Abstract
This chapter concentrates on rituals of instruction that display the respect or contempt of teachers toward the students, used to affirm the desirable identity of a “good” student and confront those who do not achieve it. Obrovská focuses on instructional rituals permeated by the ethos of work that are directed at failing Roma boys in the context of classroom 8.A and deduces that even if unintentionally, these rituals deepen the distance of Roma boys from school and provoke rituals of resistance. Based on the analysis of teachers’ talk, the chapter depicts the ethnicization of maturity of Roma students. Roma students are ostensibly premature not because they are older (as an effect of postponed and interrupted school enrollment), but because of the “other” Roma way of maturing.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Turner (2004, p. 128), “[C]ommunitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority.”
- 2.
These are so-called differentiating rituals (Bernstein et al. 1966), intended to clearly define the roles and statuses of actors.
- 3.
In the Czech Republic, it is not uncommon for the teacher to publicly announce grades.
- 4.
In the Czech Republic, after completing a written test or an oral exam, pupils receive grades on a scale of 1–5 with 1 being the best score. They are given certificates twice per year (in January and at the end of June) when they receive grades for their performance in the subject for the entire evaluated period.
- 5.
During a break following the described situation, I learned from the boys that they wanted to apply for apprenticeships as motor mechanics. “And is there any entrance exam?” I inquired. “I don’t know; no, there is not,” they reacted. “A friend of mine is there, and he only finished fourth grade,” David said. “And what if you don’t get accepted?” “Then benefits,” David responded. “No,” Filip refuted his friend’s idea. “I don’t want to be on benefits. You can also get a truck driver’s license there, and it will get you a job.” (fieldnotes, 29 January 2014)
- 6.
Rituals can be part of the hidden curriculum, that is, what students learn during school activities, what shapes and influences them, even if it is not included in the official curriculum and in the conscious goals and activities of teachers (Pollard 2008). The hiddenness does not mean that the transmitted contents lie in some unknowable depths; it is the result of un-reflected self-evidence (Havlík and Koťa 2002).
- 7.
In both classrooms I studied, boys were more resistant than girls. This was also evident in their approach to the school tasks set forth by teachers. For example, in an informatics class, I noticed how a group of girls put their efforts into creating a few paragraphs about their holidays in Croatia, while most boys were spreading around a copied paragraph with an excuse from a student book. The task aimed to demonstrate some formatting functions of a text editor, using the content of one’s choice.
- 8.
In the Czech educational system, a student can only fail a grade once at the primary level and once at the lower secondary level (altogether, only twice during nine years of compulsory education). Students should leave lower secondary school being maximally 15 years old. Therefore, some of the failed Roma boys in 8A would have to leave the lower secondary school in eighth grade, instead of ninth grade.
- 9.
Kaščák (2010) views teachers’ inclusion strategies as highly ambivalent from a pedagogical point of view. In this case, the teacher sends a student out of the room, using the symbolic power of the door as a material threshold between the social states of a student and a peer, to facilitate the acceptance of the student state. But she is sending him to the corridor, where the student can associate better with his peer identity and which offers space for uncontrolled action. Thus, the teacher may be increasing the disparity of roles in which students finds themselves.
- 10.
It is Roma boys who have the worst school results in Czech mainstream schools with Roma student populations up to 50 percent, and they represent most of the failures (GAC spol. s r.o. 2009). The 8B class teacher estimated that a “larger half” of Roma students leave the school in eighth grade (interview with 8B class teacher, 20 November 2013).
- 11.
More on this topic can be found, for example, in an ethnographic study by Nayak and Kehily (1996).
- 12.
I thank Csaba Szaló for pointing this out to me.
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Obrovská, J. (2018). Ethnicity in Classtime Rituals. In: Roma Identity and Ritual in the Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94514-9_6
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