Conference Agenda

Across the globe, classrooms are witnessing unprecedented student diversity that places continuous demands on schools and educators. The 2017 report from the European Commission entitled ‘Preparing teachers for diversity: the Role of Initial Teacher Education’, for instance, highlights the challenges of the changing nature of diversity in Europe brought about by international and intra-European migration. The complexity constituting this diversity is best captured through Vertovec’s (2007) notion of ‘super-diversity’ evident in intense diversity—marked by culture, language, religion, gender, class, and their intersections—among the society’s population. The report further emphasised the disadvantage experienced by students of immigrant backgrounds especially those of low socio-economic backgrounds. These students are left feeling alienated in schools against a backdrop of Eurocentric nationalism that continues to fuel polarisation and discrimination in society.

This paper engages with the challenge of educating in the context of diversity by posing the question: What matters for student participation in diverse contexts? It does so by examining the concept of ‘relationship’ as a key factor shaping student participation. This finding is taken from a research project that sought to examine the experiences and perspectives of educators and students in a culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary classroom. Although Australia has been touted as a successful multicultural society, much of the basis for these claims rely on diversity statistics to celebrate multiculturalism or isolated stories of success that seem to emphasise the values of assimilation (e.g. Australian Government, n.d.). Literature continues to provide evidence that racism and discrimination persistently penetrate and perpetuate in culturally and linguistically diverse schooling contexts, which in turn negatively impacts on student participation and learning outcomes (Kalantzis, 2013; Rudolph, 2013).

In asserting that relationships do matter for student participation in multicultural schooling contexts, this paper seeks to problematise the dynamics and nature of ‘relationship’ and its contestations. Pedagogical frameworks that centre building relationships are traditionally tied to learner-centred approaches to teaching that emphasise developing a sense of community in the classroom (Cullen & Harris, 2009; Cornelius-White, 2007). Scholarship advocating for this approach advocates for feelings of ‘cohesion, trust, safety, interaction, interdependence, and a sense of belonging’ (Rovai & Whighting, 2005, p. 101) as pre-conditions for fostering safe spaces that enable dynamic and risky interactions. In the context of diversity and disadvantage, pedagogical approaches such as critical pedagogy and culturally responsive pedagogy also highlight the importance of relationships and community whilst contesting the dominance and privilege of Eurocentric and elite underpinnings of education—a taken-for-granted condition in learner-centred education. As such, the relationship-building in diverse contexts require educating ‘against the grain—to contest and resist the current social arrangements that constrain social justice’ (Keddie, 2012, p. 1).

In problematising the concept of relationship, I engage with Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus. Habitus allows for an understanding of dispositions as culturally and socially mediated. Habitus, as explored by scholars, denote to both determinative and evolving or agentic characteristics (e.g., Reay, 2004). As such, habitus enables an understanding of how barriers to relationship-building in the context of diversity are sustained and maintained. In engaging with Bourdieusian notion of habitus, I illuminate how the dispositions of both educators and students constrain student participation and speculate on the possibilities for change and transformation.

This paper draws on one-year ethnographic fieldwork in a first-grade, public school, in a major Norwegian city, exploring how ethnic differences and similarities are understood and expressed by both children and teachers. The purpose of the study has been to scrutinize how ethnic diversification of pupil population transforms and modifies schools, contributing to the field of intercultural education and social justice in Norwegian Education.

The study was conducted in a first-grade classroom in a neighborhood where immigrant population prevails. In addition to ethnography, which was carried out during the entire school year 2021-2022, a focus interview of first-grade teachers was conducted at the end of the observation period. The class consists of approximately 60 six-years old pupils, of which 21 are immigrants, descendants of immigrants, children of labor migrants, and refugees.

Departing from Barad's (2007) material-discursive performativity and Zembylas (2015) White discomfort, premiliminary analyses of empirical material reveal the unquestioned and invisible hegemony of dominant Eurocentric knowledge enacted through affects, bodies, physical organization, and materiality in primary educational settings in Norwegian schools.

Preliminary analysis illustrates the existence of different assemblages in first-grade classroom. Assemblage is a philosophical approach originated from Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Assemblages embraces the ontological diversity of agency, redistributing the capacity to act from an individual to a network of bodies, things, and discourses. Assemblages disseminate agency to materiality, bodies and affects, decentering actions to include material-discursive relationality and entanglements. Material-discursive performativity refers to how human action is entangled with the physical organization and materiality surrounding assemblages, so that actions are made possible by connections in assemblages, not just by individuals.

In assemblages of children in this study, ethnic differences are played, expressed, compared, and discussed through materiality including toys, the body, touch, and talk. Children are daily concerned with their similarities and try to understand why they are different from each other. On the other hand, in teacher’s assemblages, pupils ethnic diversity seems invisible and non-present. Ethnic differences are not talked about by teachers in classrooms or taken up as a topic in teaching or other pedagogical practices. It seems that teachers understand ethnic differences as ‘cultural diversity’, a celebration of cultural expressions and material symbolism (flags, songs, food), without questioning the existence of hierarchies of power imbedded in colonial asymmetries between ethnic majority and minorities.

Leaning on new material and decolonial perspectives, this study shows how children and teachers are immersed in assemblages where school's physical organization and materiality reflects western values and whiteness as naturalized. The study also suggests the mismatch between the way differences are named, understood, and expressed among teachers and children in school settings.