The present thesis provides a case study of a municipal public school in the city of Rio de Janeiro, based on documental research and interviews with principals, teachers, custodian and teenage students, as well as ethnographic observations conducted during the 2006 school year. The work discusses the different modes of dialogue observed in the school’s day-to-day running along with questions of group regulation, concentrating especially on seventh and eight grades, with observation of four different classes. The thesis focuses primarily on instruction, emphasizing the multidimensionality of the teaching-learning processes and maintaining a constant dialogue with contributions from critical and intercultural theories. The studies of Vera Candau and Peter McLaren provide a theoretical guideline in relation to instruction, as well as critical and intercultural approaches, while Norbert Elias’s works on the cultural construction of hegemonic behaviour in the West help explore the meaning and productivity of the school regulation practices discussed in the thesis. The body of documental information compiled during the field research was analyzed from an initial question: How do the modes of dialogue found in schools affect teenage group regulation in intermediate school? This developed into the following lines of inquiry: What meaning do the studied individuals attribute to the words adolescence, indiscipline and school violence? How did the question of difference appear in these meaning creating processes? What kinds of group-related behaviour were favoured as a result of these processes? The diversity perceived in the school under study, however, prevents us from discussing this research context in one-dimensional terms. Although teenage voices were frequently disqualified, on the basis of an essentialist and negative view of this age group, which tended to undermine the possibility of intercultural dialogue between adolescents and some of the adults in this school, other professionals refused to share this view, allowing themselves to engage in dialogue with the cultural differences posed by teenagers and tending to have fewer disciplinary problems in their classes, such as lack of concentration and minor acts of violence. The thesis also investigates other aspects of the wider sociocultural environment affecting the issues under analysis, such as the crisis in authority, the decline of the institutional program (as described by François Dubet), cybernetic culture, and the general precariousness of teaching-learning conditions. These factors in mind, generalizations that seek to explain the widespread difficulties faced by many contemporary schools in relation to adolescent interactions and behaviour on a supposed cultural rupture involving the younger generations are questioned, observing that, between ballgames and mp3s teenagers from the studied school chose both.