Struggles for legitimacy in mother tongue instruction in Sweden

Abstract

This article focuses on the pedagogical beliefs, practices and ideological assumptions of 15 teachers who work with mother tongue instruction in Sweden. Despite support through provisions in Swedish laws, mother tongue instruction is clearly a marginalized subject, not least due to its non-mandatory status, the limited time allocated for it and the fact that the subject and its teachers are often contested in public debate. In this study, the teachers’ narratives center round issues of legitimacy, both for the subject per se and for the teachers’ right to be viewed as ‘real’ teachers. In this paper, we highlight how the teachers link mother tongue instruction to the notion of a ‘common heritage’ and how they see themselves as advocates and role models for the mother tongue. The teachers raise the status of mother tongue instruction in a transformational way, to a subject that is essential and can have a positive impact for a group of students who would otherwise be at a disadvantage in the school system. The undermining of mother tongue instruction was found to affect the pedagogical practices, as the teachers often took into consideration how their teaching would be viewed by parents and colleagues.

Keywords:

• mother tongue instruction
• teacher beliefs
• literacy practices
• heritage languages
• ideology
• structure and agency

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to colleagues from Stockholm University for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to Jeanette Toth for correcting and improving the English.

Notes

1. Since 1997, ‘mother tongue instruction’ is the official term used in Swedish policy documents to refer to the teaching of minority languages as a subject in the Swedish school curriculum. In line with this terminology, we will use the term ‘mother tongue’ to refer to the language/s encompassed by mother tongue instruction. Accordingly, mother tongue is not used to refer to Swedish in this particular paper.

2. The restriction in (2) has been criticized repeatedly by the Council of Europe, the Equality Ombudsman, and by several national bodies for the rights of minorities, since it excludes many children from participation in mother tongue instruction.

3. The term ‘home language’ was changed to ‘mother tongue’ in official educational documents in 1997 (e.g., Hyltenstam and Milani 2012).

4. The Swedish National Agency for Education.

5. All names are pseudonyms.

6. Interview and field note excerpts have been translated from Swedish into English by the authors, with the intent of keeping the translations close, content- and language-wise, to the original.

7. Since 2011, the grades in Sweden are set using a national grading scale of six grades (A–F), where A–E are passing grades and F a fail (Utbildningsdepartementet 2011:185). When we started collecting data in the fall of 2012, the six-point grading scale was still relatively new, and the fall semester of 2012 was the first time that teachers were supposed to grade pupils already in year 6 in compulsory school (where previously grades had not been awarded until year 7).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 721-2012-4275].