The aim of this article is to understand how day-to-day student classroom participation in an ordinary secondary Chilean school contributes to civic education towards democratic competency. The qualitative method adopted an ethnomethological perspective and used participant observation, unstructured interviews and document review techniques, all later analyzed inductively. The results show a lack of definition of classroom participation in institutional documents, sporadic implementation of participating events and a consensual passive role of students in the classroom. It concludes that classroom participation tends to teach students to consider their interactions as interruptions when dealing with their life outside the classroom and illegitimate in their expression, contributing negatively to their development of democratic competency.

El objetivo del artículo es comprender cómo la participación cotidiana del alumnado en un salón de clase de secundaria en un liceo chileno contribuye a su formación ciudadana para la democracia. La metodología cualitativa con enfoque etnometodologico usa técnicas de revisión documental, observación participante, y entrevistas no estructuradas. El análisis es de tipo inductivo general. Los resultados develan una falta de definición de la participación en los documentos institucionales y una participación pasiva o por consulta consensuada en el aula, donde sus intervenciones espontáneas son consideradas interrupciones irrelevantes e ilegítimas en sus formas de expresión. Se concluye que la participación del alumnado contribuye negativamente en el desarrollo de sus competencias democráticas.

The aim of this article is to understand how day-to-day student classroom participation in an ordinary secondary Chilean school contributes to civic education towards democratic competency. The qualitative method adopted an ethnomethological perspective and used participant observation, unstructured interviews and document review techniques, all later analyzed inductively. The results show a lack of definition of classroom participation in institutional documents, sporadic implementation of participating events and a consensual passive role of students in the classroom. It concludes that classroom participation tends to teach students to consider their interactions as interruptions when dealing with their life outside the classroom and illegitimate in their expression, contributing negatively to their development of democratic competency.