Narrating the conflict: Students of immigrant background in a school center in Madrid

Abstract

How do students of immigrant backgrounds narrate conflictive situations they have experienced within a multicultural secondary school in the Community of Madrid? How do narrators understand and explain their resistance/confrontational behaviour? What does the analysis of these narrations reveal about the situation of school failure in this educational centre? The approach to such questions will be made through the study of narratives gathered in interviews with “peñas” (“circles”): groups of peers organised to challenge the order of the school (Gibson, et. al, 2004). This study is part of a research carried out in multicultural classrooms in Madrid, following an ethnographic, sociolinguistics and discursive approach from a critical perspective (Martin Rojo, in press.). From this perspective, narratives, as an interactional genre, are collaborative situated discursive practices that “both reflect social beliefs and relationships and contribute to negotiating and modifying them” (Fairclough, De Fina, 2003a: 369). These characteristics allow us to observe the ways narratives follow and generate social rules, ways of understanding and elaborating our personal experience, social relationships and the roles participants play (as much within the world narrated as in that of the reality from which the events are narrated).