Conference Agenda

As a result of migration from Arabic-majority countries to Europe over the past decades, there is currently a significant Arabic-speaking population in Europe (UNESCO, 2019; Walldoff, 2017). This has important implications for the maintenance of the Arabic language in the European diaspora and, in turn, also for schools across Europe. Currently, Arabic is taught as a ‘mother tongue’ in mainstream schools in several European countries, such as Finland, Germany, and Sweden (Alisaari et al., 2023; Soukah, 2022). In fact, Arabic is the language within so-called mother tongue education in Sweden with the highest number of participants (Walldoff, 2017). Meanwhile, in countries such as Belgium and Norway, Arabic language teaching is relegated to community-based supplementary schools in the evenings and afternoons (Steenwegen et al., 2022; Vedøy & Vassenden, 2020). As such, access to Arabic language teaching varies significantly between countries (ElHawari, 2021). As a response to the limited access to Arabic language education combined with the increased access to digital resources and the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of students are enrolling in online Arabic language education (Hilmi, 2021). Across the diverse provisions for Arabic language learning in the European diaspora, there is significant variation in the instruction’s content, objectives, and organisation. For example, ‘mother tongue teaching’ in Finland and Sweden is regulated by a government-developed and standardised curriculum. Community-based education provided in supplementary schools – either online or onsite – has much greater autonomy to develop the content, objectives, and organisation (Baldridge et al., 2017; Steenwegen et al., 2022).

Based on four distinct ethnographic research projects exploring Arabic teaching in different settings, this symposium offers extensive empirical insight into and analyses of Arabic ‘mother tongue teaching’ in Finland and Sweden, supplementary Arabic language teaching in Belgium, and transnational online Arabic language teaching. Based on findings from the four studies, the symposium explores how different forms of organising Arabic teaching shape the teaching of Arabic, students’ and teachers’ experiences and identity formation. Furthermore, we discuss the ethical dimensions of ethnographic research into Arabic teaching in Europe, considering the increasingly politicized environment where research focusing on languages associated with recent migration operates in today’s Europe.

Community-based educational initiatives (CBEI) serves as an umbrella term to encompass all types of complementary and/or supplementary education, organised by and for various ethnic-cultural minoritized groups. These initiatives are bottom-up learning environments offering not only support for minoritized youth in their mainstream academic studies, but also providing (positive) recognition of their ethno-cultural identity and familial and community heritage (Baldridge et al., 2017; Steenwegen et al., 2022). Existing ethnographic studies have documented the classes organised in these initiatives, which range from homework support (Hall, 2002) and mathematics instruction, to language classes. These last type of classes, mother tongue or heritage language learning (under which we can document Arabic supplementary schooling), serve as an important example of minoritized communities organising their own (supplementary) education specifically to fill in gaps they experience in their children’s education; This is particularly important in contexts where mainstream education often caters to the cultural (religious and linguistic) needs of dominant ethnic majority groups but fail to be as sensitive to similar needs among minoritized communities (Clycq, 2017; Van Praag et al., 2016; Yosso 2005). Some research has been conducted to document both the organisational nature of these CBEI and the motivations of minoritized communities to organise these schools (Steenwegen et al., 2022). Yet, the processes within these initiatives, the resources they provide, and the potential impact on the educational trajectories of minoritized youth, all remain largely unknown. The paper(s) presented as part of this symposium on Arabic schooling offer new insight into the bottom-up, grassroot, educational organising various (Arabic) communities are involved in. The research took place in Flanders, a particularly interesting context to study educational initiatives as this Flemish speaking region of Belgium is notably marked by one of the largest, and quite tenacious, ethnic achievement gaps in education in Europe. Through extensive qualitative observations and interviews conducted with students, teachers, and organisers, across various CBEI, we offer new insight into how these initiatives serve as important networks of support for minoritized youth. We present these CBEI through the lens of the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005) and offer an expansion of this framework with resources that contain the transnational nature of many of the CBEI included in this research. We also attempt to showcase the importance and impact of these (third) spaces through centring the words and experiences of minoritized young people attending these Arabic schools.

Baldridge, B., Beck, N., Medina, J., & Reeves, M. (2017). Toward a New Understanding of Community-Based Education: The Role of Community-Based Educational Spaces in Disrupting Inequality for Minoritized Youth. Review of Research in Education, 41, 381-402. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X16688622 Clycq, N. (2017). ‘We value your food but not your language’: Education systems and nation-building processes in Flanders. European Educational Research Journal, 16(4), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116668885 Hall, K. A. O., K.: Zulfiqar, M.: Tan, J. E. C. (2002). 'This is our School': provision, purpose and pedagogy of supplementary schooling in Leeds and Oslo. British Educational Research Journal, 28(3), 399-418. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920220137467 Steenwegen, J., Clycq, N., & Vanhoof, J. (2022). How and why minoritised communities self-organise education: a review study. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2021.2022458 Van Praag, L., Stevens, P. A. J., & Van Houtte, M. (2016). ‘No more Turkish music!’ The acculturation strategies of teachers and ethnic minority students in Flemish schools. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(8), 1353-1370. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1103171 Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006

In countries where heritage language education is not accessible through mainstream education, diaspora communities rely on community-based heritage language education. For example, Arabic-speaking children across Europe attend community-based heritage language education to maintain their heritage language. With the development of communication technologies, the number of heritage language schools offering digital Arabic language education is increasing (Hilmi, 2021). However, there is still a lack of research on community-based digital Arabic heritage language education. Hence, the current paper investigates the following research question: What characterizes the linguistic repertoire of five heritage language learners of Arabic and how does their teacher capitalize and expand on these repertoires in her teaching? This research question was explored through a digital linguistic ethnography over four months in an online Arabic heritage language school. Digital linguistic ethnography is interested in how people use language, interact, and construct communities, knowledge, and identities, through and influenced by digital technologies (Varis & Hou, 2020). The digital linguistic ethnography was conducted through observation, interviews with one teacher and five students, and the collection of identity portraits and other relevant documents. The participating school was located in the USA and offered Arabic lessons both onsite and online with students and teachers participating from different parts of the world. The participant students were participating from different parts of the USA, while the teacher was participating from Italy. In the analysis of the empirical material, we adopted a translinguistic perspective on language, which means that language and bilingualism are considered dynamic and must not be seen as two separate systems and structures (García & Li, 2014). Thus, multilinguals only have one linguistic repertoire from which they strategically draw from to make sense of their multilingual. The analysis shows that the five students had a complex linguistic repertoire, including competence in English, Levantine Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, and Spanish. Moreover, the analysis shows how the teacher capitalized and expanded on the students’ linguistic repertoires through the use of Modern Standard Arabic, varieties of Levantine Arabic and English. Hence, translanguaging was purposely used as a pedagogical strategy to teach the multiglossic and multidialectal Arabic language. This lead to a teaching characterized by flexible language use, where teacher and students drew on all of their resources to promote language learning and support the students in making sense of their translingual world (Garcia & Wei, 2014).

Garcia, O., & W. Li. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan. Hilmi, D. (2021). Impact of Arabic online learning in the perspective of how the brain learns. Ijaz Arabi Journal of Arabic Learning, 4, 59-73. Varis, P. & Hou, M. (2020). Digtial approaches in linguistic ethnography. In K. Tusting (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography. Routledge.

In this presentation, the concept translanguaging space (Li, 2011; Zhu et al., 2017) is used to study classroom interaction in an Arabic Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI) classroom in Sweden. MTI is an elective school subject with its own syllabus. Students in primary and secondary school have the right to MTI with some restrictions: For example, the students need to already have basic knowledge in the language in question and at least five students have to enrol in MTI in order for the municipality to be required to organize it. The case of MTI in Arabic here makes translanguaging space relevant for the study of classroom interaction in relation to the diglossic situation between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and colloquial varieties of Arabic. The aim of this paper is to study classroom interaction in MTI in Arabic as a translanguaging space. The study is part of a larger project on MTI in Sweden which is carried out in the form of action research combined with linguistic ethnography. The material used is from one Arabic MTI teacher and students in grade three and consists of fieldnotes, audio recordings from classroom observations and one teacher interview. The use of the concept translanguaging space, understood as an arena for translanguaging and a space created through translanguaging (Li, 2011), highlights the seamless shuttling between different varieties of Arabic, which is natural and necessary in Arabic MTI classrooms. The diglossic situation in Arabic means that while all students need to learn MSA, the challenges are greater for students with varieties that diverge more from the teacher’s variety. In the current case, the teacher’s Levantine variety was closer to that of some of the students, while other dialects diverged more. The critical and creative aspects inherent in translanguaging space put issues of student engagement and participation in focus. In this case, the teacher was in the centre and students were rather passive, answering questions and performing given tasks. Although the dominance of MSA and Levantine may be interpreted as a monolingual classroom policy, the fact that both Swedish and other dialects were accepted shows that the diglossic situation opened up the classroom as a translanguaging space.

Li Wei (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1222–1235. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035 Zhu, H., Li, W. & Lyons, A. (2017). Polish shop(ping) as translanguaging space. Social semiotics, 27, 411-433. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1334390

Minority mother tongue instruction is a part of the Finnish school system (see Tainio & Kallioniemi 2019) yet there is relatively little participatory research on the subject. When it comes to subjects such as Arabic, traditional disciplinary foci and researchers’ linguistic repertoires partly explain the situation. However, also the ethical frameworks that regulate classroom research play a role: especially for studies that are interested in interactional data, obtaining necessary research permits is cumbersome and embarking on a research project requires considerable resources both time- and funding-wise. In this presentation, we reflect on our experiences from MIGDIA project, a five-year ethnographic research project with a focus on minority mother tongue instruction in Arabic. We discuss research ethics both in the data collection phase and in connection with publishing research results in terms of everyday ethics and formalised research ethics (cf. Smette 2019). We open up linguistic and cultural challenges of data collection by asking what kind of research projects the current ethical guidelines have been created for and what kind of participant they assume (see Everri et al. 2020). We also ask whether the current regulations and research ethical practices actually contribute to the ethical implementation of research in multilingual and multicultural contexts. The ethical considerations of the research are not limited only to the data collection, but also to the publication of the research results. By this we do not mean just ethical treatment of research participants, but the increasingly politicized environment where educational research on Arabic mother tongue instruction operates for instance in Finland. The increased political influence of far-right parties has brought services provided for linguistic and cultural minorities under scrutiny and criticism (for background, see Petterson 2020). Against this background, we reflect on our research findings. Although optional mother tongue instruction is a part of the mainstream education, in many ways it operates in the fringes of Finnish educational system (see Ylijokipii et al. 2022). With our ethnographic lens, we are in a position of seeing also the linguistically and culturally specific details more clearly. We discuss researcher’s ethical role in knowledge production and identify ethically sustainable practices for research in increasingly polarized societies.

Everri, M., Heitmayer, M., Paulius, Y.-S. & Saadi, L. (2020). Ethical challenges of using video for qualitative research and ethnography. State of the art and guidelines. In T. Lähdesmäki, E. Koskinen-Koivisto, V. L. A. Čeginskas, & A. K. Koistinen (eds.), Challenges and solutions in ethnographic research. Ethnography with a twist, 68–83. London: Routledge. Pettersson, K. (2020). The discursive denial of racism by Finnish populist radical right politicians accused of anti-muslim hate-speech. In Norocel, O.C., Hellström, A. & Jørgensen, M.B. (eds.) Nostalgia and hope: Intersections between politics of culture, welfare, and migration in Europe, 35–50. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. Smette, I. (2020). Ethics and access when consent must come first. Consequences of formalised research ethics for ethnographic research in schools. In Bushner, H. & Fox, A. (eds.) Implementing ethics in educational ethnography. Regulation and practice, 51–63. London: Routledge. Tainio. L. & Kallioniemi, A. (eds.) (2019). Koulujen monet kielet ja uskonnot. Selvitys vähemmistöäidinkielten ja -uskontojen sekä suomi ja ruotsi toisena kielenä -opetuksen tilanteesta eri koulutusasteilla. Valtioneuvoston selvitys ja tutkimustoiminnan julkaisusarja 11/2019. Yli-Jokipii, M., Rissanen, I. & Kuusisto, E. (2022) Oman äidinkielen opettaja osana kouluyhteisöä. Kasvatus, 53(4), 350–363.