Integration i multikulturelle folkeskoler: Belyst gennem feltarbejde i de tidlige klasser på to multikulturelle folkeskoler

The Danish school system has never been a homogenous one. Since the beginning of common compulsory schooling in the early 19th century the compulsory school, in Denmark known as “Folkeskolen”, has been “inhabited” by students and teachers with a variety of backgrounds with regard to social class, home culture, language and identity. In the first half century it is doubtful whether the majority of students even thought of themselves as Danish, or whether they identified more with their local region or with their social class of origin. “Folkeskolen” has played a vital part in the gathering of regional and class-based identities into a common national identity, and it has played a vital part in the creation of a common linguistic and cultural base of the population, or, at least, the creation of some commonly recognised criteria of legitimate cultural and linguistic practices. In this sense “Folkeskolen” has always played a part in what one might call the processes of integration in the Danish society. But even though integration in this sense is nothing new to “Folkeskolen” a new situation has appeared within the later decades. Global migration has created a situation, where students with different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds are a part of the everyday life in more and more schools, and while not displacing “old” regional and class-based differences it has created a situation in certain localities where we may speak of multicultural schools. These schools may be described as multicultural, not because of a multicultural ideology or pedagogical strategy, but simply as a description of the increased cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. It is this multicultural situation that the dissertation explores. It asks the question: What does processes of integration in school look like in this new context? How do the different actors in school (students and teachers) perceive themselves and each other, and how do they make sense of their own and each other’s backgrounds in this situation? It also raises the question: What are the conditions of participating in everyday life at school for students with different backgrounds? Special attention is paid to the conditions schools provide for students with minority background to participate in school life and especially in the formal learning activities: What are the obstacles and possibilities for minority students’ participation? I describe these research questions in chapter one along with my personal motivation to engage with these questions. To answer these questions I have chosen to engage with the everyday reality in school at first hand, or in other words, to use ethnographic field-work as the principal method of data collection, which I describe in chapter two. As “getting out there and seeing what is going on” is at the heart of ethnographic fieldwork, I found this to be the best way of exploring what is actually going on in the processes and practices of integration at an everyday level in multicultural schools. Consequently, I have chosen two compulsory schools that both fit the label “multicultural” as they have respectively 35 and 60 percent students with minority background. In these schools I have chosen to focus on the early years of schooling, or more precisely, from grade zero when the students enter compulsory school to grade five when they have had some years of experience with school and with each other. This has meant a somewhat complicated research design as I have spent time in two classes at each school, and followed one class from grade zero to first grade, and another from grade three to fifth grade at each school (for practical reasons one was followed to grade four only). This design has had its expenses when it comes to in-depth analysis of a single group of students, but it has provided a broad view of two schools and a broader range of student interaction. Also, the “mini-longitudinal” design has provided an opportunity to compare what is happening at different stages of the students’ early “schooling career” (which is mostly utilised in chapter six). Before engaging with the data from the fieldwork I have found it necessary to place the local studies in a broader social and historical context. Firstly, because it is my contention (one inherited from Bourdieu) that what goes on at a local level cannot be understood as isolated from what goes on at the macro-political levels. Secondly, a historical perspective on present occurrences and processes can be an effective means of “denaturalising” what otherwise may seem as “the natural state of affairs”. “Folkeskolen” and the education system as such are institutions in which most people in Denmark (including myself) have spent a number of years and probably been influenced by the values and self-images of these institutions. For this reason “Folkeskolen” may be one of the institutions that are most necessary to “denaturalise” before to engage with it academically in order that one does not take its values and interpretations as one’s own. For these two reasons chapter two also includes three relatively short historical analyses of the role of “Folkeskolen” in relation to integration, with the aim of “releasing” the question of integration from a narrow focus on the adaptation of minority individuals to the values of the Danish school system. In these historical sections I discuss how integration in relation to national identity, culture and language has always been a part of the history of “Folkeskolen”. In chapter two I also define the concept integration and points to the fact, that processes of integration cannot be seen as separate from processes of exclusion and marginalisation. In chapter three I present the first of the two analytical perspectives in the dissertation: The concept of cultural identity. The theoretical discussions of the concept are primarily inspired by Stuart Hall and his constructivist approach to questions of cultural identity. The primary claim of this approach is that cultural identities such as ethnicity, nation and “race” are not inborn or natural properties of any person or group of persons. Rather, cultural identities are created through social and political processes, which make them liable to change and reorganisation. This again means that cul-tural identities are unstable phenomena that are never finished or settled though actors may try to establish a temporary closure (hegemony). It takes (discursive) power to change cultural identities, and cultural identities may also have powerful effects, for instance in school where teachers attitudes towards minority groups may influence their interaction with these groups and thus influence the conditions for their participation in social life, or in a school context, their participation in life in school. In chapter four, five and six the theoretical discussions are utilised in analyses of how the different actors in school represent themselves and each other in terms of cultural identity. However, chapter four, which deals with teachers’ discursive representation of the students, points out how ethnic, national or racial references are not dominant in the teachers’ representations of students. Instead, a reference to the term “bilingual” is identified as the most common term for children with minority back-ground and which becomes a sort of ascribed ethnic identity in school. The main conclusion is that even though “bilingual” may sound like a positive term on practice it mainly connotes worries and problems and hardly any notions of resources or benefits are ascribed to “bilinguality” and thus to the minority children in general (though individual minority children may be held in high esteem by the teachers). Exploring the term “bilingual” further I find that the way teachers reason about these children has much in common with a pedagogical discourse called “compensatory pedagogy” and that their representation of “the bilingual child” has much similarity with the discourse of “the culturally deprived child” that is also the basis for compensatory pedagogy. Chapter five proceeds with analysing teachers’ representation of the students in terms of cultural identity. Here, I look at the instances where cul-ture and ethnicity are used as references. The main conclusion is that when culture and ethnicity are mentioned in relation to the minority children it tend to be in term of their “otherness”, and what more is, this otherness is seldom seen as just different, but is mostly represented as something unsuitable, backwards or almost pathological in a Danish school context. It must be said, however, that I also find voices among the teachers that speak of “bilinguality” or minority children in general in more sympathetic or positive terms, and these “voices” are mostly to be found among the school personnel with minority background. Another interesting finding is that whereas “otherness” is sometimes spoken about in school, “Danishness” is almost never mentioned. Instead “Danishness” functions as an unspoken (positive) notion of normality against which the images of “otherness” is constructed. In chapter six I turn towards the students’ own representations of cultural identity and ask how they ascribe meaning to categories such as ethnicity and nation. A first finding is that they don’t. At least in the early years in school the children seem to know in which categories to place each other and where they identify themselves as belonging (i.e. Turkish, Danish, Kurdish-Turkish), but it seems that they don not add much value or meaning to these categories. However, it seems to be a tendency that ethnic as well as religious categories become imbued with more meaning in the later years of schooling. During the time I spend in the schools I experience little that may be called racism or hostility towards certain groups. This does not mean that I do not encounter conflicts and stereotypes. Certain ethnic stereotypes seem to exist that connect certain ethnicities (e.g. Turkish and Arabic) with trouble. I also encounter several instances where international conflicts (such as the Turkish – Kurdish conflict or the Palestinian – Israeli conflict) enter the classroom and are negotiated among the children. Again it is striking how little Danishness is spoken about when seen in relation to other ethnic or national identities. Also among the children Danishness seems to exist as an unspoken normality rather than and explicated identity. By discussing the theoretical concept of cultural capital, as used by Bourdieu, chapter seven introduces the second analytical perspective of the dissertation. As with cultural identity the concept of cultural capital is first discussed theoretically and then applied empirically in the following chapters. The benefit of cultural identity as an analytical perspective is that processes and problems of integration are removed from a narrow and essentialist focus on the properties of ethnic minorities and instead incorporated into a broader sociological analysis of schooling. The way I utilise the concept cultural capital is not about “them” or “their” culture but about the relation between the value orientations of the teachers and the students’ different backgrounds and experiences. In this way I use the concept cultural capital to problematise the schools’ ability (or the lack of such) to adapt to the multicultural situation by providing children with different backgrounds equal terms of participation in school. By combing theoretical discussions from Bourdieu and comparable sociologists with discussions by some researchers dealing with ethnicity or ”race” in education I suggest the term “institutional culturism” or simply “culturism” to describe the inability of schools to provide equal terms of participation for majority and minority children. In chapter eight, nine and ten I analyse how institutional culturism operates in school by assigning different status (cultural capital) to the experiences and resources of children with minority and majority backgrounds. In chapter eight I discuss how the curriculum often favours children with majority backgrounds by recognising their values and experiences from home as cultural capital, while some of the knowledge and value orientations of children with minority backgrounds are less recognised as valuable for their participation in school. I also mention, that this seems not only to be the case for ethnic minorities but also for majority children from low-status social backgrounds. Apart from such instances where the potential cultural capital of minority children are neglected I also mention a few situations where their backgrounds and experiences are recognised, which have resulted in these children’s more enthusiastic and frequent participation. Chapter nine discusses the relative value attributed in school to the different linguistic backgrounds of the children. When it comes to language the conditions for participation seem to be very uneven for children with the dominant linguistic background (standard-Danish) and children from dominated linguistic communities. One of the two schools has totally abandoned mother tongue teaching, which effectively displaces the minority languages as valuable linguistic capital in school. While the other school offers mother tongue classes all mother tongue teaching is still kept out of the ordinary curriculum and out of the ordinary teaching schedule. At both schools the low status of minority languages also becomes apparent in different day-to-day situations as well as in the widespread language-testing apparatus that functions at both schools. Nevertheless, children with access to the minority languages seem to be able to benefit from sharing these languages in informal situations, where they can create communicative communities that are out of reach of the majority teachers and students. In chapter ten I discuss the role of the different pedagogical styles that are applied in school, and how different pedagogical styles may provide differential conditions of participation for majority and minority children. In these discussions I utilise concepts from Basil Bernstein in combination with Bourdieu’s concepts and I discuss how modern, so-called progressive pedagogies (that Bernstein calls “invisible pedagogies”) may be well-suited to some majority students, whereas they might constitute an obstacle for minority children whose backgrounds prepare them for other kinds of communication and interaction than those required by the “invisible peda-gogies”. However, it is also pointed out that project work, which is one type of “invisible pedagogy” may also provide an opportunity to introduce elements from minority children’s backgrounds into curriculum. Chapter eleven is the last analytical chapter of the dissertation. This chapter utilises the insights from the two analytical perspectives to discuss the behavioural and gang-related problems, that teachers report to occur among minority boys during the later years of schooling (and thus outside the main-scope of my study). I suggest that such occurrences may be interpreted as instances of counter-culture, which again may be related to (if not a direct consequence of) the different forms of marginalisation that I have discussed in the earlier analytical chapters. This chapter raises questions rather suggests conclusions, as the topic for discussion mainly seems to be connected with the later years of schooling, even though, as I demonstrate, instances of what may be interpreted as the “seeds” of counter-culture may be found in the early years as well. Chapter twelve is the concluding chapter, which summarises some of the findings mentioned above. It also mentions subjects that call for further research, and finally it points towards some practical implications of the prior analyses for a pedagogical approach to multicultural schools that aims to further equal opportunities of participation for children with different cultural identities and different kinds of cultural capital.