Conference Agenda

In recent decades, Sweden has experienced a large increase in the number of migrant adolescents, many of whom arrive with little prior experience of school-based learning (Skolverket, 2016, p. 189). Learning to read and write for the first time, and in an additional language, represents a great challenge to recent migrant adolescents who have little previous experiences of formal schooling. While engaged in the process of developing literacy in a second language, migrant students must also navigate their ways into, or learn to read, a new society (Franker, 2017). Therefore, learning a new language and developing literacy in a new sociocultural environment not only involves learning the grammar, principles of decoding scripts and new vocabulary, but also the ability to engage in new discourses. For example, teenage students may have to learn to talk about the body’s anatomy and functions, as well as subjects related to relationships or sexuality, which might represent taboos to some students. As Alexander (2008) put it: “Learning how to talk fluently and critically about sex and sexuality composes a significant part of becoming literate in our society” (p. 2).

In this investigation, the analyzed interactions concern topics of sexuality and the constitution of families. Such topics might raise questions about heteronormativity, which, according to Cameron and Kulick (2003), can be defined as “those structures, institutions, relations and actions that promote and produce heterosexuality as natural, self-evident, desirable, privileged and necessary” (p. 55). Thus, this ethnographic study combines two fields of research that rarely meet, at least in a Nordic context (Milani et al., 2021); namely, the education of basic literacy in Swedish as a second language and discourses about sexuality.

The aim of this study is to investigate how learning about sexual and gender diversity may enhance recently arrived migrant students’ understanding of different cultural norms, including some that may be considered taboos, in the context of an introductory language course in Sweden. I will argue that this understanding can be enhanced not only through the teaching of tolerance towards others but also through examinations of different practices related to sexuality. Concurrently, this cross-cultural educational context presents challenges and pitfalls that places high demands on teachers when choosing their subject content and their ways to teach it. For instance, teachers need to navigate among discourses related to sexual identity, which are not evident within queer theory: “Rather than affirming sexual identity categories, queer theory questions the need for them. Rather than legitimizing minority sexual identities, queer theory problematizes all sexual identities” (Nelson, 2002, p. 48). Using the concept of sexual identity might actually contribute to the binary opposition that was to be avoided (Nelson, 2002, p. 47). Therefore, teachers’ eagerness to use a pedagogy of inclusion (Nelson, 1999, p. 376) to enhance tolerance towards others might contribute to the dichotomy between heterosexual or gay students. Instead, Nelson advocates a pedagogy of inquiry, which is not aiming to enhance tolerance towards the other, but about analyzing how discursive and cultural practices create heteronormativity: “Whether the intention is to critique these practices or to learn them (or a combination of the two), the task is to investigate the workings of language and culture in order to make them explicit” (Nelson, 1999, p. 389). Thereby, Nelson means that the admittance of differences, and the possibility to investigate them, are crucial for intercultural comprehension (2002, p. 48) and therefore for the possibilities to communicate in a certain society. This claim supports the use of this framework to analyze the education of this cross-cultural context.

This contribution builds on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork in a 6^th turned 7^th grade class in inland Norway between January and December of 2020. The study was conducted for my PhD-project about Boys’ identity formation in at school and in the classroom which has a focus on gender, social class, and identity. The main research question for the project is “How does gender and class play a part in identity formation in the social life of boys between 11 and 13 in school, and how does it form their understanding of the world and the future?”. An inspiration for the project is the ongoing discussion regarding boys in school getting lower grades than the girls and dropping out of upper secondary and tertiary education more frequently (Eurostat, 2021), which makes it important to understand how ideas and practices of gender and masculinities are formed and take place among pupils at school. Furthermore, it is of importance to understand the interplay between the school and its pupils, and how they mutually influence each other, and produce more and less acceptable ways of being and behaving.

In this contribution I discuss how certain behaviors and ways of being are associated with perceptions of risk, and how they are manifested and communicated in the classroom. In school pupils are aware that bad behavior leads to bad results, which then can turn into bad grades in secondary school, and later to dropping out of school and/or not getting a good job/future. As a consequence, a failure to follow expectations set by the school is perceived with an inherent risk. In this contribution I will discuss this perception of risk (regardless of whether the risk is “real” or not) through the use of relevant ethnographic examples from my fieldwork. I will especially look at how ideas of the future and what it holds are used on one hand to keep pupils in line by the teachers, and on the other hand as a part of oppositional practices by some of the pupils.

The ethnographic context will be linked to the more general discussion regarding how boys are doing at school to highlight how risk perceptions in the classroom are affected by the discourse surrounding boys at school and vice versa. To explore these issues, I will make use of the concept of learner identities, which Kristinn Hegna describes as the way a learner see themselves in the world and how it makes them relate to their participation in learning (Hegna, 2019, p. 53). These learner identities, in turn, can be related to subject positions and pupil roles, and the expectations related to them in the classroom and at school (Lyng, 2004). To connect these oppositional and problematic pupil roles with the already existing societal worry about boys’ school performances I will use Ian Hacking’s concept of looping effect where categories and category mutually affect and constitute each other (1992). Furthermore, Anthony Giddens’ perspectives regarding self-identity on how modernity have made the self into a reflexive project where the future is always making itself known in the present (1991, p.3) is highly relevant. This ever-looming future in the present coupled with the reflexive project of the self has given the individual responsibility of a successful life, thus creating a possibility of leading a failed life. This makes inhabiting divergent learner identities and pupil roles deemed problematic a risky endeavor. The aim of this contribution is to show how these discourses and ideas makes themselves known and felt in everyday life at a school in Inland Norway.

Pedagogical activities in schools are necessarily always directed at the individual pupil on the one hand and the school class as a group on the other. This creates a tension that teachers need to manage. The growing diversity of the pupils exacerbates this tension, as diversity increases, but the demand for community and shared commitment cannot be completely suspended. For all the tendencies towards individualisation as the preferred response to growing diversity, schools cannot avoid creating community. This is not only the task of the school, but also necessary if the activities of the pupils as a group are not to be in permanent conflict with each other.

Diversity, individuality and community are thus in conflict with each other in the classroom. In recent years, with the 'opening up of teaching' for a different way of dealing with diversity, practices have increasingly been implemented which can be described as contratualism (Brown et al., 1996). This refers to the tendency for pupils and teachers to enter into contracts.

Contracts have many functions. Contracts can be used to coordinate the actions of the signatories They can create a binding obligation to perform expected behaviours. They establish and secure a ‘norm-oriented’ basic order of the social. Finally, contracts legitimise the actions of their signatories by providing a reliable basis for actions (Nagel 1991).

In school classrooms, learning contracts with pupils are on the one hand orientated towards measuring pupils performance in specific fields (Greenwood & McCabe, 2008; Coy, 2014). On the other hand, regulatory approaches to behaviour, such as the ‘time-out room’ – where pupils are sent when they ‘disturb the class’, and where they must complete a contract to return to class participation – are based on contractual assumptions (Adamson et al., 2019). Such pedagogical practices follow the principle of negotiating rather than commanding. Contracts should govern social interaction, create community and respect the individuality of the pupils. But they also provide an opportunity to address these rules, norms and values pedagogically. A common basis for behaviour is to be practised and established through contracts (Budde et al. 2021).

On the one hand, contractual pedagogy is welcomed in the context of democratising reforms that seek to consider the agency and self-control of individual children (Sant 2019). It is also seen as contributing to an inclusive approach to diversity. On the other hand, the power effects inherent in this instrument need to be questioned. It is assumed that contractualism is intertwined with power effects that can be understood as both self-governmental and external regulation (Apple 2011). Contractualism is criticised for establishing a pedagogical order based on homogenising notions of the school as an institution. Against this background, the article asks what power effects are produced by contractualism as a strategy for dealing with diversity in school character education?

To this end, a practice-theoretical perspective is used, which essentially focuses on the activities of the actors involved. The practice-theoretical based approach assumes that human activities are based on practices which are expressions of social orders. Practices are closely linked to material arrangements such as humans, artifacts, organisms and things (Schatzki, 2005, 476 f.). The paper follows the idea of a "flat ontology", as proposed by Schatzki (2016), for example, which locates social phenomena on a single level of reality. With regard to practice theory, the focus of analysis is on practice-arrangement-bundles. These practice-arrangement-bundles – based on an interweaving of practices, discourses, artefacts and subjectivation- form larger constellations (Schatzki 2002).