Construcción discursiva del alumno inmigrante extranjero en Andalucía: el otro en nuestras escuelas

Authors

Antonia Olmos AlcarazSalto de línea Universidad de Granada. Laboratorio de Estudios Interculturales. Departamento de Antropología Social. Granada, España.

Abstract

Discursive construction of the concept of the foreign immigrant student in Andalusia: the other in our schoolsSalto de línea Salto de línea This paper analyses the difference-building process as applied to the foreign immigrant student in the context of Andalusian schools. This process consists in a new way of presenting cultural, social and political distances in which there is an apparent absence of hierarchies but in fact there are concealed exclusion practices (García Castaño, Granados and Pulido, 1999). The paper begins with the power of social, political, oral and written discourse for evoking social representations and building social and cultural reality. An argument is presented for the idea that there is a process underway of “building otherness” in a negative sense that targets foreign immigrant students and leads to the reproduction of social inequality. An important role in this process is played by the representations of the migratory phenomenon and intercultural education that exist in political discourse, in foreign immigrant integration policies and in the schools where there are foreign immigrant students. The authors feel that the negative image politicians hold of the migratory phenomenon –focusing on the negative aspects instead of the contributions of diversity to schools– results in negative management of migration, something that is routinely expressed at school. It is equally important to ascertain how, at the same levels of reality, we see ourselves as a host community and how «our school», the Western education system, is thought of and depicted. The study was conducted on the basis of ethnographic field work and critical discourse analysis, and the methodology employed was a combination of these two components, which are eminently suitable for analyzing the lines of discursive reasoning that are the vehicle for the difference-building process.

Keywords

Discourse analysis, otherness, social construction of reality, foreign immigrant students, intercultural education.