A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Do both ‘get it right’? Inclusion of newly arrived migrant students in Swedish primary schools

  2020. Denis Tajic, Nihad Bunar. International Journal of Inclusive Education

  Article

  The aim of this article is to advance knowledge on how Swedish primary schools organise education and what strategies they deploy to ensure inclusion and attainment of newly arrived migrant students. The article is based on semi-structured interviews with 30 teachers and school administrators, and one-year of fieldwork undertaken in two multicultural urban primary schools in the Stockholm region. One of the schools initially places students in separate classes, while the other one places them directly into mainstream classes. Both are evoking inclusion and attainment as a reason for using their respective models. As such, do both ‘get it right’? Using inclusion as the theoretical and conceptual framework this article addresses the broader question: How is the meaning of inclusion constructed in the processes of its practical implementation in these two schools? The results show the ambitious tale of inclusion in both schools was, in the process of the construction of its meaning and implementation, reduced to some of its aspects. Teachers and school administrators are allowed to include or leave out of their model whatever they deem necessary, obsolete, expensive or unrealistic and still fitting under the umbrella of inclusion. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, and both schools ‘get it right’ and ‘wrong’ in some aspects.

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• The call of ordinariness: peer interaction and superdiversity within the civil sphere

  2022. Denis Tajic, Anna Lund. American Journal of Cultural Sociology

  Article

  Previous research conducted in Swedish schools and beyond has shown how newly arrived migrant students are excluded by peers from the majority population and by longer-term residents. The novelty of the present article is its focus on the opposite: how peer interaction between newly arrived and other students arises in superdiverse school settings and what this interaction means for newly arrived migrant students. A multidimensional theoretical perspective with a focus on social interaction within school is utilized to illuminate the drama of social life. Ideals of the civil sphere, superdiversity, habitus and conviviality are combined, the goal being to create links between macro- and micro-levels. Peer interaction is analyzed as meaningful per se, rather than as an exchange value. This is valuable from a subjective perspective in relation to the notion that being ordinary is a key to belonging. The analysis shows the lived interconnectedness between ideals, institutions, practices, and individuals’ life experiences. The data are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken during one academic year in two middle schools [högstadiet] and 42 interviews with newly arrived migrant students and school staff in Sweden.

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• Mellan policy och praktik: En studie om nyanlända elevers pedagogiska och sociala inkludering i skolan

  2022. Denis Tajic.

  Thesis (Doc)

  The overall aim of the thesis is to investigate how schools’ formal and informal structures affect the pedagogical and social inclusion of newly arrived students, as well as how newly arrived students in grades 7-9 and school staff themselves understand and handle these structures. Formal structures refer to forms of pedagogical measures for newly arrived students. Informal structures refer to opportunities for and the quality of interactions and social relations between, on the one hand, newly arrived students and, on the other, non-newly arrived students and school staff.

  The majority of the newly arrived students in this study came to Sweden during or immediately after the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016. This is also a period when an extensive educational policy reform was carried out in Sweden in order to provide better conditions for schools to organize the reception and education of newly arrived students.

  By using a critical policy analysis, the theoretical focus is placed on a critical and contextualized understanding of how policy implementation can be understood in the relation between local practices and national support measures. The thesis is based on an ethnographic approach, and the empirical material was collected in two primary schools in the Stockholm region during academic year 2018/2019. Besides fieldnotes, interviews with newly arrived students and school staff formed the basis for the analysis.

  The thesis involves three empirical studies. In Study I, the meaning of inclusion is constructed in relation to three contextual perspectives: the contextual requirements, contextual opportunities and contextual limits. The study shows that organizational and pedagogical "solutions", whose purpose is to include newly arrived students, sometimes have exclusionary premises. The school staff constantly find a way to legitimize their practices in relation to what the policy prescribes.

  Study II shows that the students and teachers can influence the school's institutional habitus through informal structures. This entails creating places where newly arrived students are accepted as a legitimate part of the school's educational and social environment, in which solidarity comes to the fore through the institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation.

  In Study III, the analyses show that the schools’ authorized policy actors, such as school leaders, or in some cases teachers, have a legitimate mandate to interpret and enact policy regarding multilingual classroom assistance, which sometimes turns out to be different than what was intended in a certain policy decision. However, there are some actors who do not have a legitimate mandate, but in some cases, they can influence the formal structures and adapt local policy as nonauthorized policy actors.

  In conclusion, the thesis shows how the school contexts can offer belonging when implementation of formal policy has already created otherness. The outcome is thus not a unilateral distribution of power by principals and teachers, but their power is reduced by the students' relational practices.

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