Paper short abstract:

I present the results of a research project about school experiences of working-class and minority youths in Barcelona that aimed at revealing their negotiations regarding the representations and practices of the teaching staff in relation to gender, social class and ethnicity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the results of a research project about school experiencies conducted among Catalan youths from a working class background and minority status in Barcelona, in a complex multilingual situation. The aim of the project was to reveal and reconstruct the representations and practices of the teaching staff in relation to gender, social class and ethnicity through a variety of diciplinary methods and academic devices which limit and control the expressions of students as diverse youth.

The results show how the young people studied conform part of their social, gender and ethnic identity through their experiences in school, through their daily dealings with the school's communications and practices as well as through their interactions within their peer groups in a prestige scale, which was created by the institution itself. Traditional values and patterns of Catalan and Spanish society are still dominant: heterosexuality as the only and exclusive possibility of sexual identity, higher prestige of masculinity, invisibility of femininity in general and of women in particular, almost complete ignorance or attention to the cultural expressions of young people and of different ethnic and linguistic origins.

As a result of these experiences, for young people belonging to the mainstream culture the path to academic success is marked by invisibility of gender and class. In the case of young people of immigrant and minority status their academic experience is dominated by social isolation from their peers and an academic labelling asociated with challenge, provisionality or exception. However, the experiences and strategies of female students are significantly specific, as the paper will show.