This paper reports results of a case study in the framework of the government funded research project NOESIS launched in 2010 to evaluate a highly political Austrian school reform program, the “New Middle School” (NMS). The overall goal of the school reform project is to limit marginalizing processes and to improve transitions and trajectories within an inclusive school setting. The evaluative research project investigates under which conditions the new measures are perceived as successful. Within the framework of the study, the authors focus on students’ and teachers’ experiences of classroom instruction. 

The paper starts from the premise that expenditures and added educational resources do not necessarily and significantly bring about student achievements, and that the effect of resources depends not only on access to resources, but more importantly on how resources are used or activated in instructional processes (Cohen, et al., 2003). Therefore, our research is not based on student achievement tests but on the lived experience descriptions of ongoing educational activities of those involved. We are specifically interested in finding out which resources are experienced as helpful in reducing marginalization, especially in culturally diverse classrooms, characterized by a heterogeneous set up in terms of social and economic background, ethnicity and language. We take special interest in marginalization processes involving learners known to be more susceptible to marginalization such as those from low income, lower level of education, and/or migrant families whose first language is not German (the language of instruction in Austria). From a didactical point of view, learning has to do with the meaning that emerges while dealing with a content matter. Accordingly teaching has to do with enacting content in a classroom while opening up educative substance, significance and meaning of the content for different learners (Hopmann 2007, Klafki 1963). Marginalizing processes can be thus described as instructional processes that instead of opening up substance and significance close or narrow down learners’ opportunities to develop meanings of a content. Marginalization sets in when learners mentally drop out as they fail to relate the taught content matters to their personal life-worlds. This didactical theory serves as a basis for analyzing teachers’ and students’ lived experience descriptions of classroom instruction. A great deal of teachers’ and students’ actions in instructional settings are based on “in-order-to motives” which are in turn based on taken for granted experiences and beliefs of the actors. The teacher’s taken for granted experiences, beliefs, and opinions might be inconsistent and incompatible with those of the students and vice versa (Schuetz, 1951). The description and analysis of these incongruences could shed new light on “blind spots” in instructional processes that have a marginalizing impact. Therefore our research questions focus on the lived experiences of teachers and students of the one and the same instructional measures. How and under which conditions do teachers and students experience the specific reform measures as helpful in meeting the diverse needs of learners in heterogeneous classrooms? How and under which conditions are the measures experienced as useful in making contents meaningful to learners?

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