Learning to engage with difference in a majority–minority primary school

This article investigates how middle-class parents without migration background who "go against the grain" by choosing a majority–minority primary school, engage with difference once they enter this urban school context. Based on 19 semi-structured interviews, we propose that while the tendency to "control" difference is strong, repeated encounters between parents can promote the questioning of one's knowledge, entitlements and ways of doing, which may result in adaptation to difference over time. Contributing to the work on "incremental learning", this article distinguishes four subsequent stages of learning to demonstrate its incremental nature. This staged process reveals that for most middle-class parents, incremental learning goes as far as small adaptations to differences, in which the compromise to their own needs remains limited. Identifying feedback as a core mechanism of learning allows us to reflect on why some parents surpass this stage and gradually learn to engage with differences in less hierarchical ways.