Expressions of secondary school students in Mexico

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the expressions of Secondary Education students in Mexico about their relationship with their peers, understood as the others who are different by their sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, disability or HIV/AIDS patients, among others. Because they are considered as different, they are prone to restriction of their individual rights and, therefore, discrimination. This study was limited to the analysis of utterances that students addressed to indigenous, homosexual and disabled people. Therefore, an instrument was designed, tested and applied to collect the expressions and meanings that secondary education students addressed to the three discriminated groups. The use of word association was implemented to collect the expressions that related students to a determined group. Then, the natural
semantic network was used to find the most significant expressions and, finally, the words with greater semantic weight were identified into categories to classify them into inclusion, integration and exclusion. Word usage is a fundamental part, because it is the scaffolding between personal identity and social structure. To fulfill this purpose, some institutions of the city were selected such as College of Sciences and Humanities (CCH), high schools, and from the country’s interior, Oaxaca high school. The results of
the study showed poor interaction and a growing understanding of diversity.