Practices of Homogenization: Social Choreographies in Everyday School Life

When children start school, they are neither homogeneous nor heterogeneous, but are socially created as such in various respects through acts of addressing and in everyday practices. Unlike the widely differentiated research on construction and reproduction of differences in the tradition of 'doing difference', research on how and with regard to what children are being constructed as homogeneous in school, is rare. This article will initially deal with different conceptions of homogeneity; in pedagogical discourses, it is deciphered as equality with a reference to human rights as well as "evaluating from the same point of view" with a reference to the meritocratic principle. Thirdly, it is also understood as homogeneity of the culturally significant behavioural dispositions. In the second part of this article, a praxeological approach will be used to find a way to empirically analyse the makings of homogeneity. We focus on the homogenization of students taking the concept of social choreographies (Hewitt 2010; Klein 2005) into account, which shall be explored for educational research in this article. It analyses bodily practices of established orders of movement, in which emergent semantic fields arise in the interplay of pedagogical and aesthetic dimensions. This will be illustrated by the example of classroom circles in a primary school: a configuration that stands for a participatory and equal form of interaction in class. The analyses are based on sources that were collected in the manner of an in-school ethnography for example (video supported) observations, photographs and group discussions with children.