PERSPECTIVES AND PROCESSES: THE NEGOTIATION OF EDUCATIONAL MEANINGS IN HIGH SCHOOL CLASSES FOR ACADEMICALLY UNSUCCESSFUL STUDENTS (TRACKING, SECONDARY, ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

This study examines a subject that is central to both the theory and practice of curriculum: curriculum differentiation. It addresses three questions: (1) What are the perspectives of teachers and students on what a lower-track student is, what a lower-track teacher is, and what an appropriate lower-track curriculum is? (2) Through what face-to-face processes are these perspectives made visible and negotiated, and hence, acquired meaning? (3) How are idiosyncratic, local educational meanings about teacher and student roles and about curriculm linked to wider institutional and cultural principles of differentiation?;To investigate these questions, a qualitative methodology, combining extended participant observation in nine lower-track classrooms at two large comprehensive high schools, ethnographic interviews with members of the educational organizations, and audiotaping and analysis of the discourse of lower-track lessons, was used. The methodology permits analysis of the interaction of a large number of variables in the production of educational meanings, including the practice of tracking, the role enactment of teachers, the ambivalence of lower-track students, the design of curriculum, and organizational and community cultures.;The study documents the complex, often unconscious, yet powerful processes of differentiation that go on through that most common of classroom activities: talk. Teachers in lower-track classes direct discourse structures in which adolescents learn--in school--to talk and act as indifferent or obstreperous lower-track students. Moreover, the educational meanings produced in the talk between classroom participants reflect and re-create principles of differentiation regarding age, intellectual ability, and social class that orginate beyond classrooms. Comparing regular and lower-track classes within each of two high schools and lower-track classes between the two schools demonstrates that the meaning of curriculum differentiation is always contextualized, but not in a predictable fashion. Each school establishes an Educational Norm which translates into educational practice faculty members' perceptions of the social class of the regular-track student body. Lower-track education is an extreme version of the Educational Norm of each school, and does not have a uniformly stigmatizing effect. Hence, lower-track education does not correspond simply to the external social order or to an internal hierarchy of tracks, but represents the interaction of differences between and within schools.