Challenges and Dilemmas in School from a Child's Perspective

In my PhD project, I spent a year following 20 gifted children in their everyday life in Danish primary schools. The children talked about feeling different and not fitting in. I will present empirical examples, from children’s perspective, of how processes of marginalization are produced in school -. Children can experience school as challenging, and this can have an impact on their school life and self-understanding. Not all the children appear “bright and well-adapted,” and their teachers describe them as difficult to include because they appear either passive or quiet or as disruptive, unfocussed or sloppy. These individualized perceptions can lead to teachers overlooking their academic potential. I want to show that students’school difficulties do not develop “because” of giftedness, but that the difficulties must be understood in relation to the structural conditions of the school, the teaching and the communities that the children try to become part of.