Research project Teaching the mother tongue: ideology and organisation

This project investigates how language ideologies related to mother tongue education emerge and spread. The first part of the project established which ideologies have historically emerged as the most prominent in discourses of mother tongue education. The second examines how mother tongue education is organised and what effect(s) this organisation has on ideology. Mother tongue teachers are coordinated through mother tongue centres, which manage teachers' workloads within any of Sweden's local municipalities where at least five students (or one for national minority languages) are entitled to classes in a particular language.

Existing research within the mother tongue context has not examined the relationship between ideology and the material circumstances of the mother tongue field and there is a lack of research into the organisation of mother tongue education. Furtheremore there is increasing interest in historically grounded ethnographic forms of research in this area.