The ’every day’ of polarisation in schools; understanding polarisation as (not)dialogue

This paper analyses how ‘polarisations’ in which social tensions
between the religious, ethnic and socio-economic groups are
believed to increase are experienced and understood by secondary
school teachers in the Netherlands. Based on the idea that polarisation
is present in everyday interactions, this study contributes to an
everyday perspective on polarisation by unravelling the everyday
contradictions, tensions, and incongruities that constitute and keep
polarisation in place. Borrowing from critical discourse analyses and
linguistic ethnography perspectives the analyses shows that the
everyday reproduction of polarisation in schools consists not only
of the local reproduction of existing minority and majority viewpoints,
but also reproduces the interactive dynamics that make it
hard to maintain dialogue in concrete situations of polarisation.
Making use of Lyotard’s idea that heterogeneous narratives produce
different languages of justice, the paper explains polarisation
not just as a clash between incommensurable world views, but
between different rules of ‘how to play the game’. Such a view
also explains why it is complicated to use dialogue to overcome
incommensurable worlds. The paper ends by providing conditions
that can help overcome the reproduction of existing controversies
in schools through dialogue