“He is a bit of a mystery to us” – making students with limited educational background intelligible

Abstract

According to policy and research, newly arrived students with limited educational backgrounds struggle in relation to school demands. Drawing on interviews and observations from three compulsory schools, the article analyses how these students and their school performances are made intelligible, i.e. recognisable within the framework of the school as an institution. The results show how students’ school difficulties are often constituted as enigmatic by the school staff, who articulate them in different ways: as being dependent on the students’ cultural background and/or cognitive ability or on the students’ limited educational background. We argue that although all these understandings to some extent place the problem within the individual student, they produce different subjectivations, since the last explanation also constitutes the problem in relation to the school’s organisation.