The Management of Difference in Everyday School Practice

Author(s):

Martha Mottelson(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

07 SES 06 B, Intercultural Education in School Practice

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

15:30-17:00

Room:

3001. [Main]

Chair:

Ghazala Bhatti

Contribution

The paper will present and discuss our field study of everyday life in a Danish fifth grade classroom. Our aim has been to observe, describe and analyze those everyday practices in the classroom that ultimately result in offering students different positions, identities and opportunities for participation.

Our goal is to create knowledge about the way difference is constructed and managed in schools. How is the concept of ‘difference’ conceived of, produced and reproduced through everyday practices and how is the management of difference embedded in school culture. Further our goal is to create knowledge about the consequences that occur for different students as a result of specific ways of managing differences by teachers.

Background

In 1993 the Danish parliament passed an Education Act that prohibits schools from organizing classes based on student’s achievements. Thus, since 1993 the Danish school class has become a permanent organizational group to which the same children belong throughout the ten years of compulsory schooling. The 1993-Act represented a final step in implementing a non-divided public school. And along with a substantial decrease in the number of examinations and grades given to pupils, the 1993-Act has been seen as a milestone in the democratization of schooling in Denmark.

Numerous evaluations have documented that classroom practices have undergone minimal change regarding accommodation to diversity among learners since the passing of the law (EVA 2004, 2008, 2011). Furthermore it has been documented that Danish schools to a lesser degree than our neighboring countries succeed in creating educational success and opportunity for students from nonacademic families as well as for students from ethnic minority families (PISA 2012, PISA etnisk 2012).

So, on the one hand we see politically motivated expectations towards schools to create better results among an increasingly diverse group of students. On the other hand we see a general focus among teachers towards maintaining a sense of community through common tasks, assignments and evaluation standards (Jørgensen & Mottelson 2014). Thus, our research questions point towards the balance between common and individual expectations and needs in the context of the school class.

Our goal is to scrutinize school culture in order to better understand how everyday practices in classrooms organize participation in ways that may counteract the compliance to diverse needs of different students. Subsequently, our main question of research is:

What is it in school culture that lays out a framework for human interaction where teachers orient their focus towards domains that seemingly do not provide the grounds for or opportunities to develop educational practices that can accommodate to student’s individual needs?

Our overall theoretic stance perceives of the school as a societal institution that as such provides a specific context that frames participants’ perceptions and practices and preconstructs participants’ scope of invention of practice in certain ways. It is our belief that a more clear understanding of the demands and constraints regarding human behavior in this specific setting could prove to be a first step towards addressing counterproductive elements of school culture and practice with regard to accommodating diversity among learners and counteracting marginalization.

Our project has the specific context of the Danish public school in focus, but our findings will be of broader interest as they have bearing upon a more general perspective of inclusive education. Over the past years the question of differentiated instruction and the school’s role in creating more equal educational opportunity has been a general topic of interest in Denmark and internationally. This interest has intensified as demands regarding developing inclusive education have become commonplace. Our project aims towards contributing to the knowledge base needed for increasing equity in education.

Method

Our analytical approach takes its starting point in a sociological analysis of the school as a societal institution that commends the reproduction of prevailing divisions of power and resources and secures the cultural reproduction of ideas and practices well designed to maintain status quo in society (Bourdieu& Passeron 1970). We combine this basic analysis with anthropological, ethnomethodological and interactional approaches to understanding the way in which differences are produced, reproduced and managed in the specific context of the school classroom, and how the classroom as a specific setting lays out structural and cultural demands and constraints that provide the fundamental framework in which the teacher’s efforts to accommodate instruction to individual students’ different educational needs must find its form. Thus, we further draw upon theories regarding the shaping of perception, identity and human practices in cultural settings (Ehn & Löfgren 2006, Hastrup 1992). And as our study is located in the highly specific institutional and organizational setting of the school class, we acknowledge that interactional practices are formed through a specific regulative tradition and discourse of school (Anderson 2000, Mehan 1979, Jackson 1968). This framing of participants perception, understanding and participatory practices as studied through observation, is furthered in our project through analyzing local discourse as a representation of the social construction of schooling (Fairclough 2003, Laclau & Mouffe 1985). Our initial approach to data production has been ethnographic. We have taken part in the everyday life of students and teachers in a Danish fifth grade classroom. Thus our main bulk of data consists of field notes, sketches of classroom lay out photographs etc. Further we have performed more structured classroom observations (Klette 1998) and conducted semi structured interviews with teachers as well as with students (Kvale 1994, Spradley 1989). Our analytic approach has taken its starting point in sorting and combining observed practices in order to create images of the ordering principles active in structuring participants’ perceptions and practices. Which rules and regulations are active, which structuring principles apply in the regulation of bodies in the school classroom etc. Thus, in our analytic endeavor, we draw upon traditions for understanding culture (Ehn & Löfgren 2006, Hastrup 1992), traditions for analyzing the specific social organizational principles of school class (Mehan 1979, Jackson 1968) as well as theories regarding the social production of deviance (Goffman 1963b, Becker 1963).

Expected Outcomes

As outcome we expect to point out and highlight specific domains where attention must be placed if an attempt is going to be made to develop classroom practices that better take in to account the specific needs among a diverse group of students. In order to achieve this goal, we are currently working to elaborate and document the initial findings in our project. Our initial analysis has given outline to a number of specific domains that are the subject of focus for teachers during instruction. The teachers orient their attention towards domains of classroom management as well as common learning goals and task assignments during class. Further, teachers apply a strongly one dimensional assessment scale in their evaluation of students. These specific domains and discourses don’t necessarily provide support for the endeavor to organize and orient instruction towards different students’ different needs. On the contrary they can be seen as counterproductive for developing suitable differentiated instructional practices. Thus our next step will be to look towards opportunities for developing practices of differentiated instruction in collaboration with practitioners. Our research is placed in the context of a university college where initial and in-service training of teachers takes place. Our obligation is to produce knowledge of relevance to professionals but the ways in which professionals can make use of research based knowledge is in no way clear cut. Thus, a second phase of our project is under construction with the goal of establishing a collaborative approach towards the dissemination of research knowledge to the domain of professional practice.

References

Anderson, Sally (2000) Chronic Proximity – a “natural” school practice, Nordnytt nr. 78 Anderson, Sally (2000) I en klasse for sig. København, Munksgaard Bauman, Zygmunt (2001) Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Polity Press Becker, Howard S. (1963/1991) Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. The free Press Broady, Donald (1979) Progressivismens rötter, I: Unge Pædagoger A 21/22 1979 Bourdieu, Pierre & Passeron, Jean-Claude (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society an Culture Sage Publications Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) Distinction. A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge Bourdieu et al. (1991) The Craft of Sociology. Epistemological Preliminaries. New York, de Gruyter Durkheim, Emile (1895/2000) Den sociologiske metodes regler. København, Hans Reitzels Forlag EVA: Danmarks Evalueringsinstitut (2004) Undervisningsdifferentiering i folkeskolen EVA: Danmarks Evalueringsinstitut (2008) Arbejdet med elevplaner EVA: Danmarks Evalueringsinstitut (2011) Undervisningsdifferentiering som bærende pædagogisk princip Ehn, Billy (2004) Skal vi lege tiger? Århus, Klim Forlag Ehn, Billy og Löfgren Orvar (2006) Kulturanalyser. Århus, Klim Forlag Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analyzing Discource. Textual analysis for social research. Routledge Goffman, Erving (1963a) Behaviour in Public Places. Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York, The Free Press Goffman, Erving (1963b) Stigma. Notes on the management of spoiled Identity. Simon & Schuster Hastrup, Kirsten (1992) Det antropologiske project. Om forbløffelse. København, Gyldendal Hultqvist, Kenneth and Dahlberg, Gunilla (2001) Governing the Child in the New Millennium. RoutledgePalmer Jackson, Phillip (1969) Life in Classrooms. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston Jørgensen og Mottelson (2014) Klasseledelse, inklusion og differentiering. Ålborg, Dafolo Kvale, Steinar (1994) InterView. En instroduktion til det kvalitative forskningsinterview. København, Hans Reitzels Forlag Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London verso McDermott, Ray and Varenne, Hervé (1999) Successful Failure. The School America Builds. Westview Press Mehan, Hugh (1979) Learning Lessons. Social Organization in the Classroom. Harvard University Press Pedersen, Anne-Julie Boesen (2008) Forskelligheder og fællesskab 2008, Børnerådet PISA 2012: Egelund, Niels (red.)(2013) PISA 2012 – Danske unge i international sammenligning. KORA PISA etnisk 2012: Christensen et. Al. (2012) PISA 2012 med fokus på unge med indvandrerbaggrund. KORA Rose, Nicolas (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge University Press Silverman, David (2001) Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analyzing Talk, Text and Interaction. Sage Publications Spradley, James P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc. Wenger, Etienne (1998) Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge University Press

Author Information

Martha Mottelson (presenting / submitting)

University College Capital, Denmark

Research department

Copenhagen N

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