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The Authoring of School: Between the Official and Unofficial Discourse

Theoretically the paper addresses the question of how official and unofficial discourses are related and what function the unofficial register serves for the official one. It draws on the idea of ‘underlife’ and the heterogeneity of discourse in order to show how the unofficial discourse can be a productive tool for students to both distance themselves from school and negotiate school identities in order to create new, and (for students) more compatible, forms of ‘school’. Institutional settings do not automatically produce the institutional scripts, positions and norms they are associated with; rather, they need to be authored by participants who ‘instantiate’ these scripts, positions and norms. This paper focuses on how students author school (the official) but at the same time produce alternative discourses (the unofficial). A data set of transcribed student group talk in a multi-ethnic classroom in the Netherlands is used for the analysis.