Ethnic Minority Students in – or out of? – Education: Processes of Marginalization in and across School and Other Contexts

Abstract

In what ways is students’ participation in school related to their participation and becoming subjects across the school context and other contexts in which they participate? This is the question analyzed in this paper, based on observations of, and narratives and perspectives provided by, three 15-year-old ethnic minority boys and their teachers at a school in Denmark. Drawing upon Davies’ concept of teaching-as-usual, I explore exclusions and marginalization inside school before exploring how these can be seen as connected to, and seemingly having an impact on, the lives the students lead outside school, with an understanding of this connection rooted in Holzkamp’s (2013) concept of conduct of everyday life. In this regard, I make use of concepts of recognition (Honneth, 1995 (1992)) and viable life (Butler, 2004) in order to point to how a lack of such within the school tends to drive the students away from the school context, while simultaneously driving them towards other contexts outside school, with gang related street communities (Mørck, et al., 2013) being a particularly potential one.