Samenvatting

In this article we report on an ethnographic research project conducted in 2014-2015 at a school for ‘Assistant in Care and Wellbeing’, a school for secondary vocational training that is part of a large regional education center in the metropolitan area of the Randstad. The main incentive for our research was that some researchers assumed that in this ‘super-diverse’ environment, where students with an immigrant background were a vast majority, many tensions and conflicts were caused by ethnic and religious differences between students. However, after about 100 hours of observations in the classes of fourteen teachers, 36 interviews with teachers and other staff, and focus group discussions with teachers and students, we found that for most students diversity wasn’t a big issue at all. Rather than ethnic or religious differences many irritations and conflicts were triggered by the constantly changing organisational setting and institutional context of the school. In this article, we will corroborate this finding with a detailed analysis of some cases of classroom interaction, and draw conclusions about the usefulness and limits of superdiversity as a heuristic tool.