Sociomateriel modtagelsespædagogik: Et pædagogisk-psykologisk studie af nyankomne ukrainske elevers deltagelsesmuligheder i almenklassen

Recently, Danish municipalities have established a new practice in the reception of newly arrived children. Since the 1970’s, newly arrived migrant children have been enrolled in segregated reception classes that introduced them to Danish language and school culture before starting mainstream class. But with the reception of Syrian refugees in 2015, several municipalities have closed these reception classes and started enrolling newly arrived migrant children directly into mainstream class. Today, this practice, often described as ‘direct enrolment’ or ‘direct inclusion’, is found in approximately half of Danish municipalities. Despite its popularity, however, we still have limited knowledge about the effects of this new reception model.

In international scholarship, however, a number of scholars have been discussing how different reception models support or complicate newly arrived children’s possibilities of participating in school. This research is characterized by stark disagreements about what model to prefer. In response, one of the leading scholars within the field, the Swedish professor Nihad Bunar, argues for leaving behind the concept of reception models and ideas of a ‘best practice’, while advancing instead new ideas of reception pedagogies. Following Bunar’s critique, this dissertation adds to the debates about flexible reception pedagogies by studying direct enrolment in a Danish context.

With the new reception model of direct enrolment, a particular problem concerns newly arrived children’s possibilities of participating in activities in regular class when children and adults don’t have a common language. For that reason, the dissertation has, in both methodological and theoretical terms, aimed at decentralizing language by bracketing linguistic dimensions of the school environment. Instead, sociomaterial and ‘non-linguistic’ dimensions have been emphasized. The idea is to study if and how these dimensions of the environment in different ways can facilitate and support newly arrived migrant children’s possibilities of participating in school. Based on a relational ontological understanding of the reciprocal relation between child and environment, Gibson’s (1986) ecological approach is combined with Vygotsky’s cultural historical developmental theory, linking concepts such as affordance, the social situation (of development), perezhivanie, mediation and the zone of proximal development. On this basis, the dissertation explores the following research question: How can the organization of the sociomaterial and social environmental affordances mediate newly arrived children’s participation in curricular and social activities when enrolled directly in mainstream class?

The dissertation examines this question through a qualitative study based on 1,5 years of ethnographic fieldwork with participatory observations in one public school in Denmark. Soon after starting the project, the president of Russia initiated an invasion of Ukraine, resulting in more that 6,7 million Ukrainian refugees, of whom about 56.000 sought asylum in Denmark (UNHCR, 2024). Due to these geopolitical circumstances, the dissertation investigates the reception of displaced children and youth from Ukraine, by studying four newly arrived Ukrainian children’s possibilities of participating in social and curricular activities when enrolled directly in mainstream class.

Besides knowledge on the reception of displaced children from Ukraine, the dissertation contributes with more knowledge on how we can perceive the new reception model of direct enrolment from a child perspective. By decentralizing language during the field work and in the following analysis, the dissertation has tackled several methodological problems linked to taking children’s perspective on the ‘non-linguistic’ dimensions of the environment. Here, Hedegaard’s (1990, 2009, 2012, 2022) interaction-based method of observation and Bang’s (2008, 2009) operationalization of the environment as containing artefacts, places, and social others have played a critical role in the dissertation’s methodological approach. Adding to this scholarship, the dissertation develops four analytical concepts to better understand how the child orients herself in the new school context: orientation difficulties, orientation possibilities, orientation points, and orientation strategies. Based on these concepts, the dissertation explores how four newly arrived Ukrainian children orientate themselves in teaching activities when they cannot follow the verbal instruction in class. Besides, the dissertation explores how including and arranging artefacts, places, and social others in the environment as a part of the pedagogical reception work is significant for facilitating the Ukrainian children’s way into the social and curricular community in school. Investigating the four Ukrainian children’s social situation, the dissertation concludes, moreover, that their possibilities of participating in curricular and social activities in school pivot on whether school professionals include the children’s perspective while arranging the environment, just as it is significant whether the activities are directly mediated by adults or mediated indirectly. Inspired by Chaiklin’s (2003) distinction between a subjective and an objective zone of proximal development, the dissertation discusses how school professionals can work on arranging sociomaterial dimension of the school environment in practice. Ultimately, then, the dissertation not only offers new knowledge about newly arrived children’s possibilities of participating when directly enrolled in mainstream class, but also develops methodological and theoretical ideas on how to draw on the child’s perspective on the ‘non-linguistic’ sociomaterial dimensions of the school environment, and how this knowledge can support the facilitation of more including learning environments in schools.