Buenas prácticas, ¿desde el punto de vista de quién? Una contribución a la controversia sobre las aulas de enlace

Authors

Margarita del Olmo PintadoSalto de línea Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales. Madrid, España.

DOI

10.4438/1988-592X-RE-2012-358-185

Abstract

Good Practices from Whose Point of View? Contributing to the Linking Classrooms Controversy

This study aims at analyzing the Linking Classrooms programme as a means for addressing diversity. Linking Classrooms has been run by the Community of Madrid Board of Education since the 2002-03 school year. Its three main goals are: a) to address the needs of students from foreign education systems who have serious language gaps but must enter the Community of Madrid school system; b) to shorten the time it takes for these students to become fully integrated into the Spanish school system and reach an age-appropriate level; and lastly c) to contribute to students’ personal and cultural identity development, making them part of society at large. The paper focuses on the main pros and cons as argued in the scientific literature, opinions from the people most deeply involved in the programme and the conclusions of the Board of Education’s own official evaluation. In this controversy, I introduce my own ethnographic fieldwork, which was done in a Linking Classroom over the course of three school years (2005-08), within the framework of a broader research project on integration in schools. In the end, as a way of concluding the study, I offer what the analysis reveals as advantages and disadvantages of the Linking Classrooms programme as a means of addressing diversity. A contribution is made to the general discussion about innovation in education, stressing the relevance of placing diversity at the base of education. Linking Classrooms, as a programme to address diversity, is an innovative programme not because of the programme itself, but because the programme’s limitations have forced teachers to innovate constantly, building the everyday teaching/learning process on the foundations of their classrooms’ diversity. In this sense, I think the programme could be considered a model of good practices that can inspire the kinds of urgent, sustained changes schools are in need of nowadays.

Keywords

Intercultural education, diversity and education, Linking Classrooms, good practices, school ethnography,