Conference Agenda

This doctoral project is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The main objective is to understand if and how young people experience with dance in upper-secondary education relate to their well-being and their view of themselves as citizens.

At the level of European policies, there seems to be a normative primacy attributed to a conception of education that prioritizes reason, technical and technological knowledge (EURYDICE, 2009), fostering principles of competition, individuality and increasing socio-educational inequalities. Within a Europe governed by numbers, vehemently market-oriented (Council of Europe, 2019), the relationship between education and the market gets tightened, developing an educational agenda with the main goal to equip young people with skills that allow them to successfully enter the world of work.

This may lead to dehumanization of young people: the devaluation of subjective, expressive, creative, and emotional dimensions, pointed out in academic research as extremely relevant in learning-teaching (Macedo, 2021). This line of concerns with more humane and holistic principles, opens up space for education with arts, notably dance.

This research is developed in a small country in southwestern Europe – Portugal. It departs from the global concern about schooling as generator of learning with real meaning and significance for students, to provide the experience of being citizens in the current time (Macedo, Nairz-Wirth, Araújo, Szalai, 2020) and prepare them for life in society (World Bank, 2018), recognizing the importance of more ethical, aesthetic and solidary dimensions.

The potential of the arts to stimulate expressive, cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, creative and socio-affective is highlighted (Eisner, 2004). The focus on dance is based on the intrinsic relationship between people’s emotional, identity and relational dimension (Alves, 2020), in the framework of citizenship construction in the here and now of young lives in education.

The research argues that dance can contribute to develop body awareness; the construction of a social, cultural and political reality; and expression and nonverbal communication (Duberg et al., 2016; Ramos & Medeiros, 2018); useful in education and society. Moreover, the European action strategy recognizes the transformative potential of cultural practices – like dance – to strengthen democracy (Council of the European Union, 2022). About this, Wise and colleagues (2019) consider that dance-promoting spaces in schools can lead young people to develop inclusive, participatory and empowering spaces.

Already in 2009, one of the main recommendations of the European Parliament was that arts education should be compulsory at all levels (EURYDICE, 2009). In Portugal, the Profile of Pupils Exiting Compulsory Schooling (Martins et al., 2017) seems to consider these concerns, establishing a set of principles that should feature the education of young people, recognizing the importance of artistic, critical, creative and body mastery skills. Also, the National Plan for the Arts (Vale et al., 2019) highlights the need to implement people’s closeness to the arts, continuously providing a diversity of aesthetic and artistic experiences in educational communities and civil society as a whole. However, the analysis of national decree-law on curricular matrices of secondary education, shows that these dimensions tend to fade throughout the educational system. In upper-secondary education, dance is limited to one/two classes of physical education and the other artistic areas are restricted to artistic education courses. We can admit the existence of a discourse that recognizes the artistic potential in the development/training of young people, and a contrasting practice that replaces it with competences for the labour market and country’s economic competitiveness. Young people’s well-being and enactment of citizenship claims for a different approach.

This study presents how humour is used as a strategy to deal with, reinforce or resist racialisation in 8^th-grade classes (14-15 y/o) in Finnish schools. As part of the project RILSE (Racism and antiracism in lower secondary education), it offers an ethnography-based qualitative analysis of the everyday practices, discourses and experiences of racialisation and antiracism in Nordic education. The theoretical framework for this study is critical race and whiteness studies and antiracism approached through an intersectional understanding of power in the context of critical education in Nordic.

School serves as a place of informal racialised segregation; thus, schools are both racialised and racialising places (Phoenix 2008, 27). Several studies of racism in Finland conclude that racism is apparent in education and in schools (e.g., Helakorpi 2019; Non-Discrimination Ombudsman 2020). However, racism in schools is often only acknowledged as physical, ill-meaning violence (Souto, 2011). It might prevent recognising the subtle processes of racialisation, for example how whiteness intertwines in constructing an exclusive category of Finnishness (Hummelstedt et al. 2021). This article approaches racialisation from two different perspectives: first, from the processes of racializing as white, and second, processes of racializing as non-white, other or e.g., as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of colour), as the importance of recognizing both is highlighted by several scholars on the field. Since the processes of racialisation simultaneously occur and are challenged in schools, everyday antiracist strategies contesting racism are developed, especially by pupils racialised as non-white (Vertelyté & Li 2021, 108). One of the possible strategies is humour. The research about humour in schools often approaches it in relation to masculinities. In Finnish schools, humour is studied as the boys’ strategy to gain status and resources in their peer groups (Huuki, Manninen, & Sunnari 2010), a requirement for pupils to tolerate verbal violence and take them as jokes, or at least pretend to do so to avoid risking their position in the classroom hierarchy (Paju, 2011), and as one of the strategies used to construct whiteness, Finnishness, and masculinity (Peltola & Phoenix, 2022). This study aims towards an intersectional reading since different subject positions, e.g., the school hierarchy, gender, and race, affect the available strategies to deal with racialisation. To expand the scope, this study connects to European, particularly Nordic, studies about racialising humour in schools, e.g., in Norway (Johannessen, 2021) Sweden (Odenbring & Johansson 2021) and England (Doharty, 2020).

Humour in relation to racialisation functions in different ways. First, it is used for racist purposes and to minimise racism. For those racialised as others, their role is to “get” the joke and not show any offence (Urciuoli 2020, 118-119). Different youth groups create different rules for what kind of jokes are allowed, and thus it is challenging to recognize jokes from bullying and harassment (Paju, 2011.) Therefore, it is crucial to analyse what kind of racialising discourses are upheld in schools as “jokes”. Second, humour can be used as one of the antiracist strategies for dealing with or resisting racialisation (Weaver, 2010). Verbal identity play with stereotypes may appear to the outside as heavy racialisation but it could be an insider discourse when among peers (Urciuoli 2020, 121). However, the joke is only funny when interpreted and recognized as such by the audience (Johannessen, 2021). The research question emerges from the above-presented as:

How is humour used in schools as a strategy to deal with, reinforce or resist racialisation?

The results of identifying different ways how racialisation is dealt with via humour have significance in recognizing different challenges and possibilities for antiracism and thus reinforcing structures supporting antiracism in education theoretically and practically.

Achievement gaps between students of different family backgrounds have been found in many countries (e.g. Stanat & Christensen, 2006). They are not only based on socioeconomic status or immigration background, but also on home language: If children do not speak the language of instruction at home, they are often disadvantaged in school and perform worse in school performance tests than students speaking the instruction language at home (e.g. Van Staden et al., 2016). Low SES increases the risk that children with an L2 instruction language are disadvantaged (Cummins, 2018). With rising numbers of global migration (Edmond, 2020), these disparities in educational systems can be expected to become more distinct in the future. Luxembourg is a trilingual country with an already highly diverse student population in terms of nationality and language background, with 67 % of elementary school students not speaking the first instruction language Luxembourgish at home (MENJE & SCRIPT, 2022). It is therefore a prime example to study these educational challenges ahead of time. In addition to the “super-diversity” of Luxembourg, students of different language backgrounds have to deal with a highly demanding language curriculum at school, in which the instruction language switches first from Luxembourgish to German and then to French in secondary education. In consequence, many students face challenges in acquiring language and literacy skills (e.g. Hornung et al., 2021) – leading to distinct gaps between students of different language backgrounds.
One possible way to decrease such disparities might be an early and extensive participation in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Participation in ECEC, that is “any regulated arrangement that provides education and care to children from birth to compulsory primary school age” (European Commission, n.d.), has been shown to have positive effects on language development and other cognitive abilities. These effects differ between age groups. For young children from age 0 to 3, a Norwegian study found that scaling up early ECEC improved early language skills at the age of seven (Drange & Havnes, 2015). However, a review also indicated research on this age group was scarcer and produced more varied findings (Melhuish et al., 2015). For children between the ages 3 and 6, effects on language and other cognitive skills were more consistently positive (Melhuish et al., 2015). In children with differing home language backgrounds, this association was stronger than in those who spoke the majority language at home (Ansari et al., 2021). This study aims to investigate if these findings hold in the multilingual and diverse school context of Luxembourg and to analyze the effects of ECEC attendance on language performance, differentiated by the student’s home language background and the particular type of ECEC (non-formal daycare vs formal early education). Based on the presented literature, we hypothesize that (1) participation in ECEC, formal and nonformal, is associated with higher listening comprehension in Luxembourgish (i.e. the first instruction language) in grade 1, that (2) the associations are moderated by the children home language background where greater associations are expected for children who do not speak the instruction language at home and that (3) participation in formal ECEC explains more variance than participation in nonformal ECEC.