‘But they are Norwegians!’ Talking about culture at school

Abstract

Although heavily debated and sometimes rejected in the scholarly debates, notions of culture and identity have to a large extent become the framework through which to understand the realities, effects and implications of transnational migration for European societies as well as for migrants themselves. Drawing on ethnographic data from a Norwegian primary school which presents itself as multicultural and on textual data from the wider political debate in Norway, the author aims to explore the understandings of culture that are at play in such a context and the possibilities and restrictions these are providing for practices of inclusion. At the same time as teachers are proud of their efforts to ‘make cultural diversity visible’, there is also a significant frustration with a multiculturalist language that tends to equal identity with primordial spatial belonging. In response, new understandings of culture and identity that are more focused on commonality are emerging.

Notes

1. Many of whom, however, are bilingual teaching assistants rather than regular teachers.

2. In practice, of course, identities are less orderly. It takes considerable knowledge about world politics to equip each child with an appropriate flag. One teacher recounted how embarrassed she was when some Tamil girls quietly had told her that the Sri Lankan flags they had been given were not really their flags. When I asked another teacher if it was difficult sometimes to find the right flag for a child, for example in cases of persecuted minorities, she said ‘then you get a Norwegian flag … or a UN-flag. We always have some such UN-solutions, we think they are nice’ (teacher interview).