Abstract
To promote attainment and inclusion, Sweden offers tuition in migrant pupils’ mother tongues as a regular school subject. However, the formulation of learning aims is problematic, and resources allocated to the subject do not correspond to ambitions expressed in steering documents. This case study presents an analysis of the organization of Mother Tongue Studies at a highly diverse urban primary school, based on interviews with teachers and head teachers. The practical organization of Mother Tongue Tuition affects how mother tongue teachers and pupils are perceived, but also potentially provides opportunities for empowerment and educational development. Results indicate that in the investigated case, such opportunities are not exploited, placing mother tongue teachers in a state of continuous structural stress, while limiting the forms their teaching relationships can take. Additionally, scheduling the school subject Mother Tongue Studies at the ‘edgelands' of the school day contributed to further marginalizing languages taught as mother tongue and minimized interaction with class teachers.
Introduction
In a ‘stretched world’ (Fleischer, 2011) of virtual connections and interaction, physical space and time appear to have lost much of their former importance, and have certainly taken on many new meanings. Nevertheless, opportunities for physical meetings still retain much of their significance for teaching and learning practices. This study aims to consider some of the consequences of scheduling and other aspects of spatiotemporal work organization, in the context of mother tongue teaching at a Swedish primary school. Scheduling is a significant element of learning environments. Among other effects, it creates social groups over time, and thereby profoundly impacts the perception of who people are and where they belong (Nespor, 1994). Framing the material organization of learning activities in Mother Tongue Studies as extraneous to pedagogical concerns therefore contributes to creating what Reath Warren (2013) sees as a ‘hidden curriculum’ for the subject. Along similar lines, Corson (1999) sees language policy as a determining aspect of learning policies generally, and argues that school practices are the sites where national policies acquire meaning through their concrete forms. Corson further argues that tacit practices of teachers and administrators correspond to implicit policies that first need to be rendered visible in order to enable debate or reform.
The spatial metaphor of ‘edgelands’ will be used in this paper to consider a number of consequences of the ambivalence and peripheral positioning of Mother Tongue Studies in Sweden today (cf. Eklund, 2003; Hyltenstam and Milani, 2012). This concerns both the formulation of overarching aims in the policy documents, and the material organization of the subject as it is taught in practice (Bunar, 2010; Reath Warren, 2013). Assumed relationships between language proficiency, ethnic belonging and knowledge formation are not clearly stated in Swedish policy documents. Contradictions are thus managed through ambivalence – teachers are not ‘actual’ teachers, the school subject is not an ‘actual’ subject, and students with a migrant background are positioned as both the same and different (cf. Fridlund, 2011). It will be argued that the double status of being both inside and outside allow edgelands to embody the ambivalence and contradictions ensuing from monolingual valuing school practices. However, reinterpreting ascribed meanings simultaneously becomes a way to contain consequences of inner contradictions. As Hirst and Humphreys (2013) explain, an important characteristic of edgelands is to allow the evacuation of embarrassing but necessary features from a sanitized centre.
Aim and method
The present study investigates teachers’ and head teachers’ perceptions of Mother Tongue Tuition in a Swedish primary school, with particular attention to how teaching is organized in time and space. The implicit language in education policy is examined, through the lens of spatiotemporal organization, looking at the effects of work organization, scheduling practices and related aspects of the routine ways in which things are done (cf. Riehl, 2008/2009). At the same time, underlying views of language acquisition are considered, examining the consequences these views may have for pupils’ learning opportunities.
The study thus aims to clarify how concrete scheduling practices contribute to creating distinctions between groups, affecting relationships between the different types of teachers and influencing language status. Furthermore, the discussion aims to bring to light some of the tensions between the explicit aspects of language in education policy expressed in the syllabus, and the conditions for implementing this policy in practice.
Mother Tongue Studies will here be discussed both as the subject appears in the official steering documents of the Swedish school, and through the voices of mother tongue teachers, class teachers and head teachers of this case study. The analyzed interviews are part of a larger case study of a primary school in a multi-ethnic urban neighbourhood, using Stake’s (1995) case methodology. This sub-study is based on semi-structured individual interviews with six mother tongue teachers (abbreviated MT1–MT6 below) who taught at the primary school, and six class teachers (abbreviated CT1–CT6 below). Interviews were additionally conducted with the head teacher and assistant head teacher of the Unit for plurilingualism, and with the assistant head teacher who was responsible for administrating Mother Tongue Tuition at the primary school (abbreviated HT1–HT3 below). Long excerpts from the interviews aim to give a richer description and provide a more comprehensible picture of the context in which the teachers work. Teacher interviews were supplemented by talks with parents, pupil interviews and visits, with regular participation in activities of the school and the Unit for plurilingualism for a period of over a year.
Theoretical background
The characteristics of boundary zones and the social spaces that are shaped by them have been extensively theorized in various strands of human geography. One example is the concept of ‘edgelands’, which was originally coined by Shoard (2002) to denote the ‘interfacial interzone’ between rural and urban areas. The interzone not only derives its characteristics from the interaction between the rural and the urban, but also constitutes a separate and distinct zone outside adjacent areas, exhibiting its own particularities. The metaphor therefore seems appropriate for exploring the mediating role of Mother Tongue Studies as a social space, and in terms of how the subject is organized materially in time and space.
Notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are more frequently used to describe how cultures and individuals are positioned, whereas the concept of edgelands additionally emphasizes the mediating functions of boundary zones and the creative diversity that may result. Although suffering from a lower status, the relative invisibility of the edgelands nevertheless provides opportunities for transformation and creativity (Shoard, 2002). Issues of power are still present, but the ‘centre’ is not seen as an absolute determining point of departure. The urban edgelands serve to collect waste and become the location for functions that cannot be contained in the standardized centre, but such areas are also colonized by animals and vegetation from the surrounding countryside. Ambivalence and overlap are possible, and the exclusive binary of inside/outside is broken up. Shoard’s analysis of the edgelands thus presents certain characteristics of a ‘thirdspace of political choice’ (Soja and Hooper, 1993).
Shoard’s concept of edgelands has subsequently been theoretically expanded by Hirst and Humphreys (2013) in their study of the relationship between two workspaces belonging to the same organization, but located in the urban centre and the urban edgelands, respectively. Above all, their discussion includes the dimension of power. With reference to Lefebvre (1991), Massey (1995) and Ashcraft (2007), Hirst and Humphreys stress that viewing material organization as an autonomous entity given in advance ‘allows the power relations which establish boundaries to be hidden’ (Hirst and Humphreys, 2013: 1506). They further draw on Massey (1993) and Harvey (2006) to argue that spatiality represents a temporal positioning of functions in the organization they studied, where the central offices embody qualities associated with modernity, while the warehouse located in the edgelands contains functions perceived as outdated. Finally, Hirst and Humphreys argue that the spatiotemporal organization also represents a conceptual distribution of agency, with actors in the centre driving developments.
Spatial perspectives have much to contribute to educational reflection. Not only do thinkers like Lefevbre (1991) offer sophisticated conceptualizations of agency and structure, the individual and the collective, the social and the material, but importantly, several strands of geographical reflection devote serious attention to people's ways of understanding time. Indeed, the significance of introducing spatial metaphors to a large extent resides in highlighting various possible interrelationships between space and time. Both Massey (1993) and Harvey (2006) have a profoundly dynamic approach to social phenomena.
Theorists such as Lefebvre, Harvey, Massey or Soja draw on diverse ontological considerations and variously emphasize implications of ‘absolute’, imagined or social spaces, geometries and relationality. They also variously stress continuities or creativity, fluidity or friction and inertia. Nevertheless, despite deriving from different traditions of thought, strong lines in their reflection converge in their concrete implications. Social space is socially produced, but it is equally true that spatiality produces sociality. Treating spatiotemporal concerns as naturally given therefore allows a hidden agenda to be perpetuated, out of the reach of action and debate. Inversely, reflecting deeply on how people connect time and space, and looking closely at the implications of various ways of conceptualizing time, opens possibilities for political action (Massey, 1993). For instance, imagining mechanisms of history ‘outside’ the sphere of people's daily lived practices would tend to make them see these practices as framed or contained ‘within’ a historical context, rather than as work that itself actively produces and shapes historical processes. At the same time, Harvey (2006) has convincingly argued that lived experiences and personal experiences do not exist within ‘protected spaces’ outside the reach of underlying global structural forces that impact the conditions for how people as individuals make their way in the web of life. For him, human agency does not work in the free-floating realm of ideas, but in the dense interconnected practices of the material world.
The significance of introducing spatiotemporal analysis in education therefore involves looking at how work is organized materially, but also considering the way it is understood and the conceptual delimitations people make. By privileging a particular scale or level of analysis, such as praxis versus policy, or policy versus praxis, people render themselves blind to how they interconnect. This, in turn, tends to favour a static viewpoint, since each level will then be perceived against a ‘given’ naturalized background or state of affairs. One of the great merits of spatiotemporal analysis is therefore to allow people to gain a clearer perception of dynamics that cut across scale or context (Robertson, 2009). More fundamentally, perhaps, adopting this conceptual entry to concerns of ethnicity and language in education allows people to move beyond a number of otherwise paralysing dualisms or frozen perceptions of positioning.
It is here argued that spaces for teaching and learning are variously permeable, but also that they offer various meanings for the different people who consider them. Looking at the work organization of school through a material lens allows people to move beyond reductionist categorizations and delimitations, in the sense that work cannot be reduced to the professional and institutional functions that are performed in a given organizational context. Who people are matters. This standpoint does not imply that people's identities are essentially fixed or that they exist ‘outside’ the domain of larger structural forces or the steering mechanisms which are applied at policy and administrative levels. But people bring their experiences with them across the boundaries of contexts that they live, work or study in. They carry with them unique trajectories, and spaces of participation relating to their lived histories, but also unique imagined belongings, dreams and aspirations. Spaces of teaching and learning are thus not only connected through organizational structures or networks of interaction. They also relate differently to the various spaces people belong to outside school.
The spaces of Mother Tongue Tuition in Sweden are interesting, in that they potentially permit pupils to hyphenize their ‘here-and-thereness’, and bring in the ‘elsewhereness' of other spaces of belonging. Far from being marginal, from the vantage point of the pupils and their families, such spaces may represent a greater closeness and accessibility.
The discussion here will not include all of the aspects originally considered by Shoard, but only a few of the salient points in her analysis, as well as drawing on the further development Hirst and Humphreys (2013) make of the concept of edgelands.
In Shoard’s analysis, the edgelands are invisible and do not appear in representations. This is because they are only visited by those who work there or who need to pass through and because they do not correspond to the norms of beauty of society. Indeed, this relative freedom from dominant norms is what allows edgelands to perform the functions they do. Another significant feature of the interzones is that they are a location for functions that are necessary but which mar the purified high-status image that society wishes to project. The edgelands therefore serve to collect an overflow of ‘waste’ from the urban centres. Thirdly, this zone lies outside the focus of planning, which makes the environment richer and more diversified. While in planned zones, functions tend to be homogenized, everything that cannot be neatly contained in the standardized intentions of planning tends to spill over into the edgelands. These interconnected aspects – invisibility, low status, openness, ambivalence and flexible diversity of functions – can all be observed in the organization of Mother Tongue Studies, and will be discussed in the following sections.
Mother tongue provision in Swedish law
According to Swedish law (ch.5, paragraph 8 of the Compulsory School Regulations SFS, 2011: 185) students who speak other languages than Swedish at home have the right to receive Mother Tongue Tuition (modersmålsundervisning). In addition to language, the subject includes knowledge about culture, traditions, history, geography and social conditions in regions where the pupil’s mother tongue is spoken. According to the syllabus: ‘Instruction should also contribute to pupils’ knowledge about how to express own opinions and thoughts in different kinds of texts. They should also be stimulated to express themselves through other aesthetic forms of expression. Instruction should provide pupils with the resources to develop their cultural identity and become plurilingual. Through instruction, pupils should therefore be given the possibility to develop their knowledge about cultures and societies where the mother tongue is spoken. Instruction should also contribute to pupils developing a comparing approach to cultures and languages’. (National syllabus for Mother Tongue Studies)
1
Mother Tongue Tuition was introduced in Sweden in 1968 and has been a right since 1977, but the curriculum has been modified in the interval, as well as the organizational framing and available resources. Today, mother tongue tuition can be provided in various forms, including ‘bilingual education’ (tvåspråkig undervisning, paragraphs 12–13, Compulsory School Regulations SFS, 2011: 185), as well as a freely chosen subject within or outside the regular school day. 2
In practice, implementation of national education policies is delegated to the municipalities, which in turn delegate responsibilities to school leaders. At these levels, allocation of resources to Mother Tongue Tuition enters in competition with other pressing demands on tight budgets. Despite the multiple opportunities offered by legislation, very few schools choose to prioritize Mother Tongue Studies or bilingual education (Hyltenstam and Milani, 2012). Instead, Mother Tongue Studies is generally taught as an optional subject outside the regular school day.
For the purposes of the present study, a number of points merit particular consideration in the wording of the aims for Mother Tongue Studies. First, the mother tongue is framed as a language which is spoken in geographical areas outside Sweden. This positions the speakers of the language – including the pupil – as belonging to geographical areas outside Sweden. The practice of Mother Tongue teaching thus needs to manage edgeland contradictions of being positioned as outsider/foreigner, while actually living or being born in Sweden.
Second, using the phrase ‘mother tongue’ places the subject in a conceptualization of language development in terms of first and second language acquisition; to the extent that a person is assumed to have only one ‘mother tongue’, it follows that pupils who take mother tongue tuition can never achieve the status of only having Swedish as a mother tongue. This purifies attributions of identity. Despite professed intentions, bilingualism is thus effectively ignored and monolingual norms are thereby endorsed (cf. Hyltenstam and Milani, 2012: 65). The situation of newly arrived immigrants in the process of learning Swedish as a second language is conflated with other groups, including ethnic minorities, migrant pupils who are already fully proficient in Swedish, and those with a migrant background who simply speak the ‘mother tongue’ as a heritage language associated with one or both parents (Bunar, 2010). In practice, ignoring the complexities of bilingual pupils’ actual situations in Sweden can therefore lead to placing the pupil in a double deficit position: deficit through being positioned as a ‘non-native speaker of Swedish’, as well as deficit by being a non-native speaker of the heritage language in a context where this language is framed as being the pupil’s exclusive or main ‘mother tongue’.
Another significant aspect of the way Mother Tongue Studies is framed in Swedish policy documents is that the subject (Mother Tongue Studies) is described as instrumental for learning Swedish and thereby contributing to school success: ‘The mother tongue is of importance for the personal identity and development of the individual pupil. One of the aims of mother tongue tuition is that a good knowledge in the mother tongue shall facilitate the learning of Swedish’. (Ministry of Education and Research, 2008: 24)
Work organization and school development for diverse students
In the present study, it is argued that work organization is an important pedagogical component which impacts the development of inclusive learning spaces. This question is notably raised by Riehl (2008/2009), in an extensive research review where she discusses the conditions that promote diverse students’ learning. Referring to Meyer (1984: 186), Riehl underlines that ‘since meanings are encapsulated in organizational structures and routines, administrators can help change meanings by changing the routine ways in which things are done and how the school organization is designed’. Inclusive schools are ‘marked by sustained debate over the key ideas that vie for moral authority and what these ideas mean in terms of specific school improvement plans’ (Rollow and Bryk, 1993: 102, cited in Riehl, 2008/2009: 186). Additionally, with reference to Anderson (1990), Riehl contends that head teachers can act through ‘the day-to-day management of meanings among organizational stakeholders, through the mediation of conflict when open contention arises, and through the cognitive task of resolving contradictions within their own ideological perspectives’ (Riehl, 2008/2009: 186).
Like Riehl, Lahdenperä (2008) underlines the role of leadership and school organization for creating supportive environments for increasingly heterogeneous student populations. In the context of Swedish education and overarching aims of providing good learning opportunities for all students, irrespective of background (Ministry of Education and Research, 2002, 2008), Lahdenperä has reflected on the conditions for intercultural school development. Based on her studies of school development, she argues that this involves drawing on diversity among school staff and initiating an open and continuous dialogue on values. Elements of Lahdenperä’s model for school development include recruiting teachers with diverse backgrounds (see also Jönsson and Reich Rubinstein, 2004), and actively involving mother tongue teachers in the school’s educational development efforts. One concern of the current study was therefore to consider opportunities for such participation and collaboration.
Empirical findings
Sedentary and itinerant teachers
In the studied case, as is usual in Sweden, class teachers are both physically located and organizationally attached to the school where they taught. In contrast, teachers of the subject (Mother Tongue Studies) are organizationally attached to the Unit for plurilingualism, while they physically teach as itinerant teachers, moving from school to school for each lesson. This contributes to a perception of the two different types of teachers as belonging to quite distinct categories, rather than simply teaching different subjects. Mother tongue teachers are seen as being itinerant teachers, and teaching outside the school day: ‘Outside the schedule, before the beginning of the school day or after. And in rare cases during a free period. So that’s how it’s organized. (MT1) I work, I am at sixteen schools, today. Year one up to upper secondary school, also lower secondary. And [I] have approximately fifty pupils. And you know, our job is moving from school to school. And it … you get used to it, after some years’. (MT4) ‘Here it’s worthless, because it feels like all we do is to fight over the spaces. So that’s hopeless. I feel really sorry for them. Because we want to be able to be in our classrooms after the children have gone home to clear up and correct and fix what you need to do, and then they need somewhere to be with the pupils to have mother tongue instruction. So a conflict arises there of course’. (CT1) ‘And then it is actually not possible for children to move (directly) from one lesson to the next. They need a little while to catch their breath. So there is competition for time and competition for rooms. But I do understand the teacher who wants to clear the room after a lesson and have access to her room’. (MT1)
An invisible subject
At the school, more than 80% of the pupils have a migrant background. A wide range of languages are spoken in their homes, and large numbers of mother tongue teachers therefore come to the school after the school day. Nevertheless, their presence goes almost unnoticed: ‘… we see very little of the mother tongue teachers today. The mother tongue lies outside the children’s regular school, well, school time. So that we see it is if, eh, if we sit a while longer, so we see when the mother tongue teachers come and have their groups’. (CT2) ‘I would bet that it’s one or two hours a week, or something like that. I notice them when they borrow my classroom. Thursdays for instance in the afternoon, the Albanian teacher comes and borrows the classroom. That’s how I notice it actually. Otherwise I don’t notice it that much … I have no idea what their names are, even, or what subjects they teach, and maybe I should know that. Who they are, why they are here … They are teachers as well. So … yes’. (CT3) ‘It’s a suggestion that isn’t impossible to carry out – marking it on the schedule. I had an unpleasant incident with a teacher concerning year two pupils. Their schedule is outside the door, so I asked her if we couldn’t mark Mother Tongue instruction on the schedule. “No”, she said, “It’s not school” … It’s marginalized. You are on the school premises, but you don’t have a lot to do with what is happening in school, as a Mother Tongue teacher’. (MT1)
Collecting the overflow
Contacts with parents are an important aspect of the mother tongue teachers’ work. This can be related to expectations from the school, but may equally be a matter of parents’ expectations, or teachers’ own perceptions of their role as service to the community. However, mother tongue teachers are routinely called upon to resolve difficult situations. One teacher explained: ‘They don’t want us, but whenever there is a problem, then they want us’. ‘The mother tongue teachers are much appreciated, even if they are not there all the time, but everyone is calling for help, and we want to have the mother tongue teacher more at school, how can we collaborate? The requests are there, but unfortunately, it’s difficult to, hm, arrange it’. (HT1) ‘The mother tongue teacher becomes a form of cultural interpreter also, who can get the pupil to find his/her place in society, and also understand the school system and society, and how it works, what demands and expectations exist, and possibilities. So mother tongue is incredibly important, and those who come in contact with the mother tongue teachers appreciate this and want more of that help’. (HT2) ‘They aren’t here enough. We have too little contact. So that you have to catch them on the run. Mm … And that’s not the way you would like to have it, but it’s nothing we can do anything about. But they can provide support of course – they can talk about this thing with – how you see this thing about, eh – culture clashes’. (CT2) ‘And the differences in groups, the levels in one and the same group, if you have ten children in a single hour, if you have to find time for all of that and the pupils have different levels and you have to take their needs as a point of departure. I think it’s a big challenge’. (MT2) ‘… the spread gets to be so wide really, really, quickly, and here they arrive with very different kinds of knowledge in their luggage of course. And just because they are more or less the same age or go to the same school they just get lumped together and everyone has to try to develop from there’. (CT1)
A minimally planned teaching zone
Although Swedish law does allow for other options, mother tongue teaching was in this municipality organized as an optional subject taught outside regular school hours (the most common solution adopted in Swedish schools). In the studied case, mother tongue teachers were granted teaching hours based on the number of pupils who took a particular language, and this financial allocation of means is also common: ‘It’s groups, and then you distribute the time so that each five pupils generates one hour, never mind if the pupil is in year one, or two or three or four. It doesn’t matter. When our hours are assigned the rule is five pupils generate one hour. Then I do have the possibility to distribute the time myself. So you can get a year three, a year four, a year five and a year six in the same group. And that means that it’s different levels, and if there are special needs it is not taken into consideration. So you divide arithmetically, divided by five. One hour per week’. (MT1) ‘For instance, we start when most have finished for the day. I don’t have access to my pupils, not even the youngest in year one, before a quarter past one at the very earliest. Then half of the group go to the leisure time centre, and I need to find a time that doesn’t collide with the tea-break. So I need to find a time directly after they finish, have a break for tea, and call them in again … we are not allowed to have lessons after five. So there is a limited space. In the best of cases, between one and five, otherwise between two and five’. (MT1) ‘For instance, we don’t have a schedule, we don’t have special needs programmes and lessons are either before school, sleep-in mornings, or after school, when pupils are really tired and unable to concentrate. And it’s a difficult challenge for us to keep up pupils’ levels of concentration’. (MT2)
The assistant head teacher of the school summarized the organizational difficulties in planning the subject as follows: ‘More coordination (is needed) between the different schools and the Unit for plurilingualism. The way things stand today, we meet once a year. That’s not quite enough, even if we have many languages here. Our contact surfaces are not that numerous … I think mother tongue teachers have lessons at so many different schools that it is difficult to create that relationship, and to be able to be with the teachers when they plan, because at those times they usually teach. When the children have finished here at one or two, they have mother tongue classes, and then our teachers are sitting and planning. So the logistics in the whole thing are simply wrong’. (HT3)
Marginalized as a subject
Scheduling practices that place Mother Tongue Tuition at the edge of the school day contribute to perceptions that mother tongue teachers have a different profession, or are not actual teachers. Similarly, it becomes unclear whether the subject is in fact a school subject, or just an activity. Thus one mother tongue teacher complains that mother tongue is not considered as a ‘serious’ school subject: ‘… if we could prioritize putting mother tongue instruction during the school day we might gain more from it than we do today. Then it would be considered as a serious school subject. It’s an active part of the pupil’s work at school, not something that you should do after school when maybe others have some activity, a free time activity, and maybe the pupils think “Oh, my friends are doing something fun, while I have to continue to go to school, even if it’s after school time”. Or if it is placed on a sleep-in morning when others are at home sleeping, while I have to come to school’. (MT3) ‘… (put mother tongue) into the schedule, so that the pupil doesn’t perceive it as a punishment: “When all the others have gone home, then I have to sit and work”’. (MT1) ‘Well, what I spontaneously come to think of is if it were made into a subject that is part of teaching. Now mother tongue, the mother tongue is after the school day. And if you instead, that is, if you exchanged some subject for letting these children study mother tongue at a scheduled fixed time during the school day, then I think it would raise the status of their profession. I also think that it would make things easier for the mother tongue teachers, because I think they have relatively poor conditions. That’s what I think, but I am not entirely familiar with it’. (CT4) ‘But I understand a head teacher who has several hundred pupils and children in compulsory school, who also has to take on Mother Tongue Studies, it feels like: that as well! … Yes, on the side, instead of in the middle. That’s the difference: we are in the middle of this, because we don’t have any other activity’. (HT2)
Views on language and the purpose of Mother Tongue Studies
While class teachers and mother tongue teachers largely agree in their descriptions of the work organization, their descriptions diverge concerning the purpose of Mother Tongue Studies and the role of mother tongue teachers. In line with official documents (e.g. Ministry of Education and Research, 2008), the assistant head teacher expressed the view that Mother Tongue Tuition should support the development of Swedish: ‘It supports Swedish language acquisition. A strong mother tongue contributes to easier learning of Swedish’. (HT3) ‘They should have the priorities to develop the pupils’ mother tongue and support teaching at the school. That is, a collaboration between, so that they don’t have an own path which they follow but they should follow the same path that we do’. (HT3) ‘Our role is to become … Actually, we are like ambassadors. We bring across how the language is built and cultural traditions. That is our role towards our pupils. We strengthen their self-esteem and identity. We give better understanding also of other languages, such as Swedish and English. We are good role models’. (MT2) ‘I think that just like for all other parts of our mission we should focus knowledge and values – the issues of democracy’. (HT1)
Discussion
Functions and relationships with school and community
Not only is success and legitimacy of Mother Tongue Studies measured through effects on overall achievement, but studies have shown that pupils who take Mother Tongue Studies do in fact do better at school (National Agency for Education, 2009). Although the perception of Mother Tongue Studies as an auxiliary subject is problematic in terms of possibly labelling the pupils as being ‘in need of support’, at the same time this perception is the main argument for maintaining the subject in times of financial restrictions. Other subjects perceived as less important, such as Music, Drama or Drawing have been cut when schools needed to balance their budgets. Not unlike Hirst and Humphrey’s study (2013), Mother Tongue Studies thus indeed appears to perform necessary functions in relation to the school’s explicit core missions.
Positioning Mother Tongue Tuition in the edgelands of the school day cannot directly be interpreted as distinguishing ‘modern’ versus backwards functions as in the organizational case Hirst and Humphreys studied. Nevertheless, an analogous chronological distinction can be assumed in terms of the directionality of an imagined development sequence. To the extent that Mother Tongue Studies is perceived as an auxiliary subject, aiming at supporting the pupil’s overall ability to learn, the underlying implicit directionality could be said to be from the position of needing this extra support, towards a position where the pupil would be able to manage without it. At a deeper level, however, the relative status assigned to the various languages (see Bunar, 2010; Hyltenstam and Milani, 2012) mirrors the status of immigrants versus ethnic Swedes inside the country, as well as reflecting geopolitical relationships elsewhere.
Similarly, the invisible edgelands function of mediating between cultures is not only seen in practice, but can be discerned in the formulation of aims for the subject Mother Tongue Studies itself. 1 Here, the specific learning aims for various skills are formulated as being able to ‘compare’ between what applies in the geographical area where the mother tongue is spoken, and what applies in Sweden or with respect to the Swedish language. This can be taken as implying that the teacher and learner of this subject perform the necessary function of silently mediating between cultures, embodying any conflicts or contradictions that this may involve. In this manner, the interface between cultures and the interpretation of their relationship does not have to be explicitly stated or reflected on in official Swedish discourse. Conceptually, any tensions or contradictions have thus been relegated out of sight, to the edgelands of Mother Tongue Tuition.
Teaching in the edgelands
Shoard (2002) has emphasized that the merits of the edgelands lie precisely in the fact that they are minimally planned; this is what allows such zones to flexibly perform a multitude of functions that fall outside the standardized and homogenized representations which are showcased in the centre.
More generally it can be argued that regardless of how norms are expressed, certain pupils and certain activities will fall ‘outside’ any standardized norms. And whatever falls outside needs a space. The more narrowly norms are defined, the more space will be needed to take care of edgeland functions. This is particularly clear in those cases where norms serve to differentiate in-groups and out-groups, and which therefore operate in intrinsically excluding fashions.
To the extent that Mother Tongue Tuition does perform edgeland functions, by taking care of dimensions that fall outside a norm (in this case, related to monolingualism and Swedish ethnicity), its efficacy depends on keeping a measure of openness in the learning space. If teaching were planned more in detail, it would therefore be important to maintain flexibility and avoid standardized solutions. At the same time, it appears that certain aspects might benefit from a different organization. In particular, scheduling Mother Tongue Studies outside the regular school day substantially impacts the status of the subject (cf. Eklund, 2003), and thereby indirectly also affects the status of the pupils who study mother tongue. The subject is given a strong symbolic function (Hyltenstam and Milani, 2012), but only minimal resources. In terms of embodied practice, letting individual mother tongue teachers deal with the consequences of inadequate scheduling and resources is highly stressful. The gap between the declared ambitions of the syllabus, on the one hand and actual teaching and learning conditions, on the other, causes additional tensions.
The status of Mother Tongue Studies is both marginal and mediating, serving to negotiate relationships between the inside and the outside of school activities. This is expressed through the fact that the subject is optional, and reinforced by the fact that scheduling the subject outside the regular school day places it at times of the day that are otherwise employed for leisure time activities. The itinerant group of mother tongue teachers are not perceived as belonging to the physical space of the school, or indeed as being actual teachers, teaching an actual subject, on par with other school subjects.
As a subject, mother tongue is framed in policy documents as mediating between the personal experience and ‘identity’ of the pupil and a school context dominated by the Swedish language. Finally, with respect to practices and expectations, teachers with a migrant background are expected to deal with diverse difficult situations that arise in contacts with parents, not by virtue of a professional status as social workers or counsellors, but simply through the fact that they themselves belong to the same linguistic community that the parents are perceived to belong to (cf. Jönsson and Rubinstein Reich, 2004).
The person that teachers are outside school thus takes on a special significance for both pupils and teachers of mother tongue (cf. Lahdenperä, 2008). In other words, while the task of bridging home experience and the forms of knowing and expressing that are proper to school can be seen as a main task of any teacher, the case of pupils with a migrant background is framed as falling outside ‘normal’ teaching practices, and the ability to perform these functions is instead perceived as linked to linguistic community or ethnic identity.
At the same time, from the perspective of the pupils, this means Mother Tongue Tuition can actually have a positive function of providing a less formal learning space and which is more flexible and more sensitive to their individual concerns, with teachers belonging to their own communities who are able to mediate towards the official world of school. While the specific concerns of pupils with a migrant background tend to be treated as marginal within the ‘regular’ parts of school, these concerns instead become central for Mother Tongue Tuition. This form of teaching can be said to provide a teaching and learning space permeable to concerns that otherwise would be relegated outside school altogether.
A particularly sensitive issue seems to be the discrepancy in official discourse and steering documents between the aim of inclusive schooling (Ministry of Education and Research, 2002, 2008), and the separate status that pupils with a migrant background occupy (cf. Eklund, 2003; Fridlund, 2011). In the case studied here, the mother tongue teachers were expected to work with the ‘invisible’ edgeland function of mediating between cultures and resolving conflicts or misunderstandings between the school and the pupils’ parents. Although this issue has been observed in the literature (Bunar, 2010), it cannot be stated officially in a direct manner, since that would be in contradiction with the official statement of equality. At a deeper level, such issues challenge the implicit assumption that Swedish schools provide good and equal opportunities for learning, irrespective of the pupils’ background – a ‘school for all’ (see Ministry of Education and Research, 2002, 2008). They also challenge the assumption that the teacher’s personal and ethnic background is not relevant to how qualified he or she is to teach. This opens the question raised by Lahdenperä (2008) of how important issues of mismatch between teachers’ and pupils’ ethnic or social backgrounds might be, not only with respect to providing positive role models, but also concerning basic communicative skills and, importantly, with regard to which learning aims are focused upon and valued.
Conclusion
This paper has shown that a considerable gap exists between the aims and ambitions of Swedish national policies concerning each person’s right to have opportunities to develop their mother tongue, and the marginalized status Mother Tongue Tuition is given in school practices.
Unsurprisingly, when different activities compete for scarce resources, these will be allocated according to the perceived urgency and importance of the subject that is taught. This also concerns the spatial and temporal questions of allocating available classrooms and the times of day when pupils are most focused. Not only in the case presented here, but in most Swedish schools, mother tongue is taught as an optional subject outside regular school hours.
At the level of policy, it is thus seen that framing material organization as extraneous to policy aims allows underlying power relations to remain hidden (cf. Hirst and Humphreys, 2013: 1506). On the one hand, central authorities do not provide Mother Tongue Tuition with resources that would ensure adequate provision in relation to the professed aims, but on the other the responsibility for ensuing inadequacies in implementation is placed on municipalities and schools. Material organization is clearly what determines the actual meaning that policy wording can take in practice.
At the same time, at the level of work organization at individual schools, local interpretations of national policy do not merely lead to lower prioritization of Mother Tongue Studies compared to ‘core’ subjects such as Swedish and Mathematics; placing the subject outside the school day amounts to a segregated provision, while the itinerant mother tongue teachers are positioned as outsiders with respect to the concerns of the schools. In terms of school development conducive to the needs of a diverse student population (Lahdenperä, 2008; Riehl, 2008/2009), in the studied case, scheduling practices meant that very few opportunities arose for informal contacts between mother tongue teachers and class teachers, allowing them to engage in dialogue. While the mother tongue teachers themselves mutually benefitted from the diversity of their interzone in the context of the Unit for plurilingualism, this potential only marginally contributed to development at the schools of the municipality. In other words, the kinds of spatiotemporal organization of Mother Tongue Studies which are prevalent in Sweden today lead to a symbolic and conceptual distribution of agency (cf. Hirst and Humphreys, 2013) that tends to marginalize itinerant mother tongue teachers in numerous ways. Importantly, with respect to future development, the organization creates boundaries which physically exclude these teachers from the spaces and times where decisions are made at the schools where they work.