Aprender entre el Reconocimiento y la Desigualdad: Construcción de Significado en la Experiencia Escolar Multicultural

Abstract

Education has historically been conceived as a mechanism of social integration and of expanded opportunities for mobility. Over recent decades, however, educational research has questioned this equalising capacity by showing that schooling does not operate in a social vacuum, but is traversed by power relations and by disputes over the cultural legitimacy of the knowledge it transmits. This theoretical article examines how students construct the meaning of their learning in multicultural school settings where certain cultural forms are legitimised while others remain invisible or subordinated. To this end, it articulates three perspectives: the sociocultural theory of learning (Vygotsky, Baquero and Bruner), the critical sociology of education (Bourdieu and Passeron, Tiramonti, Kessler, Dubet and Martuccelli) and recognition theory (Honneth and Taylor), in dialogue with Walsh's proposal of critical interculturality. The article argues, as a hypothesis, that meaning making in learning is conditioned by the dynamics of recognition arising from the processes of cultural legitimisation present in school: when students' identities, knowledge and cultural experiences are recognised, learning tends to acquire a sense of affirmation and openness; when they are rendered invisible, devalued or falsely recognised, learning loses subjective meaning and the institution operates as a stage for the symbolic reproduction of inequality. It concludes that educational justice cannot be reduced to expanding coverage, retention or standardised achievement indicators, but requires transforming the orders of cultural legitimisation that organise school life.