'We don't do anything': analysing legitimate knowledge construction in multilingual schools

Abstract

This paper focuses on the production of legitimate knowledge in the multicultural and multilingual classrooms of two different programs designed to “cater for diversity” at secondary schools in the Madrid region. Following a critical sociolinguistic approach, we discuss the links between local discursive practices, the institutional context and the wider social and ideological order. Our analysis of data taken from two schools, reveals the ways in which, under certain conditions, teachers (re)produce the social order as they define what counts as legitimate knowledge and its forms of production and distribution (i.e. how it is taught, who is considered a legitimate agent in the transmission of knowledge, who decides what the legitimate sources of knowledge are, who possesses valid knowledge in the classroom, who knows and who does not, etc.). We also document some of the consequences of this process for a group of students of different immigrant backgrounds, recently arrived in the Madrid classrooms, in terms of their academic success and social mobility.