Discourse Structures and Dis-Integration in Education: Promotion of Critical Discourse Competencies - PRODIC

Coordinating Institution: Université du Luxembourg
Contracting Partner(s): Goldsmiths College (University of London) , Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos (Mexico)
From: 15/01/2010
To: 14/01/2012
Budget: 50,000.00€
Contact(s): Mick Carola

Summary

Migration processes challenge homogenising educational systems everywhere in Europe: Despite its official trilingualism, schooling in Luxembourg does not succeed in integrating the sociocultural diversity of children’s life-world reality, and thus creates mechanisms of exclusion. The project ProDIC intervenes in a multilingual and multicultural classroom reality by creating a kind of third space children are invited and empowered to design autonomously, with the teachers’ and researchers’ support. They are given the possibility and necessary resources to design a school project that links their individual home and school trajetories and experiences, and that focusses the UNESCO guidelines of ‘integration, tolerance, democracy and sustainable development’.

The are asked to documnt the project development and carrying out of the activites in several media formats, including one popular monography. The accompanying research activity includes children as researchers and monitors changes of the modalities of interaction inside classroom as well as children’s developing ‘critical discourse competencies’: their capacity to reflect on and use available discursive resources, be them institutionally legitimized or not, in order to transform the classroom reality they are jointly re-/co-/constructing.

The project is meant to evaluate possibilities of promoting autonomous agency regarding the home-school gap through heteronomous interventions in classroom reality. The data collection process chooses focus children of this classroom according to their engagement in ‘regular’ school activities. It accompanies them throughout the whole project period with qualitative interviews on their own activity in the project and their collected data, as well as with video recorded participant observation. The project partners work on these observations and analyses in workshops, and publish the results in at least two scientific articles, one scientific monography and one international conference.