THE CHILD AND THE CATEGORY OF CHILDHOOD IN THE STUDY ON SCHOOL’S SOCIO-CULTURAL SPACE. CHILDREN’S WORLDS - MULTICULTURAL CONTEXTS - A REFLECTION

The objective of the article is to present the social space of the school, including but not limited to the context of multiculturalism, on the basis of conducted qualitative and quantitative research. The methods employed in the study were a questionnaire and child narrations (interviews and the projection method). They pertained to various social dimensions of the school from the perspective of the majority group and selected national-ethnic minorities. The research included three different school environments and students aged 12-13 from three distinct cultural backgrounds (Chechen, Vietnamese and Roma children).

The theoretical context explored in the study is represented by critical theories, constructivism, and the theory of symbolic interactionism versus the structural-functional approach to the school.

The purpose of the research was to conduct a diagnosis of the school’s social space from the point of view of a child, its conditions and factors (interactions, attitudes, needs and values), with reference to the multiculturalism of the school environment. The study employed a triangulation of the theory, data and methods.

The specific research objectives refer to the following three areas:
1. The recognition and description of school’s reception as an environment from the perspective of a child in three different schools with the presence of culturally “different” peers;
2. The comparative analysis of three different school environments, pointing out any similarities and differences determined by the presence of representatives of other cultures (a quantitative aspect);
3. The analysis of each of the three school environments including their uniqueness and specificity in the light of children’s narrations (a qualitative aspect).

Quantitative data was used to show the tendencies, values and expectations of the study children, whereas the narrations obtained were employed in qualitative analyses. These were further categorised by separating out socialization dimensions in the world of school reality. They include: a reconstruction of one’s own biographic experiences, the binding discourse vs cultural differences, awareness of cultural differences, awareness of one’s own identity, culture transmission and reproduction, adaptation and internalisation of cultural codes, forms of symbolic “violence”. The conceptual and semantic categories allow one to draw conclusions regarding the differences observed in the explored three school environments.

These are as follows:
1. School environment’s reception and multiculturalism depends on the social climate of the school and on the level of socio-cultural integration;
2. The differences in the evaluation of the multicultural school environment are determined by the primary habitus of culturally “different” peers;
3. Children’s interpersonal relations and children’s cultures need to be examined within a research perspective determined by their own specificity and the context of the school environment.

Research impression amounts to taking the view that children’s worlds constitute the foundation for the understanding of the dynamics of social processes occurring in the school, in particular if these worlds are authorised by various national-ethnic cultures. The child and its childhood in the school’s space form a socio-cultural category. It features differences in the socio-cultural capital, including language competencies, subjectivity and subjectivism.