Practiced Linguistic-Cultural Ideologies and Educational Policies: A Case Study of a “Bilingual Sweden Finnish School”

ABSTRACT

This article explores linguistic-cultural ideologies and educational policies as they emerge and are negotiated in everyday life in a bilingual school setting located in the geopolitical spaces of Sweden. Taking sociocultural theory and discourse analysis as points of departure, we focus on empirical examples of classroom interaction and locally established formal policing. Linguistic-cultural ideologies and educational policies that frame life at the school are investigated by employing nexus analytical methods, focusing on social (inter)actions through which a number of locally and nationally relevant discourses circulate. Our findings indicate that refocusing ideology and policy research from the lens of a practiced perspective allows the situated and distributed nature of everyday life to inform issues related to bilingualism as well as their relations to wider societal discourses. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the crucial role of educators in (re)locating bilingual education in its societal contexts as well as making these connections visible in classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• educational policy
• ethnography
• everyday life
• nexus analysis
• social practices

Notes

^1. The case study reported here is a part of the Swedish Research Council funded research project DIMuL, Doing Identity In and Through Multilingual Literacy Practices. See http://www.mdh.se/ukk/personal/sva/aln07/forskning-dimul-1.5514

^2. Fieldwork in this study has been conducted by Gynne. For more aspects of fieldwork and analyses of the other data presented in ongoing project publications, see Gynne (2016); Gynne & Bagga-Gupta (2013); and Gynne & Bagga-Gupta (2015).

^3. Some of our previous work relates to macro-level studies that have contributed to our analysis here (e.g., Bagga-Gupta’s work in parallel projects (www.ju.se/ccd); Lainio’s work related to Sweden Finns (e.g. Lainio, 2014).

^4. Dagens Nyheter, established in 1864, is Sweden’s largest daily newspaper and belongs to the “Independent Liberal” fraction of Swedish media.

^5. All names used in the study are pseudonyms.

^6. For similar claims in other, international contexts, see Bagga-Gupta (2010); Hasnain et al. (2013); Yagmur (2011).