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Abstract

This article explores how the development of mother-tongue instruction (MTI) policies in the Danish welfare state have created varying notions of difference and sameness in the schooling of migrant students and how they experience these notions locally in practice. Based on an analysis of MTI’s policy history and oral history interviews with former migrant students, we analyse MTI policy development within the Danish welfare state as a primary case and discusses whether these developments seem to be unique to the Danish welfare state by considering (West) Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden as a comparative perspective. Noting the paradoxes and dynamics of the welfare-state policy of ‘school for all under one roof’ at the intersections between the policy and practice level, we posit that migrant students are regulated as a homogeneous group that is expected to be ‘the same’ but is simultaneously considered to be ‘different’ from other, majority students. The findings thus reveal the paradox of welfare-state education policies and practice: while macro scale policy for migrant education aims to emphasise difference through MTI, the social consequences at the micro level show the opposite; namely, that MTI produces feelings of sameness and belonging among migrant students.

Keywords

Mother tongue instruction Northern European welfare states pedagogisation of policy immigration policy educationalisation migrant education history migrant education policy

Introduction

Around 1970, Denmark, along with other European nation-states, began to explicitly state the right to education for foreign children, following an EU resolution recommending member countries to guarantee migrant children’s school education¹ (Bonjour and Schrover, 2015; Driessen, 2000; Faas, 2008; Jønsson, 2013; Lehman, 2019). In the years that followed, organisations such as The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),² the Council of Europe³ and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)⁴ were arguing in favour of migrant children’s educational right to learn their mother tongue and explore their cultural heritage. Alongside these international developments, countries with a substantial number of guest workers began noticing the migrant students entering their national education systems, and thus they began to address the growing amount of cultural and ethnic diversity in their public education systems⁵ (Buchardt, 2014; Lehman, 2019). The aim of this article is to broadly explore how the Danish welfare state crafted (at the macro level) and practised (at the micro level) school policies towards these migrant children. We investigate how the Danish welfare state has created varying policies of difference and sameness in schooling for migrant students and how migrant students experience these policies in practice, using mother-tongue instruction (MTI) as a case. This article traces how a policy of migrant education, MTI, has been combined with the programme of the welfare-state school ‘for all’ and the expectation that all students should receive the same instruction in order to have the same life opportunities. MTI serves as a case in this article because the language of instruction in education affects the proficiency and legitimacy of that language to the future citizens of the Danish welfare state. As welfare institutions expanded in the decades following World War II, education played a pivotal role in shaping future generations of welfare-state citizens (Buchardt et al., 2013).

Denmark is an interesting case because, in recent decades, it has gained a somewhat notorious reputation for its very restrictive and harsh immigration and integration policies (Breidahl, 2017; Brochmann et al., 2010; Salö, 2018). Yet in the 1960s and 1970s, Denmark, like other Northern European welfare states, recruited a substantial number of guest workers through the so-called ‘guest-worker programmes’ due to the increased industrialisation and subsequent optimisation of the previous century (Jønsson, 2013; Van De Werfhorst and Van Tubergen, 2007; Vasta, 2007). The Northern European welfare states were under the assumption that these guest workers would return home once their participation in their host country’s labour market became obsolete (Bonjour and Schrover, 2015; Jønsson, 2013; Willke, 1975). However, evident from the sizeable diaspora of guest-worker migrant groups, this was not what happened. Instead, many stayed, opting to achieve family reunification and settling more permanently. These adults and children gradually entered national welfare institutions, including the education system.

In this article, we make three contributions to the research field of migrant education along different axes. Firstly, through the comparative historical policy perspective showing the policy developments at the macro level are not unique to the Danish welfare state. While previous work pointed to differing rationales over time in MTI policies in Denmark (Daugaard, 2015; Gilliam and Gulløv, 2012; Kristjánsdóttir, 2018), we reveal the contours of three ‘phases’ which extend to other Northern European MTI policies. Secondly, we contribute with new historical depth by investigating pedagogised Danish policies in practice by means of oral history interviews conducted with former migrant students in Denmark who arrived between the 1970s and the 1990s. The pedagogised Danish policies have not been approached from a student perspective in previous work on this period (Øland, 2012). We show that migrant students are regulated as a homogeneous group that is expected to be ‘the same’ but simultaneously considered to be ‘different’ from other, majority, students, and that the aforementioned ‘phases’ are dynamic and overlapping, rather than linear and inevitable. Thirdly, we reveal the paradoxes and dynamics of intentions in MTI policies and the social consequences in welfare-state education by analysing the intersections between the macro and micro levels. Earlier historical work has mainly analysed one level such as policies (Jønsson, 2013; Kristjánsdóttir, 2018), welfare professionals (Buchardt, 2014; Øland et al., 2019) or pupils (Gilliam, 2009). Our main finding is that, while macro-scale policy for migrant education aims to emphasise difference through MTI, the social consequences at the micro level show the opposite; namely, MTI produced feelings of sameness and belonging among migrant students. Belonging is here understood as emotional and spatial attachment to different contexts, subjectivities and communities – it is about feeling ‘at home’ (Yuval-Davis, 2016).

In the following sections, we first situate this study through the theoretical framework and methodological approach, before moving on to the analyses. The analysis sections’ structure follows our three contributions: the historical development of MTI policies at the macro level, the migrant students’ experience of the practice of MTI at the micro level and the intersections between these two levels.

Policy and practices of migrant education as the processes of educationalisation and pedagogisation

In order to investigate the entanglements of policies and practices of migrant education, we analytically apply the intersecting processes of educationalisation and pedagogisation (Buchardt, 2018). Educationalisation is a theoretical development of the Foucauldian concept of problematisation. Problematisation is ‘a complex of attentions, worries and ways of reasoning which produce what is possible to think of as paedagogical content and as the nature of the child’ (Plum, 2014: 571). Foucault argues that the processes of problematisation are the events in which the definition and redefinition of who we are, what we do, and the world we live in take place (Foucault, 1990). Educationalisation as a concept builds on empirical observations of the assumption that social problems can be solved through education. It has played a central role in the modernisation and construction of newly emerging nation-states since the 19th century in a European context (Depaepe, 2012; Depaepe and Smeyers, 2008; Tröhler, 2016). Therefore, in our analysis of the historical development of national policies on migrant education in the Northern European welfare states, we question how migrants are problematised as social problems and how education is the assumed solution (the policy analysis). However, we also wish to explore the lived effects of educationalisation in order to illuminate how the micro-political history (of the lived experience) can complicate and nuance the macro history (of written national policies). Therefore, we examine how these policies are transformed and pedagogised (Bernstein, 1996; Buchardt, 2018) through migrant students’ experiences of and perspectives on schooling. Hence in this article we use the concept of educationalisation to investigate policy at macro level, whereas we apply the concept of pedagogisation to explore how these policies are transformed at the micro level. Drawing on Bernstein (1996), we conceptualise educational institutions as productive sites in modelling problems and resources of societal attention due to their practices and knowledge production. Thus, through the migrant students’ lens, we explore the paedagogical interventions through which teachers, school leaders and students deal with the knowledge, social structures and categories that are produced in other social fields and transformed through the school’s own logic. Hence we seek to capture the professional translation of the policies as it is experienced by the migrant students.

Methods and materials

Our point of departure is around 1970 when European welfare states began paying policy attention towards migrant children’s schooling, which signifies the beginning of a distinct educationalisation of migrant families. The trajectories of these policy measures are initially the focus of our comparative policy analysis of four European welfare states, while we in this paper focus specifically on the Danish policies as a primary case for the pedagogisation of the policies. The selected comparative perspectives include (West) Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden and serve to illuminate and nuance how European policy trajectories unfold over multiple sites and scales in countries with both labour market affiliation and an (at least) eventual EU membership. We therefore draw inspiration from Bartlett and Vavrus’ (2017) work on three axes to illuminate these European policy trajectories at the compulsory primary and lower secondary school level.⁶ The vertical axis encourages comparison between the different levels, here micro and macro levels. The horizontal axis refers to investigation into how similar policy points develop differently across sites and contexts, while the transversal axis draws attention to changes over time, historicising the analysis. The axes are intertwined and can be applied to varying extents (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017). We start by horizontally comparing how the bilateral agreements between the countries and guest-worker migrant countries go on to unfold across different national policy sites, and we transversally investigate the policy developments across time in the selected European policy contexts. Vertically, we dive into investigation across the micro and macro levels by applying a rare pedagogised student perspective on the migrant education policies of the 1970s and 1980s.

This approach allows us to focus on MTI policies across different European welfare-state trajectories and, ultimately, offers valuable insights into how certain developments in migrant education are not unique to Denmark. We investigate by means of publicly accessible national policy documents where possible, supplemented by literature on the countries’ migrant education policies. We then trace the pedagogisation of these policies through the lens of former migrant children in Denmark. While the analysis at the micro level is empirically exemplified by the lived experiences of former migrant student Yildiz in the 1980s, the analysis is based on 20 unique oral history interviews with adults who arrived in the Danish school system as children of migrants during the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews were conducted in Danish by the first author taking between one and two and a half hours in 2019–2020. It was conducted in the informants’ private homes or in public places, such as a library, at the participants’ discretion. The informants were between age 40 and 60, and they went to school in different geographical areas of Denmark – both rural and urban. They were approached through public posters in Nørrebro (an inner-city Copenhagen neighbourhood where a big part of the population has a migration history), postings on social media and by references from people who had already participated in the interviews. The notions of difference and sameness that are used in this article as anchors for the findings are empirical categories that will be coloured through the analysis on micro and macro level. These are categories we have observed through our readings of the policy and oral history materials.

In relation to oral history interviews, memory should be understood as an active process of making meaning rather than as a passive bank of facts (Perks and Thomson, 2016). Memories of the past are thus selective, fractional and not fixed. It means, working with the oral history interviews as material entails the complexity of the multilayers of time: The past in recollections, the past construed through the life experiences that happened since, the present seen in the light of the past, and the future imagined qua the memories that are evoked and processed. These layers are interwoven and have to be taken into account while analysing how the memories of a particular past is made and re-made in the present. We have chosen the case of Yildiz to illustrate the social consequences of the problematisation in policies because her articulations help us understand and animate the patterns of how migrant students in our sample experienced schooling in the 1980s in Denmark. Yildiz is a woman in her 40s, and she heard about our project through a friend whom we interviewed. The interview took place an autumn day in 2019 at her home in the countryside lasting about an hour and a half.

Furthermore, Yildiz’ move between two geographical locations in Denmark makes for an interesting case allowing us to trace how problematisation follows the group of migrant students as a categorisation and can have ‘real’ consequences for their schooling. Thus, the case of Yildiz illustrates the social consequences when these migrant students were treated and regulated in schooling policies as a group rather than as individuals, as previously noted by Øland (2011) In this article, neither Yildiz nor the names of places and institutions are anonymised or pseudonymised (with Yildiz’ consent) for two main reasons. Firstly, these places and institutions are records that aid in capturing the picture of the historical practices of migrant education in Denmark. Secondly, by documenting the former migrant students with their real names, our study seeks to give voice to a minoritised experience that is not part of the standard history (McLeod, 2016).

Mother-tongue instruction: A marker of sameness and difference

In the following cross-welfare-state policy analysis, we investigate how migrant students’ mother tongues become problematised and how this problem is to be remedied through an educational emphasis on the national majority language in schooling (the educationalisation). We horizontally trace across sites how mother-tongue instruction (MTI) policies create varying notions of migrant students being different from the linguistic majority students – and how these welfare-state policies aim for migrant students to be the same as their linguistic majority classmates.

Denmark

While Denmark is the primary case due to its current strict immigration and integration policies (Breidahl, 2012), the welfare state’s guest-worker programmes encouraged immigration during the 1960s (Andersen, 1979). These were initiated under the general assumption that guest-worker migrants would be young unmarried men, although local school authorities increasingly saw a different picture throughout the 1960s. The school authorities in Copenhagen were the first to ask the Ministry of Education about the status of the supposed guests’ children (Buchardt, 2016; Coninck-Smith et al., 2015; Jønsson, 2013). Due to economic stagnation beginning in 1970, the government put a temporary halt to immigration, tying work permits to proof of a specific job offer (Jørgensen, 2006).

Politically, it was argued that while the suspension of permits aimed to reduce the number of migrants, it was also intended to direct attention towards improving the social conditions of the (perceived to be temporary) migrants already in Denmark (Buchardt, 2016). In 1970, the Ministry of Education published a departmental note advising schools to welcome ‘foreign children’ and to provide them with foundational Danish lessons in smaller segregated groups, but maintained that the migrant students would be temporary⁷ (Buchardt, 2016; Odde, 1974; Padovan-özdemir, 2016). This was followed up in 1976 by legislation outlining how to organise reception classes similarly to the practices of Copenhagen Municipality (Clausen, 1982), including requiring the municipalities to offer MTI with a cultural component⁸ (Undervisningsministeriet, 1981: 24). Municipalities were to offer MTI if more than 12 children could be gathered within a language group (Buchardt, 2016). The statutory order emphasised that the purpose of MTI was for students to ‘maintain and develop their knowledge of their mother tongue and the relations in their home country’⁹ (§12), so their ‘possible return to the home country can be eased’ (§12, para. 2). The purpose of MTI was thus to facilitate the return of guest-worker children to their country of origin (Jønsson, 2013; Jørgensen, 2003), while simultaneously adhering to the European Union’s 1970 recommendations (Sälo, 2018: 598). Responsibility for further legislation on migrant education was delegated to the sitting Minister of Education (Salö, 2018), who can release a statutory order.

The statutory order of 1984 still emphasised that the purpose of MTI was for students to obtain knowledge of their home language and culture,¹⁰ while also stating the importance of learning Danish. Regeringen (1984) As this area was the responsibility of the sitting Minister of Education, the 1993 School Act, for example, merely stated that ‘[t]he Minister of Education can decide if foreign language pupils should receive lessons in their mother tongue’.¹¹ Therefore, migrant students’ mother tongue is considered separate from the general law governing schools and, by extension, differentiated from the situation of linguistic majority students.

Other than the German minority in Southern Denmark, Denmark does not have any (recognised) linguistic minorities (Moldenhawer and Øland, 2013). The categorical division in Denmark is instead primarily Western/non-Western,¹² or European/non-European (Padovan-özdemir, 2016), because European citizens have certain rights established by the EU. In 2002, the public subsidy of non-EU MTI was removed and instead became at the discretion of municipalities.¹³ The municipalities were responsible for financing and organising MTI for students other than those originating in an EU member country,¹⁴ leading to a rapid decrease in municipalities offering the subject¹⁵ (Salö, 2018: 593). This removal was the result of a political problematisation of migrant students’ mother tongue by the prime-minister-elect during the election campaign (Kristjánsdóttir, 2006), who framed MTI as being in opposition to so-called integration efforts.

In 2005, a paragraph was included in the School Act that allowed municipalities to refer students with ‘linguistic needs’ to schools other than their district school (Jacobsen, 2012), further problematising students’ mother tongues Regeringen (2005). In the most recent 2019 curriculum guide, the purposes of MTI include gaining an insight into the ‘country of origin’s culture and civic conditions’ and ‘[easing] the pupils’ possible return to that country’ (Børne-og Undervisningsministeriet, 2019: 5). The latter formulation still implies the distinct perception that students with a non-Danish mother tongue are temporary residents. Not having the same mother tongue as the majority evokes an immediate notion of difference. MTI in Denmark has generally been a politically contested area and the subject is problematised as being in opposition to ‘becoming Danish’ (Kristjánsdóttir, 2006; Salö, 2018; Timm, 2008).

(West) Germany

Migrant children gradually garnered attention in West German Länder (states) as their parents requested exemption from compulsory German schooling in favour of schooling in their mother tongue organised by the embassies and consulates of their country of origin (Lehman, 2019). The first Länder recommendations were published in 1964, following the 1963 Standing Conference.¹⁶ While migrant children would be admitted to segregated classes in German-language instruction during the mornings, the recommendations encouraged states to make embassies and consulates responsible for instruction in the mother tongue during the afternoons.¹⁷ Congruent with the Danish assumption, the guest workers (Gastarbeiter) were perceived to be temporary. Compared to other migrant groups, they were therefore largely assumed to merely need their mother tongue to repatriate.¹⁸ The non-German children who might potentially stay simply ‘needed enough German language to integrate socially and be able to hold an (unskilled) job’ (Lehman, 2019: 135). The Standing Conference’s recommendations therefore fully supported these ‘temporary’ migrant children’s right to develop their mother tongue language skills.¹⁹ However, the consular instruction was not permitted universally for migrant children. As early as 1962, in North Rhine-Westphalia in West Germany, only guest-worker children deemed ‘culturally distant’ from Germany were allowed to receive consular instruction about their home country²⁰ (Lehman, 2019). This meant that the ‘culturally different’ (temporary) migrant students from Italy, Greece and Turkey could receive politically supported lessons in their home country’s language and culture. Dutch guest-worker children, however, were deemed ‘Germanic’ and did not receive this privilege, but were instead relegated to the regular German classes. The ‘culturally other’ migrants were portrayed in the media as both economically and culturally poor and hence problematised as different from perceived Germanic peoples (Faas, 2008; Lehman, 2019). While the 1971 Standing Conference recommended that all foreign children receive instruction of some sort in their mother tongue, leaving this up to the different states led to huge variations in provision (Crul et al., 2019), overcrowded classes and overdependence on the different embassies and consulates to finance it and provide teachers (Willke, 1975). At this time, the focus in the individual states was already directed towards these children acquiring German-language skills, even though (non-educational) national immigrant policy emphasised the perception that labour migrants would return to their home country (Qureshi and Janmaat, 2014).

By the 1990s, MTI was recommended in national guidelines, but the quality and quantity remained uncertain, due to differing Länder interpretations of the guidelines (Duarte, 2011). When bilingual programmes or mother-tongue instruction was halted, after the 1990s this was often due to ‘feasibility, financing and the prioritisation of German language skills’ (Miera, 2007: 20). Nowadays, MTI legislation is delegated to the Länder, which has resulted in some Länder ensuring broad access to MTI (e.g. North Rhine-Westphalia) while others have abandoned it (e.g. Bavaria) (Olfert and Schmitz, 2018), similarly to the effect of municipal autonomy on MTI in Denmark. Only in schools for minorities, such as the Danish and Sorbian schools, is MTI as a subject integrated into the timetable and fully supported both financially and politically (Olfert and Schmitz, 2018). The four official Germany minorities receive special status and federal support.²¹

The Netherlands

There are two primary reasons why migrant education did not receive much public or scholarly attention in the Netherlands until the 1980s (Stevens et al., 2011). Firstly, the Netherlands’ status as a coloniser meant that the post-WWII influx of citizens from the former Dutch-speaking colonies (particularly Suriname and the Dutch Antilles) were assumed to blend into the school system relatively smoothly, as the structure was largely comparable to that of their home country (and language) (Rijkschroeff et al., 2005). Secondly, since as early as 1967, larger cities had left embassies, NGOs and private entities in charge of instruction in the mother tongue, similarly to the German approach (Braster and del Pozo Andrés, 2001). This resulted in migrant children living unproblematised parallel lives to their Dutch counterparts (Driessen, 2004; Driessen and Van Tier Grinten, 1994). In the late 1960s, a social democratic public discourse suggested that the state had a moral obligation to help socially disadvantaged people in the country, also benefitting migrant students (Bonjour and Duyvendak, 2018). From 1970, the government began partly financing mother-tongue education offered by embassies and consulates and, through the Educational Incentive Policy (EIP) of 1974, migrant students’ right to schooling on an equal footing with nationals and to mother-tongue instruction was established and encompassed the same right as in the Danish legislation (Rijkschroeff et al., 2005). The purpose of the 1974 EIP was twofold; on the one hand, it attempted to cater to migrants assumed to be settling permanently and on the other to those who were assumed to be in the Netherlands merely temporarily. In this regard, MTI could serve as a mediator for learning Dutch, but also to facilitate return to the home country, as emphasised in the Danish case (Driessen and Dekkers, 2008). The government wanted to ensure that migrant students were prepared for both outcomes: integration and repatriation.

During the 1980s, there was a widespread realisation that the guest workers would not return to their countries of origin, and in the political debates the emphasis shifted to migrant students’ future as permanent residents in a predominantly Dutch-speaking society. The Ethnic Minorities Policy of 1983 recognised the permanency of guest-worker migrants and simultaneously framed them as a group with ‘poor prospects’ and thus in need of help (Bonjour and Duyvendak, 2018). This problematisation (and distinct educationalisation) of migrants and other minorities was closely linked to their perceived socioeconomic situation, and they were therefore lumped together as having the same ‘difference’. The 1983 Ethnic Minorities Policy, for example, applied to Southern Europeans, the four major migrant groups²² and Roma and Sinti groups. However, it did not apply to Chinese migrants, for example, because they were not seen as the same kind of minorities (Vasta, 2007). In 1985, the Dutch weighted funding system (from 1974) for schools therefore included migrant children as a category, thereby releasing additional funding (Bruquetas-Callejo et al., 2011; Guiraudon et al., 2005). During the 1980s, certain large migrant groups were therefore considered to be distinct ethnic minorities²³ (Guiraudon et al., 2005). The migrant category and special provisions were removed again in 1998, when the reins were transferred to the municipalities and the focus returned to socioeconomic factors (Driessen and Dekkers, 2008: 452). Part of this policy change emphasised early intervention, enacted as special attention being paid to migrant children learning the Dutch language rather than their mother tongue (Rijkschroeff et al., 2005). The argument was similar to the Danish case, in that all children should speak the same language. The sameness argument was also used when the cultural component of MTI was removed in 1991 (Rijkschroeff et al., 2005).

MTI was mostly received by students with a Turkish or Moroccan background until the removal of all government support in 2004, by which time the effect of MTI on the national language as a second language had been questioned for decades. The focus was instead explicitly and legislatively moved towards learning Dutch, so that all students spoke the same language (Driessen, 2000; Driessen and Dekkers, 2008; Vasta, 2007).

Sweden

With Sweden’s post-war introduction of the universal social democratic welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990), policies were initially characterised as ‘Swedifying’ assimilatory policies (including enforcing Swedish as the national language). Only during the late 1960s did Swedish policies begin to emphasise equality across social groups, including (old) minorities, who benefitted from the emerging group of labour migrants (Borevi, 2014). In 1966, MTI with a cultural component was extended to migrant children²⁴ (Bajqinca, 2019). The distinction between minorities and migrants is important in the Swedish context. Firstly, it is important due to the (widely regarded as shameful) history of ‘Swedifying’ groups such as the Sámi minority (Borevi, 2014; von Brömssen and Olgaç, 2010), which meant that, by the late 1960s, the government was keen to avoid similar policies. Combined with concerns over the potential ‘semi-lingualism’²⁵ of Finnish Swedes, researched by Niels Erik Hansegård, the historical treatment of minorities was pivotal in convincing Swedish legislators to adopt a more multicultural and integrationist approach (Salö, 2018). This multicultural approach was increasingly backed throughout the 1960s by both scientists and officials in an appointed Commission of Immigration (Wickström, 2015). Concurrent with (especially Finnish-speaking) activists’ persistent push for extensive and explicit rights for migrants in order to preserve their cultural and linguistic identity, 1975 saw the introduction of the ‘immigrant and minorities policy’ (Borevi, 2014; Salö, 2018). This policy favoured ‘equality, freedom of choice and partnership’ (Borevi, 2014: 710), and, unlike the other countries in this article, Sweden explicitly assumed that at least some migrants would stay permanently. However, as evident from the policy’s title (immigrants and minorities), migrants and minorities were differentiated, although they initially received similar rights relating, for example, to MTI, which was officially endorsed from 1976, similarly to the Danish case. From 1976, MTI lessons were thus guaranteed for all migrant children, from pre-school all the way through secondary level,²⁶ while MTI at the primary level had existed locally since the early 1970s (Kupsky, 2017: 54). In 1977, the Home Language Reform was put into effect, legislatively considered to be the ‘cornerstone’ of MTI in Sweden for students speaking a language other than Swedish at home (Salö, 2018). The home language reform was mainly aimed at the ‘new’ migrant minorities and not those minorities with a long history of living in Sweden (Cabau, 2014). The distinction between ‘minorities’ and ‘immigrants’ was further clarified over the next couple of decades. In 1986, the government declared that immigrants were not minorities – minorities were groups with a long history in Sweden.²⁷ In 1999, five minority languages were recognised as belonging to the ‘historical’ minorities: Finns, Tornedal Finns, Roma, Jews and Sámi²⁸ (Cabau, 2014). Clarified again in 2009, official minorities’ languages are regarded as official national minority languages, including receiving special status (Salö, 2018: 593).

An evaluation of MTI in 1990 suggested that too much was being spent on the subject, and a concurrent law decentralising school funding meant that it was no longer mandatory for municipalities to offer MTI if fewer than five students requested it, or no qualified teacher could be found. In 1994, this regulation was altered, so that these restrictions do not apply to ‘minorities’, but only to ‘immigrants’ (Axelsson, 2005). The latter therefore had to exist as a group of a minimum of five to receive MTI. This, much like in the Danish case with its EU/non-EU distinction, resulted in a sharp decrease in the number of both hours taught and students receiving MTI (Bajqinca, 2019), as migrant students outnumbered minorities. This also indicates that the different languages of minorities are considered more legitimate than those of migrants. Furthermore, a government report in 1996 described how MTI had inadvertently become low status among teachers and that the subject generally was suffering due to administrative and financial problems.²⁹

In 2020, Sweden still offered MTI for students speaking a language other than Swedish at home. The argument legislatively remains that MTI facilitates the learning of Swedish, which in turn is seen as the ‘key to Swedish society’ (Bajqinca, 2019: 158), meaning that speaking the same language is the ideal. Migrant students’ mother tongues are then problematised as creating difference, which needs to be resolved through MTI that facilitates the learning of Swedish. Mastering Swedish is seen as enabling migrant students to attain the ‘sameness’ of the national majority language speakers. While municipalities should ensure that students have full access to MTI, in practice, they tend to receive only a few, scattered hours of such instruction (Salö, 2018).

Is Denmark a unique case?

Like the other three countries, Denmark distinguishes between migrant groups (by EU membership) and, as in the other countries, this has resulted in a decline in mother-tongue instruction rights for migrant students originating from non-EU countries, or without a minority history in the country in question. None of the four countries has included labour migrants as official minorities, in spite of their numbers being larger than those deemed official minorities. This excludes them from European legislation, which ensures the rights of recognised minorities,³⁰ thus balancing between ensuring equal rights for some citizens and the exclusion of others (Joppke, 2005). The initial ‘phase’ of generous support for MTI in Denmark is similar to that seen in the other welfare-state cases in this article, which is largely due to a united European framework aimed at tackling the issue early on, illustrating the origins of fundamental structures and dilemmas. The generous support in Denmark was contingent on the perceived temporariness of guest-worker migrants as a group, and this was seemingly also the case in (West) Germany and the Netherlands. Being guests alludes to being different and belonging to a different nation, which results in a lack of policies aiming for sameness with the linguistic majority students. Over time, MTI policies in all four countries have become rooted in the notion of being able to facilitate the learning of the national majority language, using the students’ difference to enable their linguistic ‘sameness’ with the majority, non-migrant population (Cabau, 2014; Salö, 2018). This can be perceived as the contours of a sort of second ‘phase’ following the early generous policy ‘phase’. In recent decades, a new third ‘phase’ can be detected, where using MTI to facilitate learning of the national majority language was renegotiated in Denmark and the Netherlands in favour of an even greater emphasis on the national majority language. Although Sweden explicitly acknowledges migrants’ right to difference, MTI is still – as in the other countries’ ‘second’ phase – argued to serve as a tool to facilitate the national majority language, and migrant students as a group are perceived as distinctly less legitimate than their recognised minority classmates. The Danish initial support for MTI, followed by the notion of MTI serving as a mediator and then, lastly, MTI being considered an actual hindrance to learning the national majority language, specifically for migrant students, can therefore be understood as contours of ‘phases’ that are by no means unique to the Danish context. By investigating the problematisation of migrant students’ mother tongues, we show how welfare states do not necessarily embody a ‘school for all’ sentiment, as the ‘differentness’ of migrant students’ mother tongues goes against the emphasised ideal of sameness.

In the next, micro-policy, section, we will investigate how the embodied lived experience of the migrant can nuance this perception of the policies and their intertwined ‘phases’, illustrated through the experiences of former migrant student Yildiz.

Pedagogised policies of sameness and difference

When looking at the pedagogisation of the policies, it is striking how much emphasis was placed on both the academic and social dimensions of schooling. Above all, issues of social interaction between migrant students and ethnic Danish students (the social mix) were discussed as criteria for successfully schooling migrant students during the late 1970s (see e.g. Fremmedarbejderbladet 1975.08.12; Hjemmet og skolen no. 63, særnummer om fremmedsprogede elever, 1973). In our interviews with former students of the 1970s, they often described being one of the few students of colour, and sometimes being the first one in the local school and community, regardless of the degree of urbanisation. While the number of migrant students rose rapidly during the 1980s, which enabled provision of MTI for migrant students of the presumed same origin across schools and districts within the municipal borders, the migrant students also experienced being deliberately segregated from each other: placed in different classes in the same school or another school than the district school. It is through the provision of MTI that the segregation becomes visible for the migrant students. We will hence shed light on ‘school segregation’ as a policy intervention that migrant students encountered, along with the provision of MTI as vital markers of difference and sameness. These paradoxes embedded in policies will serve as examples of pedagogised policies. The focus of this section will be the migrant students’ experiences of school under the shifting ‘phases’ of the initial support for MTI and the following ‘phase’ during which the notion of MTI serving as a mediator to learn the majority language held sway.

Yildiz moved from Turkey to Denmark in 1977 at the age of three and began Grade 0 in 1979 at Houlkær Skole, a newly constructed district school in Viborg. In 1986, her family moved to Ikast because her parents found job opportunities there. In Ikast, the MTI was provided in Turkish at Østre Skole (a school) at the beginning of the 1980s.³¹ Yildiz is today a local politician in the city council in Ikast and works as retailer consultant. The students in Ikast Municipality with a Turkish background were gathered into one class, twice a week, for two hours at a time. It was a class with around 15 or 16 students of different ages. Before this organisation of the MTI at Østre Skole, the students had had to take a minivan to Herning provided by Ikast Municipality because the municipality did not have enough students with a Turkish background to establish a class itself. The establishment of MTI in Turkish is itself an indication of the increased number of migrant students with a Turkish background in Ikast during the 1980s compared with the 1970s. For Yildiz, it was through the MTI that she again became trilingual, speaking Danish, Turkish and Kurdish.

Yildiz:

And it was there I started to understand Turkish because there were some Turkish girls who I started to hang out with. I learned Turkish through them, then I suddenly became trilingual again. So, from coming from Turkey and having one language, Kurdish, then coming to Denmark. Then I became monolingual, only Danish, and then, um, moving to Ikast, where the Turkish and Kurdish once again appear.

Yes. But primarily Turkish or what?

Yildiz:

Both.

Both? Yes.

Yildiz:

Yes. But, also, very much Danish, we spoke always in Danish, at home, we have always spoken in Danish, back then when I was living with my parents. That is also what we do now in my home [with my kids].

How did you get to Østre Skole? Did you walk or?

Yildiz:

We walked. And if you had a bike, then you biked. Otherwise, you walked.

How far was the school?

Yildiz:

Well, it was actually, how far was it, it’s around three kilometres, yes actually three kilometres. Or two and a half, three. We walked that. So, we gathered, the girls, block by block, and then we walked together. And we also walked together back home.

Yildiz recollects how excited she was about going to MTI twice a week. She talks about how the route from their neighbourhood to Østre Skole itself was a cosy, social activity, during which all the girls from ‘the blocks’ would walk together. She explains how hanging out with these other Turkish/Kurdish girls reignited her fluency in both Turkish and Kurdish, which she had forgotten during the years in Viborg because her family communicated mostly in Danish. She also remembers the class itself as simultaneously strict and very cheerful. She recalls not being fond of the teacher practising strict disciplinary paedagogy [in Danish: ‘kæft, trit og retning’]. However, she also says that she still thoroughly enjoyed the fun atmosphere created in the class.

Yildiz:

We had great fun in the class. We really did. . ..There the boys, well they were just funny and made fun of things and there was that time when we would watch a lot of Turkish videos, and then they were imitating them, just like stand-up sketches or so.

She still remembers some of the shared jokes and sketches from popular Turkish movies that some of the boys were doing in the class. Yildiz’ experience of MTI during the 1980s reveals a focus on obtaining knowledge of the home language and culture, while the importance of learning Danish through MTI as mediator was less practised, in spite of the presumed policy ‘phase’. However, it also shows how generous MTI enabled Yildiz to be part of a school community focussing on linguistic achievements, while creating a space of sameness and belonging. It seems that the sameness which was impossible for Yildiz to experience with her white Danish classmates hinders the foundation of belonging. Below, Yildiz recalls being placed in another school (Nordre Skole), different from the district school (Vestre Skole) at which she was enrolled due to her perceived sameness with other migrants and difference from her non-migrant classmates:

Yildiz:

Yes, and then we went to Vestre Skole. It was in the 80s. And the reason was that we, the area around Stadion Allé, we actually belonged to Nordre Skole. According to the school district. But there were many children with other ethnic backgrounds at Nordre, because um, many of them lived at Stadion Allé, [in the] social housing. Then the city council at that time, um, the school administration decided that when new [immigrant children] came, then they should be placed at Vestre. So, we moved to Vestre, even though we belonged to Nordre. And, actually, they didn’t know that we were very well integrated, spoke fluent Danish and all that, but we were seen as or with another ethnic background, given that we lived in Stadion Allé.

(. . .)

Yildiz:

We went to Vestre Skole, yes. And there were not so many students like us at Vestre Skole. It was also a big change for them. At the beginning, you’re very popular, because they want to look at you and all that, but then it was like the interest just declined a bit. It was also because the privileged kids went to school there.

Yildiz says that the reason for the placement was that there were already a lot of migrant students at the district school. The categorisation and regulation of the school placement seems from Yildiz’ perspective to be made according to two criteria; namely, that they were children from an immigrant family and that they lived in the social housing area. Yildiz recalls being placed in Vestre Skole, which had few students ‘like them’, meaning migrant and bilingual children. Yildiz felt that her family was wrongly categorised because the policy could not be aimed at those who were already ‘well integrated’ and spoke Danish well. Here, the categorisation of immigrant families did not differentiate between degrees of how well ‘integrated’ the families were, or the similarity to Danes the family had achieved by speaking Danish. Being a migrant simply meant being categorised as different and therefore in perceived need of being surrounded by Danish language speakers. This category had a strong effect on how Yildiz was able to understand herself as a child – namely, a migrant child who could be treated differently by the school system than the ethnically Danish children. This is an early indication of a practice that, in the 2000s, became the national ‘dispersion policy’ in the school placement of ‘bilingual students’. At the school, however, the authorities did not provide Yildiz’ family with extra classes in Danish because they could see that she and her brothers were ‘well-functioning’ and fluent in Danish. This also demonstrates that school placement was not due to an assessment of the migrant students’ Danish-language skills (as prescribed in the 2005 School Act).

Furthermore, Yildiz’ teachers were not attentive following her transfer and she had trouble in social interactions with her classmates. She was the only student in the class with a migrant background and her classmates were very curious about her background at the beginning, although interest faded after a few months. She explained that it was particularly difficult during recess and group work in class. In group work she was not invited to participate in any group and she tried to understand this by assuming that it must be because the class was already divided into fixed groups. In this way, her exclusion in the classroom became her own issue to tackle without mitigation by the teacher. She instead reasoned that when you arrive in a new class in the sixth grade, you cannot expect social inclusion. Somehow, she felt lucky that she had at least found a recess playmate from the grade below her, whom she had met during MTI class. This shows that the students’ experience of pedagogisation of the practice of dispersion, in combination with the provision of MTI (under the shifting ‘phases’ of initial support and seeing it as a mediator for learning Danish), entailed both inclusion and exclusion processes. As such, the pedagogisation of migrant education policies suggests that the social interaction between migrant and ethnic Danish students played a significant role in measuring school success, both for the school and for the migrant students. So, in spite of the dispersion policy’s intention to include Yildiz in the ‘school for all’, the only point of belonging and sameness that she found came instead as a consequence of her difference, the MTI classes and friends from there. The feeling of sameness is created through MTI because during the 1980s this practice still aimed to provide students with knowledge of the ‘home language and culture’, rather than emphasising learning Danish through MTI, as the overall policy ‘phase’ suggested.

Discussion

Our analyses show how the written macro-policy history of MTI intersects with the history of the lived experience as micro-political history. Together, they reveal how the educationalisation and pedagogisation of the ‘problem’ of guest-worker migrants’ permanency and family unification are constituted through various notions of sameness and difference. When we apply a comparative perspective to the Danish case, we see how, in three of the four countries, the mother tongues of migrant students were problematised and, eventually, became seen as an obstacle to developing the national majority language, suggesting that the ideal is linguistic sameness as the foundation for belonging.

The policy analysis of MTI hence illuminates the historical changes in the internal bordering of the nation within the framework of the welfare-state model (Kettunen, 2011; Suszycki, 2011). Certainly, the mother tongues of migrant students did not receive acclaim as an advantageous skill. However, the analysis of oral accounts bears witness to migrant students developing a notion of sameness through the MTI, which was important for their sense of belonging during their schooling. Through the oral history accounts, we are able to show the migrant students’ pendulum swinging between belonging through MTI (which was politically intended to constitute difference) and not belonging through the dispersal trend (which was politically intended to constitute sameness). This demonstrates the paradoxes of the entanglements of the micro and macro levels. While macro-level policies for migrant education aim for difference through MTI and sameness through school dispersion, the social consequences at the micro level reveal the opposite – namely MTI creating feelings of sameness and belonging, while school dispersion created feelings of difference and exclusion. In line with Chinga-Ramirez (2017) investigation of migrants’ schooling in contemporary Norway, this study shows that the welfare state’s inclusion project, ‘school for all under one roof’, becomes a nationalising project, where inclusion and equality in schooling are achieved by understanding them in school as sameness (Chinga-Ramirez, 2017). This reveals the social stratifications produced in educational institutions as struggles between the principles of universal rights and the national borders of welfare through the education system (Buchardt, 2018; Øland et al., 2019).

Conclusion

Our analysis of MTI policies has reiterated how welfare states are very distinctly welfare nation-states in their problematisation of migrant students (Øland et al., 2019, p. 17). The universal ideals of a ‘school for all’ are closely intertwined with notions of national linguistic ‘sameness’, where the migrant students’ mother tongues are problematised and perceived as a difference in need of remedy. Other Danish researchers have previously highlighted how MTI policies and curriculum disregard minorities’ non-Danish language skills and see them as something in need of remedy (e.g. Haas, 2011; Kristjánsdóttir, 2006; Øland, 2011). Our analysis shows how the remedy is pursued via a series of dynamic non-linear ‘phases’, which are not exclusive to Denmark but can also be traced in (West) Germany and the Netherlands. Sweden, in comparison, maintains the second ‘phase’: MTI is a tool to achieve sameness. When migrant students were considered temporary guests, and thus in the need of belonging for these welfare states, their different mother tongues were not problematised. This changed as MTI’s purpose was no longer repatriation and therefore their mother tongues were no longer considered a legitimate difference.

The pedagogisation of the policies resulted in migrant students living a different experience than the policy intended. Although MTI is problematised in policies as a hindrance to the welfare-state notion of sameness through ‘one school for all’, the migrant students in fact experienced MTI as a source of sameness and belonging. Simultaneously, instead of experiencing inclusion and sameness through geographical dispersion, they embodied and experienced difference from the linguistic majority. The lived effects of this policy combination reveal hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, as MTI enabled migrant students to belong to a school community and excel, which was seemingly not possible through being dispersed among their ethnic ‘Danish’ classmates.

The intersections of educationalisation and pedagogisation thus reveal the paradox and dynamics of welfare-state education policies and practice: While macro policy for migrant education aims for difference through MTI and sameness through school dispersion, the social consequences at the micro level show the opposite; namely, MTI produced feelings of sameness and belonging, while school dispersion created feelings of difference and exclusion.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our anonymous reviewers as well as associate professor Karen Nielsen Breidahl and professor Mette Buchardt for conducive comments on earlier drafts.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nanna Ramsing Enemark

Notes

Author biographies

Jin Hui Li has PhD in sociology of education and history of education policy and is an assistant professor at the Centre for Education Policy, Aalborg University. Her research centers the formation processes of student subjectivity in the relationship between education, migration and state-citizen relations within the Nordic welfare states.

Nanna Ramsing Enemark is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Education Policy Research at Aalborg University. Her research areas include the organisation of migrant education, welfare state’s education policies, comparative and international education.

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Educating to belong: Policy and practice of mother-tongue instruction for migrant students in the Danish welfare state

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Policy and practices of migrant education as the processes of educationalisation and pedagogisation

Methods and materials

Mother-tongue instruction: A marker of sameness and difference

Denmark

(West) Germany

The Netherlands

Sweden

Is Denmark a unique case?

Pedagogised policies of sameness and difference

Discussion

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biographies

References