Theory and practice of «special support» between system and individual

The main purpose of this work is to analyse how teachers perceive and deal with diversity, where they put the limit between «normality» and «otherness», how they relate to the documentation proceeding from public institutions. Using an ethnographic methodology based on participant observation and semistructured interviews, I shall apply Pierre Bourdieu's theories about social reproduction and distinction to a high school in Skåne, with the purpose of better understanding the difference between change and reconversion in dealing with «otherness» in the form of «learning disabilities». This study aims at better understanding how «otherness», «diversity», and «plurality» are categorized, hierarchically organized, considered as «distortions», «defects», «syndromes» to be cured, when instead they could actually constitute means to overcome the ancestral «fear of the other», the rejection of «complexity» and to fill the perceived gap between theory and practice, between the «school of diversity and plurality» and the school of «kunskapsmål», «performance», «driven-ness», both present in the current Läroplan (LPF-94) and likely to be found in the new one. Finally, this analysis tries to point at the necessity to question the unquestionable. That is, to question the values that are considered to be established for good and for everybody, understanding them as historical products, not as philosophical a priori. Far from being historical invariables, those values and principles are the result of actual political fights, even of revolutions, and of debates occurred for centuries or even millennia. School has been focusing on having them internalised and naturalised, instead of developing adequate instruments to let them be critically understood, reflected upon, talked about, and of course experienced in their many contexts. The study's main result lies in individuating the structural and individual factors that allow the teachers to deal with «otherness» and «diversity» as a problem instead as a resource, underlining the symbolic violence implicit in the process of naturalisation of values and principles