Abstracts - Earli

come from interviews with 16 teachers, from 4 separate schools which were chosen on the basisof: (i) having a range of middle-years classes (grades 5-9); and (ii) catering to a diversecommunity where incomes were variable and where there had been recent mobility. In contentanalysis of the interviews using a category system devised by Paine (1989) we found that teachersdeployed mainly an individual differences orientation and a social categorical orientation todescribe student diversity. The teachers fore-grounded the difficulties that they faced in teachinglow ability students and those from different ethnic backgrounds, countries of origin and fromsocially disadvantaged families (low income, single-parent, latch-key kids). Regarding teachers’rationales, we found that most teachers sought to provide "high ability" students with opportunitiesto "flower" and low ability students with opportunities "to try". There were contrasts to the typicalviewpoint. A few teachers regarded diversity as valuable and desirable per se rather thanproblematic, and they saw themselves as active agents in the construction of students as differentkinds of learners. The implications of our findings for policy and teacher education programs areelaborated in the presentation.Teachers’ (in)sensitivity to cultural and linguistic diversity in dyadic teacher-student interactionsin multi-ethnic classroomsEd Elbers, Utrecht University, NetherlandsMaaike Hajer, Utrecht University, NetherlandsThis presentation concerns dyadic teacher-student interactions in two multicultural classrooms atsecondary schools in the Netherlands. The schools have a population of native Dutch students andstudents from various migrant groups (with Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds), mainly secondgeneration. The students are 12 -14 years of age. We made video- and audio-recordings of 23mathematics lessons (10 in one classroom and 13 in the other). In our analysis we focussed ondyadic teacher-student interactions (there were 100 dyadic interactions in the two classrooms),mostly occurring while the students were working individually at their assignments. Teachers inthese classrooms seem not to be sensitive to the diversity of their students, both with respect tolanguage and mathematic competence. The consequence of this lack of sensitivity for students’learning and achievements will be discussed as well as ways of empowering teachers to make amore focussed use of the dyadic interactions.Migrant parents learning to talk with teachers: the construction and deconstruction of institutionalcategories.Mariëtte de Haan, Utrecht University, NetherlandsInge Wissink, Utrecht University, NetherlandsIn this presentation we will focus on how teachers and migrant parents in the Netherlandsnegotiate the advice students receive at the end of primary school to attend a particular secondaryschool. In particular we will focus on how both teachers and migrant parents adopt, reconstruct orreject institutional categories, strategies and procedures as they discuss student characteristics,person-environment concepts as well as basic concepts of education. The migrant parentsthemselves vary in their socialization into Dutch institutional settings and the research focuses onhow both parents and teachers deal with this situation when they negotiate and decide about theinstitutional futures of their children/students. The preliminary results show that parents with moreexperience with Dutch schools differ in the kind of dialogues they construct with teachers. Moreexperienced migrant parents both are more able to both adopt and reject the institutional categoriesput forward by the teacher and are able to relate these to discourses outside the institutionalframing. These strategies are effectively used to negotiate and criticize the institutional discourse– 270 –