“What they bring from there doesn’t work here”. The difficult adaptation of the diversity within the so-called “Latin-American student body” in Spain’s school

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze how difference in school is socially constructed based on students’ cultural diversity, specifically in the case of students called “Latin-American”. From quantitative data that locate their presence and the impact that it has caused on the Spanish research, we present a discourse analysis of teachers to reflect how the identity of these students is constructed in school. The analysis shows that the discourse ranges from cultural proximity logic —“they are like us”— to school distance —“but they fail in our school”— and it ends up blaming their families, their education systems, and even themselves, for these school situations that hide the inability of the education system to deal with cultural diversity.