Right pedagogy/wrong language and caring in times of fear? Issues in the schooling of ethnic Kurdish children in Denmark

Abstract

Cummins calls on educators to promote critical dialog during micro-interactions with students, times when students acquire knowledge and negotiate their identities. For critical dialog to flourish, educators must create caring environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a discourse of caring was transmitted to ethnic Kurdish students enrolled in a bilingual/bicultural education program in Denmark, and the mitigating role that macro (societal) factors, such as a discourse of fear played in their educators’ attempts to create safe, caring havens for critical dialog. To do so, I deconstruct issues that arose when an educator taught a novel study unit as a springboard for developing critical literacy. I adopted a critical ethnographic case-study approach that featured interviews, extensive participant-observation, and document analysis. There were mixed results with more at issue than pedagogical and linguistic factors. Macro-level discourses mitigated the success of the intervention, as did identity issues related to ethnic solidarity; however, some pedagogical features of the program opened up spaces for the ethnic Kurdish children to critically examine fear of ‘difference.’

Keywords:

• bilingual education
• caring
• classroom-based ethnography
• Denmark
• fear
• Kurdish children

Notes

1. All quotes in this paper are my translation into English from the original Danish.

2. My use of the term ‘two solitudes’ refers to Hugh MacLennan's (1945/1969) novel about the historical divide between two ethnic groups, English and French-Canadians: two distinct peoples sharing one homeland, and the gulf between them despite their physical proximity.