Reflexivity on stories of conflict among Latin American teenage school girls in a multicultural school in Madrid

Abstract

This paper looks at forms of reflexivity and the moral positioning of social actors, displayed in conversational narratives about school conflict, co-produced by Latin American girls during sociolinguistic interviews with a female researcher of Latin American origin, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. Understanding narratives as communicative practices makes them suitable discursive spaces for revealing the moral positioning and moral orders constructed in discourse. These discursive positionings need to be considered in the light of the ethnographic conditions under which such narratives emerge (Patino-Santos, 2016). Herein, I analyse narratives recounting conflicts from two different groups – female secondary school students and their teachers – based on the notion that it is in recounting and evaluating moments of conflict that social actors call upon their systems of beliefs and values. The failure of the girls’ secondary school and all the negative repercussions of such failure are central to problematising the social circumstances in which their narratives are produced.

Keywords

• school failure
• Latin American students
• school conflict
• narrative analysis