Although students’ performance is at the centre of attention in current discourse on education, there is surprisingly little research on a student’s individual perception of ongoing processes within the classroom.

For years, students gather experience and expertise on what it is like to be a student, how to handle challenging instructional situations, and on what really matters in terms of success and failure at school. Research on marginalization and discrimination usually focuses on processes on the system level and reveals “objective” factors in marginalization (e.g. Gomolla 2007, Kronig 2003 etc), whereas this project aims to explore  subjective perceptions of students.

Students act within an interactive relationship comprising their teachers, their peers and various contents within the classroom (Klette 2008) and so experience different complex learning situations. According to didactical theories, students create different meanings of what transpires in the classroom, depending on their own life-worlds, and personal and social backgrounds. Regarding the concept of matter and meaning (Hopmann 2007, Klafki 1963), one could say that the different meanings of a taught content allow relating the content-matter to the life-world of each student. Hence, the teacher’s freedom to allow different combinations of matter and meaning is an important principle for meeting the diverse needs of a classroom. However, current concepts of competency standards challenge this principle by trying to link a certain matter to a certain meaning, which can lead to a narrow pathway for succeeding in school and might also lead to the systematic marginalization of students who in certain aspects deviate from an expected norm. The teachers’ “room to move” for meeting the diverse needs of these students becomes smaller. My research investigates how students perceive instructional situations and what they perceive as marginalizing. Their perceptions are analyzed by the didactical theories mentioned.

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