being raised concerning social inequality and exclusion. Focusing on the educational field and its intersection with the factors of immigration and ethnicity, my paper, based on the research project I am currently conducting, examines the interplay of social class, migrational history and ethnicity.. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with two groups of immigrant Albanian and native Greek students attending the second grade (average age of 17) of one Vocational and one Comprehensive Greek Lyceum, I am exploring the educational decision making process and specifically how ethnicity and minority status compounds the effects of social class and institutional arrangements. Starting from the point that social inequality in the educational context can be evidenced not only in the form of varied educational performance but also in the form of different patterns of decision making, my emphasis lies on students themselves as I am attempting to examine their role as active agents (Morrow, 1999) who interpret, interact, form supportive relations and make choices among the available ones. Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory and specifically the notions of field, capital and habitus are being used not just as conceptual tools but as a way of thinking and analyzing the school context and the practices and action that is taken place in it. In the field called ‘school’ practices and social action are considered as the product of the interaction between capital and habitus. The latter is defined as “system of durable, transposable dispositions”(p.72), as a subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class” (Bourdieu, 1977, p.86). Although habitus is acquired in the family, as a result of early socialization, then it is reformed by the force of school and constantly is being restructured by new experiences. When Bourdieu analyzes educational choices he argues for the important role of both objective probabilities of academic success and subjective expectations. Habitus is formed by the opportunities and the limitations inherent to objective conditions and functions as the generative, organizing and unifying principle of practices. One of the issues raised by my ongoing study is the role that social class membership and ethnic group membership plays towards the formation and possibly the reformation of habitus in the light of immigration. My paper attempts to examine whether the decision making process is differentiated across the lines of social class, ethnicity and nativity status; the role of interaction of students with educators and finally the role of individual and institutional habitus. The influence that a distinct institutional field and learning site exerts on students’ systems of perceptions and worldviews, seems to be essential according to students’ accounts as it is contributing not only to “the choice of the necessary” (Bouedieu, 1986, p.81) but also to the construction of their identity.

I am using interviews as the main tool for gaining the material required. Complementarily and as a way to gain additional insight and to make my self familiar with the field and the students with me, I am observing school formal and informal activities and making group discussions with students and informal conversations with educators. Students are being interviewed (the interviews will be audiotaped and transcribed) throughout this academic year for approximately an hour per time, in an attempt to eliminate the sense of boredom and discomfort.

Low expectations and negative dispositions towards schooling seems to lead students, mainly with minority and socially disadvantaged background, to self-elimination by choosing a type of school of lower academic standing, and self-exclusion by dropping out and entering the labor market.