Ethnicity and student identity in schools: An analysis of official and unofficial talk in multiethnic classrooms

Abstract

The present study shows that power relations in classrooms between Dutch and immigrant students radically shift when students move from academic talk to more open, free talk. Whereas in their interactions with immigrant students, Dutch students are able to represent the more powerful role in the official, academic discourse, they lose this position in the unofficial, nonacademic discourse. These shifts show that ethnic relationships are played out differently in different discursive domains. They also show that academic identities do not exist as such but are specific to certain minority-majority relationships. This study builds upon a tradition of studies that have argued that ethnic minorities construct academic identities depending on the social setting. However, this study shows the instability of these constructions while demonstrating their dependency on specific ethnic interactions and discursive modes. The study is based on the analysis of interaction patterns in multi-ethnic classrooms in the Netherlands focussing on (a)symmetries in knowledge sharing. An ethnographic approach is combined with quantitative analyses to test group differences. The results are interpreted and discussed in the light of a poststructuralist view on how ethnic minority groups construct academic identities and how these are related to minority-majority relationships.