Tools for Understanding Diversity in School and Community Settings
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Abstract
This paper presents tools for analyzing the social phenomenon that occurs when people from different geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds come together. Taking this as the central axis of our work, we pose the following question: what analytical tools do two disciplines within the social sciences, ethnography and sociolinguistics, provide for understanding this phenomenon in educational settings?
Through this question, we develop a critical perspective on what we often, perhaps naively, call diversity and multiculturalism when the webs of power commonly established in micro-interactions among different people are not taken into account.
We present our ideas through the analysis of data collected between 1996 and 1998 in different geographical spaces: the United States of America, specifically the state of California, and the Argentine Republic, specifically the Federal Capital, as well as in two different educational settings: an Argentine school and work with families in a community in the state of California.
We conclude by taking a position on how to understand multicultural situations and by proposing that it is possible to translate this reality into conceptual maps and lines of action useful to those for whom diversity is an everyday fact of professional practice, such as teachers, health educators, health workers, and community workers.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The author/s grant exclusive license without temporary limit for the manuscript to be published in Cuadernos-FHyCS edited by Humanides the Faculty of Social Science, National University of Jujuy.
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