Peruvian Meatballs?: 'Constructing the Other in the performance of an inclusive school'

• Main Authors: Anna Åhlund, Rickard Jonsson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Helsinki University Press 2016-08-01
• Series: Nordic Journal of Migration Research
• Subjects: second language education; identification; inclusive school; the (ethnic) other; school ethnography
• Online Access: https://journal-njmr.org/articles/199

In Swedish schools, newly arrived refugee and immigrant students are provided with a language introductory programme, designed for integration into the mainstream school system. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork on classroom conversations in one such introductory programme, this study analyses how Swedish as second language (SSL) students are positioned and position themselves in everyday discursive practices. The participants strive to qualify for mainstream programmes through performing a ‘regular’ student identity. Although educational aim and the students’ investments coincide, in doing the inclusive school, the institution calls for the students to perform ethnicity. The student identities thus emerge in and through a cluster of performative effects of how they are addressed by the school as ‘ethnic’ students, and how they manage those very positionings. Paradoxically, an institutional construction of an inclusive school draws on a discourse of Otherness in which the student’s voices are invited but seem to be ignored.