English in Nordic universities: ideologies and practices

It is by now a well-documented fact that English is being used to a much greater extent at Nordic universities than was the case a couple of decades ago. With the proviso that cross-country comparisons are difficult because of differences in educational systems and methods of measurements, the proportion of academic articles which are published in English at Nordic universities is in the order of 70 to 95%; for doctoral dissertations, the order is 80–90%. The use of English as a medium of instruction differs at undergraduate and graduate level; at the former level some 10–25% of programmes are taught in English and at the latter the range is some 20–40%. The proportion of non-Nordic students is around 5–15%, though for all these areas, there are considerable differences between the disciplines, with the technical and natural sciences typically exhibiting a much greater degree of Englishization (Godenhjelm, Saarinen & Östman, 2013; Hultgren, 2013; Kristoffersen, Kristiansen & Røyneland, 2013; Kristinsson & Bernharðsson, 2013; Salö & Josephson, 2013). Universities in the Nordic countries, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, may be seen as being on the forefront in this process of Englishization, but we believe that the trend is universal and that the causes and consequences of the development are therefore relevant far beyond the region. It is against this backdrop of greater English language usage in key university activities that the present volume is set. The purpose of this volume is to explore and contrast the ideologies and practices associated with the Englishization of Nordic universities. By ideologies we understand the ways in which English at Nordic universities is explicitly or implicitly talked and written about in the Nordic debate. By practices we understand the ways in which the phenomenon of language choice unfolds on the ground in the situated interactions of the social actors directly involved in it, i.e. primarily those who conduct their daily working lives at Nordic universities: students, faculty and other staff. As it shall be clear in the chapters to come, this dichotomy is, of course, a simplification, not least because practice and ideology influence each other. The primary difference between ideology and practice, as we use the terms, is thus that ideology is either explicitly or implicitly value-laden discourse about what ought or ought not to happen, while practices are what actually happens. Of course, nothing is ever just as it seems, so the account of practices that we offer in this book will extend only as far as the particular research methods employed. It seems to us that in the case of language choice at universities in the Nordic countries these two types of realities – ideologies and practices – have become exceptionally far removed from one another, in a way that we would suggest has become unproductive and unhelpful. At the ideological level, two opposing discourses may be distinguished. On the one hand, we have what might be called the “internationalist” discourse. This is typically represented by politicians committed to making the nation internationally competitive. At the institutional level, the discourse may be carried on by university leaders concerned with internationalizing and advancing the rank of their universities. To these actors, language is often a non-issue (see, e.g., Phillipson, 2009; Phillipson & Skuttnabb-Kangas, 1999; Saarinen, this volume; Ljosland, this volume). In contrast to these arguments, we have what might be called the “culturalist” discourse. This is typically represented by politicians committed to safeguarding national culture and the heritage of the welfare state. Other representatives of this discourse may be characteristically Nordic institutions charged with the task of monitoring and regulating the national language, such as national language councils, or members of the cultural elite and professional linguists. To these actors, language is often highly salient. Ironically, they may be affiliated with both right and left-wing politics, albeit for different ideological reasons (see Salö, this volume). Safeguarding the national language in right-wing politics becomes a surrogate for protecting the nation state. In left-wing politics, it is a shield against commercialization and global homogenization. Thus, the ideological level is fraught with contradictions between “internationalists” and “culturalists” and even among the culturalists themselves. As far as the practices are concerned, there has over the years been a growing body of work aimed at exploring this phenomenon (Haberland et al., 2013; Kuteeva, 2011; Mortensen & Haberland, 2012; papers in the special issue of Iberica, vol. 22, edited by Kuteeva, 2011). Some of the issues which have been explored at the level of practice have been how teaching and learning is affected by it taking place in a language that is not one’s first (Airey, 2009, 2010; Thøgersen & Airey, 2011), patterns of language choice (Ljosland, 2008; Söderlundh, 2010; Haberland et al., 2013), the emergence of new and non-native ways of using English (Mortensen & Fabricius, this volume) and the attitudes of students and staff to Englishization (Hellekjær, 2005; Jensen & Thøgersen, 2011; Tange, 2010). In the chapters to come, we shall have a more detailed look at how Englishization plays out at the level of ideologies and at the level of practices. Before we go on to consider this in more detail, we will take a step back in time and consider how the role of universities have changed over time before considering the linguistic and cultural implications of these changes

Different routes, common directions? Activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK

This article analyses and compares the development of activation policies for young people in Denmark and the UK from the mid-1990s. Despite their diverse welfare traditions and important differences in the organisation and delivery of benefits and services for the unemployed, both countries have recently introduced large-scale compulsory activation programmes for young people. These programmes share a number of common features, especially a combination of strong compulsion and an apparently contradictory emphasis on client-centred training and support for participants. The suggested transition from the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ to the ‘Schumpeterian workfare regime’ is used as a framework to discuss the two countries’ recent moves towards activation. It is argued that while this framework is useful in explaining the general shift towards active labour-market policies in Europe, it alone cannot account for the particular convergence of the Danish and British policies in the specific area of youth activation. Rather, a number of specific political factors explaining the development of policies in the mid-1990s are suggested. The article concludes that concerns about mass youth unemployment, the influence of the ‘dependency culture’ debate in various forms, cross-national policy diffusion and, crucially, the progressive re-engineering of compulsory activation by strong centre-left governments have all contributed to the emergence of policies that mix compulsion and a commitment to the centrality of work with a ‘client-centred approach’ that seeks to balance more effective job seeking with human resource development. However, attempts to combine the apparently contradictory concepts of ‘client-centredness’ and compulsion are likely to prove politically fragile, and both countries risk lurching towards an increasingly workfarist approach

Reconceiving Barriers for Democratic Health Education in Danish Schools: an Analysis of Institutional Rationales

Health promotion - and education researchers and practitioners advocate for more democratic approaches to school-based health education, including participatory teaching methods and the promotion of a broad and positive concept of health and health knowledge, including aspects of the German educational concept of bildung. Although Denmark, from where the data of this article are derived, has instituted policies for such approaches, their implementation in practice faces challenges. Adopting a symbolic interactionist analytical framework this paper explores and defines two powerful institutional rationales connected to formal and informal social processes and institutional purposes of schools, namely conservatism and Neoliberalism. It is empirically described and argued how these institutional rationales discourage teachers and students from including a broad and positive concept of health, the element of participation, and the promotion of general knowledge as legitimate elements in health education. This paper thus contains a perspective on health education practice, which, in a new way, contributes to explain the relatively slow progress of democratic approaches to school health education