The identity game: constructing and enabling multicultural identities in a Finland–Swedish school setting

Abstract

This study, building on previous studies stressing the bond between positive sense of ethnic identity and school belonging, puts at its center the very process of ethnic identity construction. Thus, identity is viewed as co-constructed, within a social-constructionist perspective on learning. The study is two-folded. It starts out by describing how participants in a Finland-Swedish preschool setting orient to ethnic identity in everyday interactions. Video recordings are analyzed using conversation analysis, a relatively recent approach to the exploration of how ethnicity is accomplished in interaction. It shows that the different ethnic backgrounds of the children were considerably more prominent in the informal self-initiated interactions between themselves than in situations where adults were present. The children mainly used ethnicity as a resource to investigate themselves in relation to others to negotiate status and construct in-and out-groups. The second part focuses on how to create a more inclusive school-setting by more actively supporting students' ethnic identity construction. It discusses the experiences from a teacher-researcher collaboration, where the way children constructed ethnic identity in the first part of the study was taken as the starting-point for the development of new practices. The study suggests the ongoing ethnic identity construction in everyday educational settings to be a fertile area for further research. We need to know more about how these processes can be supported in a manner that is sensitive to the students' needs to decide for themselves whether, and how, they wish to orient to their own ethnic backgrounds.

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Recognizing spaces of dissensus in English teacher education

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