This study aims to investigate the context of a multigraded school which receives students attending the first grades of elementary school and is located in the rural neighbourhood of a small town with 9,911 inhabitants in São Paulo State, Brazil. To examine the representations that the students and their mothers build about the school as well as the representations of the teachers about the school and the students, the methodology adopted was ethnographic (ERICKSON, 1984 and1986) which implied the development of fieldwork based on observation of the school and the classroom, informal conversations, and also visits to students' houses and interviews. The observation was recorded in the journals kept by this researcher.The theoretical framework of this work, which is developed in a vertent of Applied Linguistics seen as a "crossdisciplinary" area of science (SIGNORINI e CAVALCANTI, 1998) or "mixed and ideological" 1 (MOITA LOPES, 2006), contributes to the data analysis for the construction of responses to the following research question: "From the mothers', the students' and the teachers' points of view, what representations are at stake about the school, the students and the knowledge or the instruction that the school represents in the universe of this school located in a rural neighborhood?" The view of culture presented here, central to understand all the other concepts that are going to be focused, is derived from the discussion of theorists from