Revisiting studies of multicultural school events from the perspective of strategic essentialism

© 2021 Joke Dewilde & Thor-André Skrefsrud. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.The article discusses schools’ use of multicultural school events as a practice designed to enhance inclusion and to prevent prejudice and negative intergroup attitudes in school. While prior research has largely criticized such events for promoting cultural stereotypes and essentialist cultural identities, in this article we argue for a more nuanced way of perceiving such practices. Based on our previous empirical work, we apply the idea of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1996) and discuss how multicultural school events may also represent an opportunity for minority parents to achieve certain objectives. The minority temporarily adopts the image provided by the majority and uses it in a strategic manner to act and pursue chosen political advantages. However, we also critically discuss possible limitations and pitfalls of the idea of strategic essentialism as the concept may in fact essentialize the minority group contrary to the intention of the multicultural school event. The contribution of the article is a theoretically informed discussion of how these events may ascribe agency to the participating families, reducing the way critics perceive them solely as victims of a majority-dominated and non-inclusive practice.acceptedVersio

"Det er bare i hjertet mitt" - Portræt av en transspråklig ungdom som diktskriver

Dette er en artikkel om den transspråklige ungdommen Khushi, som diktskriver hjemme og på skolen. Studien som hun er del av, er en lingvistisk etnografi der jeg gjennom et skoleår har studert elever i en innføringsklasse for sent ankomne ungdommer gjennom deltakende observasjon, intervju, lydopptak og innsamling av tekster. Jeg anvender en transspråklig forståelse av literacy som utfordrer konvensjonelle forståelser av språk som avgrensede enheter, skriving som selvstendige produkter og forfattere som individuelle skrivere. Analysene viser at diktene som Khushi skriver hjemme, er rekontekstualiseringer av bollywoodsanger framfor tekster hun har skrevet selv, en praksis og et språk som hun trekker veksler på når hun skriver norsk på skolen. Hun er redd for å skrive dikt på skolen, og analysene viserhvordan oversettelse og transspråklige praksiser er med på å myndiggjøre Khushi som en skriver på norsk. Artikkelen avslutter med å understreke viktigheten av at lærere skaper trygge skriverom på skolen

Teacher collaboration: A study of topics in planning sessions between a science and a bilingual teacher

The education of recently-arrived language minority pupils involves subject teachers, second language teachers and bilingual teachers. Even though these teachers collaborate in one or other way, these relationships have largely been under-researched. In this article, I explore planning sessions between a science teacher and a bilingual teacher at a lower secondary school in a Norwegian context collaborating about a recently-arrived pupil from Poland. Hereby, I show that collaboration between two teachers with different foci and pedagogical knowledge is not straightforward. Using a discursive approach and studying the notion of topics in planning sessions, I explore the dynamics of the teacher–teacher interaction. Topic initiatives indicate the teachers’ foci and areas of responsibility and the analysis highlights factors which influence the extent to which the teachers are able to discuss these foci, including the relations of domination between them. I will argue that despite the institutional discourse which favours science over bilingual subject teaching, it is interesting to explore how these teachers negotiate their relationship locally. An important finding is that in order to gain deeper insight into the collaboration, further field work is needed, i.e., observing the teachers in informal conversation, classroom sessions and interviewing them about their experiences with regard to the collaboration

Multicultural School Festival as a Creative Space for Identity Construction – From a Minority Parent Perspective

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Multicultural school festivals as a creative space for identity construction – the perspective of minority parents

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any wayIn this article, we explore how minority parents construct and promote cultural identities through a multicultural school event in Norway. Such events respond to the call for diverse and inclusive initiatives to facilitate learning, belonging, and cohesion in schools. Interestingly, while schools see these events as helping further inclusion, prior research on the subject has criticized such events for promoting essentialist understandings of cultural identities, hence regarding them as counterproductive to the aim of promoting inclusion. This research has directed scarce attention to the participant perspective, among them minority parents. Using the stall of the Kurdish parents as an example, we conducted fieldwork applying the method of Linguistic Landscaping. In addition, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the parents asking questions about the festival and the meaning of the displayed representations in their stall. The findings indicate that the Kurdish parents involved view the event as an important space for creative construction of transnational and diasporic identities, as well as an opportunity for a minority group to strive for acceptance for its cause. We end the article by reflecting on the pedagogical potential in multicultural school events as tools for creating inclusive school practices.publishedVersio

Nyankomne barn og unge i den norske utdanningskonteksten

Nyankomne barn og unge i den norske utdanningskonteksten er en økende gruppe, men har fått relativt lite oppmerksomhet i forskningen. Vi definerer nyankomne som barn og unge som er nye i Norge, og som av den grunn har spesielle opplæringsbehov. Artikkelen gir et historisk riss av norsk innvandring, samt en oversikt over opplæringstilbudene for ulike grupper nyankomne med hensyn til alder og oppholdsstatus. Det finnes ingen offentlig statistikk over nyankomne, men andre kilder avdekker at de fleste kommer fra Afghanistan, Eritrea, Polen, Syria og Somalia. Barn i grunnskolealder har rett til opplæring, uavhengig status. Asylbarn under eller over skolepliktig alder faller ikke under barnehage- eller grunnskolelovene og har dermed ikke de samme rettighetene som barn med bosettingstillatelse. Det finnes en del kartlegginger og andre tilstandsrapporter, men lite forskning på hvordan opplæringen for de ulike gruppene fungerer. Vi kan likevel konkludere at det ikke er noen faglige grunner for hvorfor noen grupper får bedre opplæringsvilkår enn andre

Including alternative stories in the mainstream. How transcultural young people in Norway perform creative cultural resistance in and outside of school

This is an Open Access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License 4.0 (CC BYC ND) and originally published in International Journal of Inclusive Education. You can access the article by following this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2016.1145263 Dette er en vitenskapelig, fagfellevurdert artikkel som opprinnelig ble publisert Open Access i International Journal of Inclusive Education. Artikkelen er publisert under lisensen Creative Commons Attribution International License 4.0 (CC BY NC ND). Du kan også få tilgang til artikkelen ved å følge denne lenken: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2016.1145263The development of an inclusive pedagogy takes on new urgency in Norwegian schools as the student body has become increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse. Traditionally, the Norwegian school has been dominated by homogenising and assimilating discourses, whereas alternative voices have been situated at the margins. In response to this tendency, we present two transcultural students’ autoethnographic stories produced in alternative spaces to the Norwegian mainstream, that is, in a transition class for newly arrived students and on Facebook. Both spaces are perceived as contact zones in the sense that they are culturally and linguistically complex. This article illustrates how the students perform cultural and linguistic resistance towards dominant homogenising discourses as the transition class and Facebook seem to offer opportunities for constructing alternative stories. Moreover, we contend that these alternative stories offer important knowledge for conventional education contexts since they represent stories of competence in contrast to the assumed limitations of these students

Young people’s experiences and meaning-making at a multicultural festival in Norway

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.This article explores young people’s experiences and meaning-making at a multicultural festival. Multicultural festivals aim to promote inclusion and challenge problem-oriented discourses in current debates on diversity and migration. Listening to youth voices from such a festival gives a sense of how young participants perceive representations of cultural difference, and how they relate these representations to their own identity and sense of belonging. The participants in our study are 86 young people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds between the ages of 12 and 20. They recorded answers to our questions about what they did at the festival as well as the memories that participation evokes using a specially developed app. Interpreting the broad spectrum of their reflections in the light of theories about intercultural learning and citizenship, we found that the young people were eager to learn about the Other by experiencing cultural differences and engaging with traditions different to their own. In addition, they experienced the festival as an inclusive space, open for transnational identities, and evoking a sense of safety and belonging. We conclude by arguing that the young participants take with them experiences and memories of diversity as the norm rather than the exception.publishedVersio

“Det er veldig fristende å synge med”

Kritisk literacy og flerspråklig kompetanse er stadig mer relevante kompetanser for borgere i digitaliserte og globaliserte samfunn, og har også blitt tillagt mer vekt i den norske læreplanen. Kritisk literacy kan forstås som kompetanser elevene trenger i møte med ulike tekster, mens flerspråklighet i skolen handler om å lage rom for og bruke hver enkelt elevs språklige ressurser og identitet. Denne artikkelen undersøker hvordan ungdomsskoleelever forholder seg til flerspråklige tekster, og vi ser på mulighetene for å arbeide med kritisk literacy og flerspråklighet ved å bruke den skjønnlitterære teksttypen sangtekster. Artikkelen baserer seg på teorier om kritisk literacy og transspråking, og datamaterialet er innhentet gjennom to fokusgruppe­intervjuer. Utvalget består av til sammen seks tiendeklasseelever fra en skole med store kulturelle og sosioøkonomiske forskjeller i osloområdet. Elevene ble bedt om å velge ut to tekster blant fire forslag til bruk i norskundervisningen i en tenkt åttendeklasse og vurdere tekstenes egnethet. Analysene viser at elevene har et nært forhold til mange ulike språk og språklige fenomener. Vi ser også at elevene har mye kunnskap om språk og sangtekster som populærkultur, men at deres evne til å forholde seg kritiske til tekstenes innhold er varierende. Flerspråklige sangtekster har et stort potensial som øvingsfelt for kritisk literacy, samtidig som det er en teksttype der elevene får vist sin kunnskap om språk og kultur. Sangtekstene kan brukes som verktøy for å bygge bro mellom elevens verden og skolen