Two Situations of Opposed and Normalized Educational Success: Comparison among Adolescent Schoolgirls from Different Cultural Origins
Type de matériel :
2
The aim of this article is to study and understand adolescent girls’ identity dynamic in a situation of educational success and with different cultural origins: French girls and French girls of Maghreb origin. We have used the representational contextualization method (Zavalloni 1998) which allowed us to explore salient identity mechanisms and to explain the influence of the cultural dimension within educational success. The adolescent girls of Maghreb origin appropriate school as a means of social recognition and in order to offset victimization (the condition of Muslim women, racism, unemployment, and stigma, connected with where one lives). By comparison, among the other adolescent girls, the identity dynamic is realized through a trivialized achievement, integrated into norms of the education systems. For these girls, the focus is on the moment of adolescence, with its crises and its disturbances, but also with its dreams and its creativity. Thus, this research has allowed us to locate identity structures and relations indicating two forms of achievement: “normalized success” and “opposed success” which are in both cases a powerful mediator of identity construction.
Réseaux sociaux