Teachers’ viewpoints about an educational reform concerning multilingualism in German-speaking Switzerland

Establishing multiple languages in early childhood. Heritage languages and language hierarchies in German-English daycare centers in Switzerland.

“…These decisions seem to be made rather unconsciously based on their own language ideologies and repertoires. Raising awareness of teachers' (potentially problematic) subjective viewpoints on multilingualism (Lundberg 2019) and uncovering such discriminating practices is essential to do away with linguistic prejudices (Lippi-Green 2012). Another rather simple way to raise the potential of HLs spoken in daycare centers might be to increasingly employ teachers who speak them.…”

Revealing stakeholders’ perspectives on educational language policy in higher education through Q-methodology

“…He argued that subjectivity has to be studied empirically by accepting participants' constructions of their worlds, rather than imposing researcher-defined categories onto it. For this, Stephenson introduced Q as a way to reveal shared viewpoints about an issue, in a purposefully selected group of people, by combining the qualitative sorting technique and the quantitative by-person factor analysis, as opposed to by-variable factor analysis done with SPSS (Lundberg, 2019). Q has proven to be a reliable research methodology in various studies (Watts & Stenner, 2012).…”

“…We looked at each factor array independently, examining statements that were given the highest ranking (+3), the lowest ranking (−3), those ranked higher in which factor than by any other factor, and those ranked lower in that factor than by any other. This prevented the oversight of items ranked indifferent (or zero) in a given factor for the description of its viewpoint if they were given extreme scores in other factors (Lundberg, 2019). We also created largely…”

When dialogue doesn’t work: school reforms and lessons from Denmark

“…School reforms are often an object of research (Blackmore and Sachs 2007). Frequently, a gap exists between what ministerial policy makers and administrators aim to achieve through reforms and how professionals and teachers as education professionals approach achieving those aims and meeting expectations (Saquin 2019;Lundberg 2019;Downes 2019;El-Taliawi & Van Der Wal 2019). The disparity between what policy makers envisage in terms of the results of a reform and what teachers imagine, whether they are involved or not, is apparently sizable.…”

“…One study, for example, described how the Education Service Contracting scheme in the Philippines failed because the government did not succeed in engaging stakeholders to work together (Saquin 2019). A recent Swiss case analysis on multilingual policy found that policy makers based their reform on a seemingly common understanding of the nature of multilingualism but revealed that education professionals held a different view that did not match theirs (Lundberg 2019). The pedagogical practice of teachers in the multilingual classroom differed from the policy makers' worldview, and the reform did not attain its objectives.…”