Friendship and Diversity by Carol Vincent Sarah Neal & Humera Iqbal

Author:Carol Vincent, Sarah Neal & Humera Iqbal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Conclusion

Investigating the friendships of children in highly diverse primary school settings allows us to explore how children from varied social, religious, and ethnic backgrounds negotiate the complexities of their particular micro-environments. The children viewed diversity as an ordinary part of their everyday lives; but at the same time, as something that is the subject of a celebratory phenomenon by their schools. These two positionings—the ordinary and the celebratory—make up a social terrain that they are required to negotiate and manage. We have suggested that the children drew on a multidimensional awareness of difference to make sense of their worlds and their friendship relations. Our work chimes with Connolly’s argument that young children are very much engaged in identification processes that include conceptions of ethnicity and class. However, unlike the more disadvantaged and/or conflict environments of Connolly’s and Ramiah et al.’s work, the diverse localities in this project meant that most of the children were surrounded by intense levels of social, ethnic and religious differences and were themselves constituents of these complex populations with their own complex identities. As a father at Junction School commented, ‘I can definitely remember as a child, thinking, “oh this is strange, not everybody is like me”, whereas I am pretty sure my children don’t even enter that thought…that is a massive, massive part of education’ (Patrick, White British middle-class, Junction School). Although we argue that the data illustrates that the children do recognise difference, we agree with Patrick that they are not surprised by it, and that they appeared to be able to participate across difference in proto-skilled ways, to generally mix competently and without major tensions or frequent recourse to racialisation and othering . In this way, our findings speak to those of Weller and Bruegel (2009) in relation to primary school children’s capacities to manage and interact with social and ethnic difference in their school worlds. We would stress that these capacities were partial and uneven. A coexistence of interactions and separations (Harris 2014) prevailed, such that instances of social and ethnic interactions, of friendship formations across difference were also coupled with indifference towards ‘the other’ , as well as relationships of affinity towards those socially and ethnically similar to themselves. In relation to the latter, the aforementioned ‘White middle-class girl’ group at Leewood, and Bethany’s ‘blonde’ friendship network offer examples. However, the descriptions of the children’s networks across all three classrooms illustrate the way in which they frequently forge relationships across ethnic and/or social class difference. Thus, we argue that that in the field of diverse urban schooling, the children’s habitus is exposed to and shaped by experiences of both social similarity and difference through their diverse friendship networks. As we discuss further in Chaps. 5 and 6, these heterophilous bonds may not travel far outside the school walls or far along the journey to adolescence, but we argue that for these children, these relationships signal emergent dispositions of openness and engagement—the indicators of a convivial disposition.

We have also argued that materialities

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.