ABSTRACT
Diversity has become a major characteristic of contemporary education. Most classrooms in the Netherlands are made up of students of various ethnic backgrounds. Especially in the urban areas in the western part of the Netherlands, where our data come from, classrooms host children from different immigrant groups along with or without Dutch students. These different ethnic groups are commonly referred to, both in social scientific literature, and in everyday speech, in terms of categories of national identity: Dutch, Moroccan, Turkish and Surinamese, to mention the three largest groups of immigrants. In this paper, we will discuss a case where the word ‘Moroccan’ is used and understood by a teacher and students in a classroom, while at the same time the category is not used with a mutually shared meaning by all participants.
