Normality and difference in education: relational encounters at school boundaries

ABSTRACT

Substantialist ethnographic approaches have been questioned for situating studies into stable groups and places, thereby creating rigid categories of diversity. In this study, we approached school normality through a relational ethnography, where the focus is on fields rather than places, and boundaries rather than bounded groups. Extended fieldwork was done at two schools in Santiago de Chile, where we embarked on a flexible journey to follow daily school life. We analysed situational encounters between the ethnographer and school actors at the school boundary as relational fields. Findings show that the institutional schools’ structures and norms seen at the boundary define the terrain where the relation between schools and differences is revealed. In this context, normality takes the form of resistance, nostalgia, and risk, defining how differences within the student body are constructed.

KEYWORDS:

• School
• boundaries
• relational ethnographies
• normality
• difference

Acknowledgments

We appreciated the contributions addressed to undertake the study in which this manuscript is based. First, as required, we would like to state the participation and respective efforts from each researcher on the development of this project. First author, César Augusto Ferrari Martinez, made part of this investigation as a doctoral student, contributing on the fieldwork codification. Second author, Olga Espinoza Aros, was co-researcher in the project and performed critical discourse analysis on the curricular documents. Third author, Claudia Matus, was the principal researcher of the project and responsible for the funding acquisition and for the conceptualisation of the methodological and theoretical framework.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 For more information on this project, please visit http://www.nde.cl.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Proyecto Anillos en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades: Normalidad, Diferencia y Educación [National Competition of Multidisciplinary Research Projects in Social Sciences and Humanities: Normality, Difference, and Education] under the PIA-CONICYT SOC1103, Proyecto Anillos PIA-CONICYT 180023, Proyecto ANID PIA CIE 160007. This work was also supported by Project PIA ANID CIE 160009 under a postdoctoral fellowship.