The Ethnography of Pedagogical Systems of Difference - Methodological problems of ethnographic research on the socially selective production of academic success in the classroom

Abstract

For a long time now, the more or less undisputed fact that education can mark a crucial moment - both as cause and as consequence - in the societal reproduction of social inequality has led to a significant intensification and methodological differentiation of research in this field. But while some reveal diverse statistical correlations between socio-economic background and school achievement and others describe the fit of background culture and learning culture from a socio-scientific perspective, there is a remarkable lack of educational-scientific studies examining the question of how classroom practices produce which hierarchical differences among students in the form of achievement-related differences. Based on the assumption that academic achievement is not simply given and merely adequately recorded, but rather has to be created anew in each case, the authors develop a practice-theoretically oriented, methodological proposal for the investigation of pedagogical systems of difference as systems of achievement. Drawing on ethnographic studies on heterogeneity and difference, the thesis of a socially selective production of school achievement as the "re-staging" of social differences in academic achievement is sketched and its theoretical plausibility is discussed.