School–Muslim Parent Collaboration in Finland and Sweden: Exploring the Role of Parental Cultural Capital

ABSTRACT

This study explores head teachers’ and cultural brokers’ views of school–Muslim parent collaboration in Finland and Sweden. The data includes semi-structured interviews with school heads (n = 20) and Muslim cultural brokers (n = 16). The theoretical background leans on the theorizing of cultural capital originating from Bourdieu and on more recent conceptualizations of minority cultural capital. The results show major differences between head teachers in their views and practices, recognition of parental cultural resources correlating with open and active collaboration practices, perceptions of lack of parental capital with authoritative and inactive collaboration. Cultural brokers promote active collaboration and enhance the ability of Muslim immigrants to transform their cultural resources into cultural capital in school, thus resisting the reproduction of educational inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural capital
• school–parent collaboration
• parental involvement
• Muslims
• Islam
• cultural brokers

Introduction

This study explores the role of parental cultural capital in school–Muslim family collaboration in Finnish and Swedish schools. Muslims in Europe are a heterogeneous group but a target of common prejudices and may be regarded as a low-status group and as the European “other” (see, e.g., Modood, 2003). Studies have explored issues related to the inclusion of Muslims in European state schools, and reported Muslim parents’ experiences of exclusion and concerns about their children’s positive identity development, which sometimes leads parents to prefer faith schooling (Rissanen, 2018; Ipgrave, 2010; McCreery et al., 2007; Merry, 2005). Not all Muslims are religious and may suffer from religionizing discourses; on the other hand, many have religion-based needs and lifestyles, the accommodation of which is much debated in European state schools. In these debates, Muslims seem to suffer from a credibility deficit due to the fact that religion-based arguments are often deemed backward and unintelligible by secular citizens of Europe (Epstein, 2014). Some studies have found that immigrant pupils from Islamic countries have lower educational achievements than other immigrant pupils (Dronkers & Fleischmann, 2010; Dronkers & vander Velden, 2013).

This position of Muslims as Europe’s “cultural other” and stigmatized as backward justify examining educational inequalities between them and the majority population through Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. According to Bourdieu’s theorizing, individuals struggle for different forms of capital through which they gain appreciation and power and which influence the structuring and perpetuation of inequality. Cultural capital refers to cultural resources (knowledge, preferences, values, beliefs and modes of expression) that are cultivated in different social fields. Embodied cultural capital converts into habitus (dispositions of thought, behaviour and taste) which constitute the link between social structures and individual agency. Attributes and competences can be regarded as cultural capital if they facilitate the appropriation of the cultural heritage of a society but are not equally distributed among its members (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986). Bourdieu’s theorizing explains differences in academic achievement between social classes not in terms of ability but in terms of the cultural capital acquired through cultural education in the family. Children are exposed to cultural education from a very young age, some of them having cultural education resembling the dominant culture taught at school, some not. However, since teachers often confuse cultural capital with academic ability and reward it, and at the same time ignore the abilities of pupils whose habitus differs greatly from their own, they reinforce these inequalities instead of combatting them (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).

Parental Involvement and Emerging Notions of Minority Cultural Capital

Decades of research have yielded evidence of parental involvement as an important predictor of educational achievement (Wilder, 2014). The research stream on parental involvement has often pointed out the deficits of ethnic minority parents and presented them as hard to reach, inactive and lacking in cultural capital; more rarely has research considered how conventional efforts to support parental involvement may overlook the cultural resources of minority families (Ishimaru et al., 2016). Yosso (2005) challenges the way in which Bourdieu has commonly been invoked in educational research to affirm certain groups as “culturally poor”, leading to efforts to promote equality by investing extra effort in children lacking such cultural capital. This study is interested, in particular, in the role of parental cultural capital in school-family collaboration (Lareau & Weininger, 2003; Reay, 2010). Parental cultural capital may, on the one hand refer to the knowledge parents have of the education system, their skill levels, levels of confidence and entitlement for managing institutional encounters and other cultural resources that help parents support their children in navigating through the education system. On the other hand, it includes (positive or negative) symbolic cultural capital – cultural preferences and values which develop into status signals rewarded by teachers, or, when contradicting the habitus of the dominant group, into a stigma. Some studies have found that immigrant pupils benefit less from parental cultural capital (e.g., high parental level of education) than do majority pupils (Kilpi-Jakonen, 2012; Leopold & Shavit, 2013). This indicates that teachers do not recognize and reward resources acquired in cultures different from their own, which inhibits their conversion into symbolic cultural capital.

According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. 5), “all pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power”. Cultural arbitraries are legitimized and naturalized as common sense in the social field of education by those wielding power in that field (educators) (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). However, some level of individual and collective freedom exists within social structures and practices: habitus is not entirely deterministic. This view receives more emphasis in Bourdieu’s later works. Scholars of critical multicultural/intercultural education who draw on Bourdieu hold that the symbolic violence of education can be combatted by increasing educators’ reflexivity over their power and positionality, and by challenging the naturalization of cultural arbitraries. By developing practices of resistance, individual educators may gradually change the ways in which the existing social order reproduces itself (Shim, 2012). If educators “strip the facade of neutrality from prevailing cultural standards, curricula, pedagogy, and instruments of assessment”, they can influence what will be recognized as cultural capital (Olneck, 2000, p. 323). In this study, some practices of resistance are brought to the fore by analysing the views of Muslim cultural brokers. In the literature, the title “cultural broker” has been assigned to intermediaries who in various ways help to bridge the worlds of families and the school: they translate and interpret language, help parents to navigate the school system, serve as advocates of the parents, enlighten school staff about the cultures of the parents and generally help the disparate social systems to adapt to each other; they may serve in this role both formally and informally in schools (see, e.g., Ishimaru et al., 2016; Martinez-Cosio & Martinez Iannacone, 2007).

A body of research has emerged which counters the deficit-based academic discourses on parents of non-dominant groups, and assesses and conceptualizes “minority cultural capital”. In order to explain the higher than expected (on the basis of their social class) participation rate of certain British non-white ethnic minorities in higher education, Modood (2004) introduced the concept of “ethnic capital”, which refers to the high educational aspirations of ethnic minority families and also to support received from their ethnic communities. Franceschelli and O’Brien (2014) further propose a notion of “Islamic capital”. They describe Islam as a resource for parenting: besides offering parents a support network, it helps to strengthen parental control, moral standards and a sense of duty, all contributing to children’s educational success. Yosso (2005) writes about the empowering potential of minority cultures that could be better capitalized in schools. In addition to the aspirational and social capital also inherent in Modood’s concept of ethnic capital, the aspects of “community cultural wealth” noted by Yosso include resistant and navigational capital, which entail the potential of minority cultures to promote resilience.

The concepts “multicultural” or “cosmopolitan” capital refer to cultural openness and experience of diversity as rising forms of cultural capital that seem to be replacing the role of traditional high-brow culture as a status signal. However, while multicultural capital can be seen as a desire and possession of the white middle classes and elites, it also may indicate more positive stances towards cultural minorities in schools (Reay et al., 2007). Immigrant families can be seen to participate in global cosmopolitan culture through their immigration project, and thus as possessors of multicultural capital – or at least as providers of multicultural capital for the native majority. In this study, the notion of “minority cultural capital” is used to refer to the above-described forms of ethnic, Islamic and multicultural capital, the role of which in school-home collaboration is analysed.

Finland and Sweden as Contexts

Finland and Sweden are Nordic countries characterized by egalitarianism and high levels of social trust. School cultures in these countries are also commonly based on trust, democratic leadership and low power distance (Lunneblad & Johansson, 2012; Rissanen, 2018). Finland and Sweden are becoming increasingly multicultural, Finland a little later and at a slower pace than some of the most multicultural European countries. Both Finland and Sweden have been ranked as countries of “strong multiculturalism policy”, (Multiculturalism Policy Index, 2010) but Sweden in particular has experienced a backlash in multiculturalism policies with the state taking less responsibility for immigrants’ cultures (Byström & Frohnert, 2017, p. vii). The majority of the population in Finland and Sweden belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, but these countries can be described as highly secularized. Muslims in Sweden account for approximately five per cent of the population, while the corresponding figure in Finland is one per cent (Larsson, 2015; Pauha, 2015). The Muslim population in both countries is heterogeneous. The state and municipal school systems in both countries offer instruction in pupils’ mother tongue and Finland provides religious education “according to pupils’ own religion”. In both countries the vast majority of pupils study in mainstream (not faith-based) schools; however, in Sweden but not in Finland there are also Islamic schools.

In Finland, attitudes towards Muslims are exceptionally negative when compared to other countries in Western Europe. According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center (2018), 62 per cent of Finnish people are of the opinion that Islam is not compatible with Finnish culture and values, and only 35 per cent of Finns personally know a Muslim: the respective percentages in Sweden are 34 and 71 (Pew Research Center 2018, pp. 66, 79). The numbers indicate that Islam is still considered alien to Finnish society. This discourse of Islam as an “other” to Finnish national identity is also reflected in the experiences of young Finnish Muslims, who distinguish between Islam and Finnishness and even associate strengthening one’s identity as a Finn with losing one’s Muslimness (Pauha, 2018). In Sweden, islamophobia has not been as widespread and young Swedish Muslims mainly hold implement an engaged identity strategy, but the situation is regarded as unstable (Kinnvall & Nesbitt-Larking, 2011). Furthermore, despite the generally more negative attitudes towards Muslims in Finland, Swedish educators are more reserved in regard to granting Islam or any other religions any visible role in the public space of the school (Rissanen, 2019).

Basic education in both countries leans by and large on the basic values of liberal democracy and human rights, and aim towards pupils’ holistic growth as responsible citizens on the basis of these. Earlier research has reported how the “secular normativity” of Finnish and Swedish schools indicates that non-religious positions tend to be regarded as “normal” or “neutral”, while religious positions and particularly Islam are seen to be contradictory to modern, rational and independent thinking (Berglund, 2017; Kittelmann-Flensner, 2015, pp. 115–120; Rissanen, 2018, 2019). Thus, democratic liberalism and secular Protestantism seem to be ideologies which Finnish and Swedish educators have taken on into their habitus; at the same time, Islam is negatively stereotyped by educators and educational texts in a manner that maintains perceptions of it as threat to the cultivation of core national values in education (see, e.g., von Brömssen & Olgaç, 2010).

However, at the same time both Finnish and Swedish curricula recognize various markers of pupils’ identities and forbid discrimination based on these in education. The Finnish curriculum, in particular, is markedly multiculturalist in its orientation and demands that all pupils’ cultural and religious identities be recognized and supported (Zilliacus et al., 2017). Furthermore, in both countries, school-home collaboration is regarded as increasingly important, and new forms of collaboration as well as parental education have been developed; however, there are also reports of immigrant parents being treated by their children’s teachers in a manner which they find alienating or paternalistic (Haga, 2015; Lunneblad & Johansson, 2012).

Data and Methods

The research questions of this study are: (1) What kind of views do head teachers and Muslim cultural brokers have of the collaboration between school and immigrant Muslim parents? (2) What do these views reveal of the recognition/misrecognition and cultivation of Muslim immigrants’ parental cultural capital in Finnish and Swedish schools? The methodological underpinnings of this study are linked to critical educational research. The perspective is widened from the micro dynamics of the classroom to the complex dynamics of cultural production and resistance in school; the critical ideas affecting the formulation of the research questions are expressed openly, and the inevitability of value-laden decision-making in every phase of the process of inquiry is acknowledged (Cohen et al., 2007, pp. 26–27).

The study aimed at advancing a multifaceted understanding through a multi-perspective view by interviewing individuals from two informant groups: head teachers of Finnish and Swedish urban multicultural schools (n=10 in each country) and Muslim parents and staff members, who serve as “cultural brokers” in the school communities (n=8 in each country). The cultural brokers of this study were (a) self-identifying as Muslim, (b) parents of a child or children who had attended a public comprehensive school in Finland/Sweden, and (c) employed in the Finnish/Swedish school system or active members of the school community. Thirteen of them were teachers (of religious education, languages, social sciences), two were special needs assistants, and one the chair of a parents’ association. Nine of the interviewees were female and seven male; apart from two native Finns and one second-generation immigrant in Sweden, they were first-generation immigrants (from Iraq, Iran, Malesia, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Turkey). They were fluent in Finnish, Swedish or English and the interviews were conducted in these languages. The schools of the head teachers interviewed were urban (Swedish schools located in the metropolitan area of Stockholm, Finnish schools in or near the three biggest cities of the country) and had between ten and 99 per cent of pupils with Swedish/Finnish as their second language and also significant Muslim populations. All the head teachers had previously worked as either subject or class-teachers and had between 12 and 30 years’ experience of teaching in schools; they all also had several years’ experience of serving either as a head or deputy head teacher. They were all either native Swedes or native Finns, and none of them was Muslim. Nine of them were male and 11 female. The author conducted semi-structured interviews with the informants in the spring of 2016. The interviews lasted from 50 to 90 minutes. They were recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The study is part of a larger project concerned with the development of inclusive citizenship of Muslims in Finnish and Swedish schools. There is also a comparative aspect in this project; the comparative aspects are more thoroughly discussed in previous analyses of the data which focused on negotiations on inclusive citizenship (Rissanen, 2018) and head teachers’ diversity ideologies (Rissanen, 2019). In this type of qualitative study, only speculative interpretations can be made of the role of country-specific factors as predictors of the observations. Overall, the study makes no claims of generalizability but regards transferability as an important measure of validity for this type of critical educational research; in addition to the detailed description of the study process and context, transparency is sought by presenting a detailed description of the researcher’s interpretations and the parts of data they relate to – but the decision regarding which of the findings are transferable is left to the reader. Wider questions concerning the development of Muslims’ inclusive citizenship in Finnish and Swedish schools guided the data gathering phase; using Bourdieusian concepts as an analytical lens for the data were decided on later. While they were regarded as an appropriate and useful choice, adding some interview questions more directly informed by these concepts would have increased the validity of the data and possibly enabled more courageous interpretations. In the analysis, Finnish and Swedish education systems are regarded as social fields, where educators, who mostly represent the dominant cultures characterized by democratic liberalism and secular Protestantism, use power to naturalize and legitimize the norms of these majority cultures. In the analysis, attention is paid to these processes particularly in the context of school–Muslim family collaboration, as well as to the Muslim minority members’ practices of resistance.

The research project was conducted taking an abductive approach: searching for unanticipated empirical findings and then constructing reasons for these through careful data analysis with the help of a wide theoretical repertoire (Timmermans & Tavory, 2012; see also Elo & Kyngäs, 2007). The data were analysed starting from consequences (head teachers’ as well as cultural brokers’ ideals and practices of school–Muslim family collaboration) and then examining the dynamics attached to these views using Bourdieusian concepts as well as more recent concepts of minority cultural capital as an analytical lens, systematically processing the data by forming condensed meaning units, codes and categories. In the analysis of head teachers’ perceptions of collaboration with Muslim immigrant parents, two discourses were identified: one in which the cultural resources of Muslim parents were not recognized, resulting in low motivation for collaboration, and another in which the recognition of different forms of minority resources as cultural capital was linked to ideals of open and active collaboration. These discourses reveal a vicious and a virtuous circle influencing the production and reproduction of educational inequalities. Cultural brokers’ discourses revealed ideas and practices of resistance to the dominant habitus in school, but also efforts to support Muslim immigrant parents’ chances to acquire majority cultural capital through school-home collaboration.

Results

Head Teachers’ Perceptions, Ideals and Practices of Collaboration with Immigrant Muslim Parents

Perceptions of Parents as Lacking in Cultural Resources Manifesting in Inactive, Authoritative and Controlling Collaboration

Head teachers often associated parents’ immigration status with lack of resources (such as language skills) for parental involvement, and indifference towards school. Furthermore, some head teachers talked about the “cultural deficits” of immigrant Muslim families leading to value collisions. There were many head teachers who regarded Muslim parents articulating their religion-based needs as difficult, irrational and averse to co-operation. They referred unequivocally to the values embraced by Muslim parents as being opposed to the “national values” and even mentioned detachment from Islamic faith as a sign of successful integration (see also Rissanen, 2018). Most commonly, these statements adduced the lack of gender equality in Islam associated with mothers staying at home and not being actively involved in school–home collaboration, girls being expected to marry too early and not fully utilizing the education opportunities available in Finland and Sweden, strict supervision of Muslim girls as a reason for why they lived two separate lives at home and at school and lack of respect on the part of Muslim fathers for female head teachers – all pointing to Islam as an indicator of lack of parental cultural capital. Some head teachers’ views of Islam as backward and as a barrier to (particularly girls’) education were evident:

PF7 (Finnish head teacher, female): One thing I maybe would like to develop with families is like  …  since we’re in Finland now, we have a high-quality education system, and girls, too, should take advantage of it as much as possible  …  There are these so-called more secularized Muslims who allow this.

PS7 (Swedish head teacher, female): And I like to think that we should be able to compensate for … whatever the home situation is like, so that it doesn’t matter if you have parents who are Muslim, or alcoholic, or who have gone to the university.

These heads regarded the perceived incompatibility of Islamic and national values as a reason for some parents’ lack of commitment to Finnish/Swedish society, which hindered their children’s integration into the school and into society. Altogether, head teachers’ perspectives lent support to the interpretation that in the social fields of Finnish and Swedish schools, positive symbolic capital is attached to secular-Protestant positions, while both Islam and immigrant background are stigmatized and can be seen as negative symbolic capital.

Head teachers’ perceptions of parents’ lack of cultural resources were linked to inactive and authoritative collaboration with immigrant Muslim parents. According to some school heads, due parents’ deficiencies educational equality in multicultural contexts is promoted by relying less on parental input. Thus, their indifference towards collaboration included ideals of actually discouraging school-home collaboration:

PS7 (Swedish head teacher, female): How much responsibility in school do we put on parents, maybe that’s not desirable […] we try to minimize those things, of course things happen in school with kids all the time, we have almost 1,000 kids, but trying to go from saying that your kid broke a window, talk to him or her, to saying, your child broke a window, this is what we did about it, and we solved the problem in this way, we just want to inform you … ‘cos that’s of course important, the parents want to know … but what happens in school, is meant to be dealt with in school and I think, for me, that changed working in a multicultural school where there were … for the most part there was no parental support or they couldn’t support us in school […]

In general, indifference to close collaboration, associated with perceptions of lack of parental capital, was linked to the tendency to talk about collaboration mainly in terms of school’s vs. parents’ rights and impose rules and regulations on parents in an authoritative manner. In the Swedish context this tendency, which may be linked to superficial efforts to create dialogue with parents, has previously been described as “governmentality” (Lunneblad & Johansson, 2012). This inactive and authoritative collaboration indicates there are few opportunities for immigrant parents to cultivate cultural capital (e.g., linguistic capital and knowledge about the education system) in school.

Recognition of Muslim Immigrants’ Cultural Resources Mirrored in Open, Active and Empowering Collaboration

Perspectives that countered this deficit discourse nevertheless emerged: many attributions that could be described as minority cultural capital – ethnic capital (Modood, 2004), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) or Islamic capital (Franceschelli & O’Brien, 2014) – were recognized by some head teachers. Particularly in socially deprived areas, they regarded Muslim immigrant parents often to have more (certain forms of) cultural resources than the native population, which serves to protect them against social problems. Family and communal values were associated with Islam and seen to afford the families resources and important networks. They also seemed to transfer into symbolic cultural capital in the social field of schools:

PS4(Swedish head teacher, female): I think they are very helpful, they are very open-minded, they have … I mean if you are a Muslim or a Christian there are certain things that you should … be doing good. Like being a good friend, and you should help each other. And that’s really strong in them. We have forgotten that in the Christian part that it’s not me, the individual, I mean they really  …  bring things together that we are a big family, that it is just not me that is important it’s important that all my friends in my class are having a good day, it’s important that our school is a good school and we are really nice to each other. I’ve been a head teacher in homogeneous Swedish schools, where it’s all about me or my kid, or my grades or … not about I can help you to get  …  even  …  my grades can be higher if I help you because I learn more if I teach  …  It’s more like … the common thing. That’s really nice and very helpful, from the Muslims. The family values help sometimes. And if you speak to the pupils here, they all see us as a family. Like in a really different way. [ … ] they made me see myself differently, as an individualist Swedish 50-year-old woman.

Head teachers regarded collaboration with many Muslim immigrant parents as easy and rewarding due to the high levels of “aspirational capital” (see Yosso, 2005) – for instance, appreciation of education, respect for authorities and readiness for hard work:

PS2(Swedish head teacher, male): many parents that I meet know the value of education, know the value of school or being well educated, and really  …  appreciate the way we’re trying to help their children to learn. And that they can see learning as not something that just happens and that it’s connected with hard work sometimes. Because it is sometimes hard work to learn. That I can see that we sometimes are losing in the Swedish schools that … learning happens, just when you come to school, and that you could, as I said, almost order some grades.

Furthermore, immigrant parents were believed to bring multicultural capital to the school community. Their cultural knowledge and skills could be used in organizing different kinds of events, or parents were sometimes invited to classes to talk about their religion, culture or countries of origin. The view of some informants seemed to be that the mere presence of immigrant families in the school community multiculturalized the school and enhanced the opportunities for developing global citizenship – a prominent educational aim in both Finnish and Swedish curricula.

Ideals and experiences of open and active collaboration were emphasized by head teachers who recognized the minority cultural capital of Muslim immigrant families. According to them, without building trust and listening to parents, and negotiating matters individually with them, little success can be expected in educating their children. A good example of controlling vs. empowering strategies and their links to the views of parental capital is the way in which these two head teachers reacted to the children’s absence from school due to travelling to their countries of origin:

PS6 (Swedish head teacher, male): We report them to the social services. Yes. And then they may conduct a small investigation, generally nothing happens. But it becomes a big problem for the child, and for the parents, they don’t  …  because this is mainly families with low education, so they cannot see the damage it does […] what do you teach your child  …  well, school isn’t so important because we can travel away for two months even though the headmaster says no.

PF9 (Finnish head teacher, female): We tell the parents that (if they travel), the schoolwork becomes the parents’ responsibility. A pupil may be absent for three months, this is rare, but absences of one month do happen, I just signed a couple of permits  …  but if you have relatives, and there’s a wedding, I do understand they want to go. [..] I guess many of them will become cosmopolitans, like  …  because they have relatives all over the world.

While the former informant interpreted these journeys as a sign of lack of respect for education and had an extremely authoritative way of dealing with them, the latter recognized the link to familial capital and multicultural capital, deemed it feasible to rely on parents to support their children’s schoolwork while travelling, and respected the parents’ ability to decide what is best for their children.

These school heads considered it important that particular efforts are made to empower immigrant parents in the school community. Instead of traditional parents’ evenings and communication through digital media, they had, for instance, increased the amount of face-to-face collaboration and encouraged parents to visit the school with a low threshold, organized meetings with smaller groups of parents and in their own neighbourhoods, arranged baby-sitters for the meetings, developed collaboration with different ethnic, religious and other organizations in the area, and in this way created opportunities for parental contributions that do not demand fluency in Finnish/Swedish. Head teachers reported having found suitable modes of school-family collaboration through trial and error:

PF8 (Finnish head teacher, male): Gradually we found different ways to approach the parents, how to strengthen their activity in school … After we kind of had them on the same side as us, after that many things changed. At the moment we feel that most parents give their children a lot of support, school is appreciated and regarded as important, and this really reflects on the school.

In developing these new forms of collaboration, the role of cultural brokers had often been significant. Through this collaboration mediated by cultural brokers the head teachers had learned to become more acutely aware of their own positionality: a few of them were able to give concrete examples of re-evaluating their own values (e.g., high individualism) after being in dialogical collaboration with Muslim immigrant families, and seeing opportunities for a positive societal change through the influence of these newcomers to Finland and Sweden.

Cultural Brokers’ Perceptions of School–home Collaboration

Cultural brokers’ views did not completely challenge or support either one of the head teachers’ discourses, but emphasized the diversity of Muslim families. Cultural brokers also recognized a lack of commitment to society and to school in some families but interpreted it as a result of feelings of exclusion rather than being linked to cultural collision. They discussed the impact of negative symbolic capital attached to Islam in schools: according to them, to many educators Islam seems to signal primitivism, and this influences teachers’ expectations toward Muslim pupils and their relationship with them. Cultural brokers, many of whom had experience of several schools, described the vast differences in how schools collaborate with immigrant Muslim families, resulting in very different levels of mutual learning and understanding. According to the cultural brokers, some parents felt that they were listened to politely, but their views had no influence on the school culture. Here one cultural broker describes the response she received from the head teacher when she suggested having multi-faith school festivities in her son’s school:

CBS3 (Swedish cultural broker, female): The head actually wrote to me that you know “in the Constitution it states that you can only have Christian education in the school”. It was in the Constitution before the sixties! They actually replaced that. So she … either she doesn’t know the Constitution or she thinks I’m stupid. (laughs) […]So  …  it was not  …  it was not a fun thing  …  I thought it was not worth arguing with her. I just let it go.

Even though the reported differences between schools appeared greater than the differences between countries, the Swedish cultural brokers reported more and stronger experiences of secular normativity, i.e., cultural practices attached to Islam were deemed “too religious” to gain any visibility in school, which made it difficult to challenge the connotations of primitivism attached to them. Highly educated Muslim immigrant parents’ experiences of being regarded as “stupid” and not being given a chance to participate in developing the school culture would suggest that their parental resources are not readily convertible into cultural capital that would be recognized in school and benefit their children’s education.

Furthermore, according to the cultural brokers, collaboration with immigrant Muslim parents is hampered because many of them lack cultural skills to negotiate and explain their needs. For instance, in highly secularized contexts such as Finland and Sweden, explaining religion-based needs in a way that renders them comprehensible to teachers and heads with secular-Protestant habitus demands competence. In these situations, cultural brokers with both religious literacy and an understanding of the secular education system often help educators and parents understand each other’s needs and demands:

FCB6 (Finnish cultural broker, male): Many head teachers have goodwill, but they want no conflicts. And by conflict I mean that people would challenge their views. Like … they (Muslim immigrant parents) also have a right to look at school-home collaboration from their perspective and reflect on things from a religious position, but  …  it’s clear they are easily ignored because they don’t have sufficient language skills and knowledge about our society. And this is what motivates me, I want to help them.

CBS1 (Swedish cultural broker, female): It’s not very easy to communicate this (religion-based needs) in a way that the school does not have to feel defensive, you are not really attacking the school policies, just creating an understanding or a platform (for discussion) … it’s not everyone who can do it … negotiate these issues.

The cultural brokers recognized the meagre resources that parents sometimes have, but challenged the widely held myth that minorities’ inactive parental involvement indicates parents’ lack of interest in their children’s education (Kim, 2009). Rather, they reported how lack of understanding of the education system caused insecurity and shame, and therefore reluctance to participate in the parents’ events or teacher–parent meetings:

CBF3(Finnish cultural broker, female): Many parents think, if they are called for a meeting, that their kid has done something bad, because in their home countries parents are called for meetings only to be ridiculed.

For cultural brokers, Islam signals high morality and valuing of education. They countered the discourse of Islam as a threat to integration by discussing Islamic values (such as tolerance, respect for life and respect for education) as well as the aspirational capital of many immigrant Muslim families as a resource for supporting responsible citizenship – the core educational goal in both Finland and Sweden. They emphasized the importance of increasing opportunities for children to capitalize on their parents’ skills and cultural wealth in school:

CBF8 (Finnish cultural broker, male): But if we’re able to strengthen parents’ competencies somehow  …  what I have done in mother tongue lessons is that I involved the parents in teaching. I had Afghan kids, I didn’t know anything about their culture, and I thought that of course I will teach them grammar and how to write, read, but since I’m not familiar with the culture, I invited a parent who was a teacher in his home country, and he taught brilliant lessons for us. [ … ]his kid’s face was glowing from joy that my father knows something even my teacher doesn’t know. And that also strengthened this parental role.

Altogether, the cultural brokers created opportunities for Muslim immigrant parents also to cultivate their majority cultural capital at the school by developing platforms for collaboration and helping parents to navigate the education system; furthermore, they also worked to challenge the contents of cultural capital by making visible minority cultural values and practices which serve educational aims (see also Rissanen, 2020).

Conclusion

This study investigated school–Muslim parent collaboration in Finnish and Swedish schools, paying particular attention to the recognition and cultivation of Muslim immigrants’ cultural capital in these contexts, where Muslims are posited as the cultural other, schools are marked by secular-protestant rationality, and liberal democratic human rights values are naturalized and universalized in educational discourses. The study found both vicious and virtuous circles operating in school-home collaboration. A virtuous circle unfolds when recognition of Muslim immigrants’ cultural resources encourages head teachers to promote open and active collaboration, giving parents better chances to cultivate their (majority) cultural capital in school as well as to promote recognition of minority cultural resources as capital in school. This further encourages mutual trust and collaboration and supports Muslim pupils’ educational equality. The forms of parental cultural capital recognized by these school heads accord with the forms of minority capital described in the literature – the aspirational and empowering capital of immigrant minority communities (Modood, 2004; Yosso, 2005), cultural values that promote commitment to communities (e.g., family, school and society) and can be seen as Islamic capital (Franceschelli & O’Brien, 2014), as well as multicultural capital (e.g., Reay et al., 2007). In a vicious cycle minority cultural resources are not recognized, school heads prefer inactive and authoritative collaboration, and parents’ chances to accumulate cultural capital as well as pupils’ chances to capitalize on their parents’ existing resources in school are low. However, the results of this study also show that in some schools a shift from vicious circle to virtuous circle is promoted, often with the help of cultural brokers. When active school-home collaboration is cultivated, spaces for dialogue and practices are created whereby the naturalization of majority cultural capital is challenged and legitimization of minority capital enhanced.

Discussion

In societies such as Finland and Sweden, which are becoming increasingly diverse through immigration and where remarkable achievement gaps exist between the native population and immigrants, measures need to be taken to challenge the power of domestic cultural capital in the production and reproduction of educational inequalities. Traditionally, educational research has taken this to mean that pupils whose parents “lack cultural capital” need extra support in schools; more critically informed studies, however, have challenged these approaches and focused on resisting the legitimation of only majority culture as capital in the social field of education (i.e., Olneck, 2000; Shim 2012; Yosso, 2005). According to Bourdieusian thinking, through becoming conscious and developing practices of resistance, individuals may also contribute to changing the ways in which the existing social order reproduces itself (Shim 2012). This study drew attention to how active collaboration with Muslim families had enabled some of the head teachers to better recognize minority cultural capital and question the majority norms. In open and active school-home collaboration, often mediated by cultural brokers who serve as agents of critical multicultural education, educators’ reflexivity over their positionality and prejudiced habitus increases, and the naturalization of cultural arbitraries (e.g., secular-Protestantism) as common sense is unpacked, which reduces the “violence of education” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), but at the same time supports minority parents’ opportunities to accumulate majority capital at school. All in all, the importance of active school-home collaboration for the practices of resistance in education receives support from the findings of this study. The findings challenge the view, also evinced in some academic writing, that policy emphasis on parental involvement tends to maximize the potential of the already advantaged and may serve to reproduce class inequalities in education (see, e.g., Reay, 2010); this is likely to hold only if collaboration is based on authoritative practices rather than efforts to engage and empower parents. School-home collaboration may also create a space for cultural encounters resulting with changes in habitus and influencing what resources are recognized as cultural capital. The power that Muslim cultural brokers exercise in Finnish and Swedish schools (see, also Rissanen, 2020) is legitimized both by Muslim immigrant families and school heads. Among the former, they have symbolic power due to their proximity to legitimate culture and power to influence practices in the school. Among the latter, their power and ability to pursue practices of resistance are attached to the multicultural capital they hold. The rise of this new expression of cultural capital does not automatically challenge the existing power-relations and inequalities: openness to diversity is more accessible to those with the (economic and educational) resources to take advantage of globalization (Coulangeon, 2017; Prieur & Savage, 2013; Woodward et al., 2008). In the Nordic egalitarian context, the holders of cultural capital tend to de-emphasize their capital for moral reasons (Vassenden & Jonvik, 2019); however, multicultural capital seems to be a form of capital about which the head teachers in this study had no inhibitions, which indicates that they have not recognized its role as a class-value. However, the study found that even though some school heads’ ideas of “openness to diversity” in the school culture may not have originally involved critical reflections on power relations, and their efforts to inculcate cultural diversity in their staff may have been related more to efforts at managing the cultural minorities rather than learning from them, even these superficial ideas of celebration of diversity have opened up a space for minority members to gradually implement processes of transforming minority cultural resources into cultural capital in school. An important aspect of these processes has been to deconstruct the negative symbolic capital attached to Islam. Even though education has a central role in Islamic traditions, and the high educational aspirations of Muslim parents and young European Muslims have been demonstrated in research (e.g., Khattab & Modood, 2018; Ross-Seriff et al., 2007), for some educators Islam signals opposition to progress and education in general. Due to the legitimacy of secular-Protestant rationality as cultural capital in Finnish and Swedish schools and the position of Muslims as the cultural other, even highly educated Muslim immigrant parents of pupils in Finnish and Swedish schools feel they risk losing their status in the school in a way that may be detrimental to their children’s education, if they articulate their religious position and religion-based needs. In these countries marked by secular normativity and increasing worldview diversity, educators’ views of schools as “neutral spaces” with regard to religion and worldview easily mask the hegemony of the majority worldview. This study observed even higher rate of secular normativity in Swedish schools than in Finland. Swedish educators appeared to carefully avoid expressing any prejudiced or negative attitudes towards immigrant Muslims, but also to avoid talking about difference at all; the ideas of restricting religion strictly to the private sphere implied relying on “colour-blind” diversity strategy – not seeing difference – in the case of Islam and Muslims (see also Rissanen, 2019). This difference between the countries is also linked to their differing structural level solutions for the recognition of religious minority rights in education: religious education according to pupils’ own religion in Finland and faith-based schools in Sweden legitimize the plurality of rationalities and worldviews in the education system. However, the Finnish solution increases the visibility of Muslim identities in mainstream schools through the presence of Islamic religious education teachers in the work community and the practices of separating pupils to their “own” religious education classes. Many Finnish educators, too, are inclined to promote educational equality through extensive focus on similarities and declining to see the differences, but the norms and structures in the education system hamper the implementation of this strategy. As has been the recent emphasis in many approaches to multicultural/intercultural/culturally responsive education, the reconstruction of school cultures towards recognition of diversity is essential for the pursuit of educational equality. When pupils come to school with diverse domestic cultural-educational backgrounds, recognizing the rationalities attached to different worldviews is vital for pursuing educational equity. The power of cultural capital rests much in the recognition of that capital by others and the indicator of true recognition of minority cultural resources as capital is whether they are recognized as resources for everyone and not only for minorities. For instance, the connotations of backwardness attached to Islam could be deconstructed by giving the high culture and values of Islam some visible space as “cultural heritage” in school, aligned with the celebration of Protestant heritage in the secular space of school. Even though these processes of reconstruction of cultural capital in Finnish and Swedish schools and particularly in the context of school-family collaboration may be rare, the observation of this study gives some examples of them, inviting further and more extensive research on the subject in different countries and at different educational levels.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Eino Jutikkala Fund (https://www.acadsci.fi/en/about-the-academy/funds-and-foundations/jutikkala-fund.html); Suomen Kulttuurirahasto.