‘Being yourself makes you special.’ A school ethnography about belonging and being different in a Spanish primary school

This ethnography has two objectives: to analyse the experience of belonging in relation to differences within a group of students in the fifth year of primary education; and to understand the value of visual narratives in creating dialogic spaces through which students can collectively express, negotiate, recognise and resignify that experience. Over one academic year, a process of shared knowledge construction was developed using visual methodologies and participant observation. The results show how differences (gender, cultural background, social class and disability) are intertwined with experiences of belonging in a dynamic interplay of perspectives in constant adaptation and negotiation with the ‘norm’ and hegemonic values. Visual methodologies, integrated into the ethnographic fieldwork, made visible the identities and practices of resistance of students who felt marginalised by these dominant values. They also fostered new forms of recognition, collective awareness and belonging within the research process by enabling the production of counter-hegemonic narratives.