Educating migrant children and women in the political projects of the Danish welfare nation-state. Language and gender as political tools.

The emerging attention to “the guest-worker” question in the Northern European states in the late 1960s included neither children nor women, but focused mainly on the “guest worker man”. Nevertheless children and women with a migration history have since the 1970s been a key object for political negation and struggle, often with the education system as an arena and battle field.

In Denmark, education political descriptions of migrant students have gone through a complex development. The first official formulation regarding so-called foreign children appeared in a departmental circular from the Ministry of Education in Denmark (Ministry of Education, 1970). Since then, categorizations have in varied wording related to the non-nationness of the children in question. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the category that appeared frequently in e.g. communication between state bodies, early attempts to make teachers’ guidelines, etc., was “foreign-worker children”, describing the children in relation to the non-national guest-worker parents (although also children of e.g. refugees were included in the category). During the 1970s, the non-national mother tongue of the children came to the fore in the descriptions, such as “foreign language children” or “bilingual students”, who in the late 1970s increasingly were described in light of their “different culture” and “other culture” in the meaning of different from and other than the “Danish culture”, something which was not least understood as rooted in the family. From especially the 1980s attention to “Muslim women” and “girls” increasingly entered pedagogical and political debate.

Based on a source material related to state bureaucracy and public and professional debate (juridical and ministerial texts and reports, political and professional debate in newspapers, professional and academic journals, teachers handbooks, textbooks, etc.), the presentation explores the role of gender and language in the making of politics and policy concerning migrants and how this interplayed with the role ascribed to “Muslims” and “Islam” in public and political debate, and thus in the public curriculum.

Bio

Mette Buchardt is Professor and Head of Centre for Education Policy Research, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research comprises the interdisciplinary field of welfare- and social-state history, church and theology history and the history of education with an emphasis on 18th to 20th century. 

She specializes in the relation between education- and social reform in the European states, e.g. modernization and secularization, and the influence of migration on welfare state development historically and at present. She has published e.g. Kulturforklaring. Uddannelseshistorier om muslimskhed [Culture as Explanation. Education Histories about Muslimness]. Copenhagen: Tiderne Skifter 2016 and “Educating migrant children and women in the political projects of the welfare nation-state and secularization: The Danish ‘extreme case’ in light of the French” Routledge World Yearbook of Education, 2022, 251-266.

Buchardt leads research project “Educating newcomers to the welfare state. Organizational responses to migration 1960s-2010s and their influence on Danish central policy” (Aug. 2022-Jan. 2026), financed by Independent Research Fund Denmark.

 [MB1]INDSÆT link til CfUs hjemmeside
 [MB2]Indsæt link til projekt-hjemmeside

Being bilingual and dyslexic in Danish public school - Diversity and inequality in tracing practices

Bilingual pupils diagnosed with dyslexia are significantly underrepresented in Danish public schools (Gellert, 2009; UVM, 2019). Politically and socially, both bilingualism and dyslexia in public school receive considerable attention, but they are often treated as separate areas (e.g., UVM, 2020a).

Bilingual pupils are not a new phenomenon in Danish public schools, and the current definition of the Ministry of Education is: "children who have a mother tongue other than Danish and who learn Danish only through contact with the surrounding society, possibly through school education." (Retsinformationen, 2016). These groups of pupils have had changing names since the 1970s - from foreign worker children, foreign language pupils and immigrant children to today's bilingual pupils, who are in practice brown Muslim children (Buchardt, 2016). In policy debates, bilingual pupils are seen as a homogeneous pupil group and based on their school outcomes, they are often the subject of education policy interventions (Horst, 2017). Similarly, dyslexia is not a new phenomenon in Danish primary schools. Although dyslexia is the most common learning disability at school age and the most common cause of major literacy difficulties (Elbro, 2021; Jandorf & Andreasen, 2021), neither the educational system nor Danish research has a clear focus on bilingual pupils in terms of their learning disability. dyslexia (Gellert, 2009). In order to open up for a wider diversity in terms of detection practices, the article will provide insight into the forms of knowledge positions and knowledge logics that have existed about dyslexia and bilingualism (Bernstein, 2001), and how these unfold in the detection practices of dyslexia in the Danish public school.

Bio

Hatice Secilmis Filikci is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Education Policy Research at Aalborg University. Her project revolves around bilingual students and dyslexia in Danish public school. Her research areas include the Danish education system, education policies and inequality in the education system.

Taming religion by nation: Educational nation-building and the shifting role of Islam in the light of Turkish language policies

In discussions about secularization processes the Republic of Turkey is an often-mentioned case for a radical, top-down, and successful social and political secularization of an entity that beforehand was perceived as religious, traditional and hence pre-modern. In doing so, Turkish national historiography as well as the Eurocentric modernist notion of secularism as a marker of societal progress and development mutually reinforced a specific interpretation of Turkish secularism.

In this context the legal abandonment of the Arabic alphabet, which had been used for the Ottoman Turkish language for centuries in favor of the Latin alphabet in 1928 was coined as the most dazzling and profound step towards a modern secular state and society. The departure from the Arabic alphabet – the alphabet of the Qur’an – to the Latin one seemed to be nothing more than a clear rejection of Islam and the imperial Ottoman past in favor of the ‘modern’ secular nation-state (Çolak 2004).

In this presentation, I want to challenge these assumptions by understanding the transformation of the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic not as disappearance, but as shift of religion’s role within the state realm. To do so I will historically contextualize the Turkish alphabet act beyond national historiography and a modernist historical approach. Following the theoretical lens provided by Talal Asad (2003), which allows me to describe secularization not as the disappearance of religion but rather as an intersection with it, I will attempt a source-based historicizing alongside with a Foucaudian (2005) discourse analytical reading of the early Republican time (1923-1929). Accordingly, my research follows the suggestion that rather than religion being eliminated from the Turkish Republican project it was heavily incorporated into the nation-building process.

References

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford

University Press.

Çolak, Y. (2004). Language Policy and Official Ideology in Early Republican

Turkey, Middle Eastern Studies, 40(6), 67-91, DOI: 10.1080/0026320042000282883

Foucault, M. (2005): Schriften in vier Bänden: Dits et Écrits. Schriften, Band IV: 1980-

1988. Suhrkamp.

Bio

Kevser Muratović has studied educational sciences, Islamic sciences and public law at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Currently she is working at the University of Vienna as a research assistant in the department of education. There she also pursues her dissertation project in the field of history of education. Her work focuses on educational nation-building in the Ottoman Empire, the enactment of borrowed policies and the social materialization of the nationalist discourse. Researching the intersection of modern schooling, nation-building, and class formation in an imperial context, her project has an interdisciplinary approach in order to grasp this multi-layered phenomenon. Her previous publications and presentations connect also to research topics like travelling ideas, policy-borrowing, and post-structural historiography, thereby contributing to discussions about cultural and political history as well as politics of modernization and secularization.

Mother Tongue Instruction policies and welfare state dilemmas. Points from a comparative study of the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

Migrant children presented a dilemma to Northern European welfare states when they arrived with their parents as so-called migrant guest workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Denmark, (West) Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands were presented with a dilemma of how to school these pupils who were not only somewhere between permanent and temporary; they also had a different mother tongue presenting a challenge to nation-state projects seeking a unifying majority language and unified education system for the whole population. These welfare states were therefore faced with determining what importance should be assigned to preserving migrant pupils’ mother tongue through policies on Mother Tongue Instruction. The paper will through a comparative policy analysis show how Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands as European welfare states used migrant pupils’ mother tongue to produce them as different, but simultaneously sought to make them similar to non-migrant pupils. The migrant pupils’ mother tongue was not considered a resource, but rather as an obstacle to the intertwined nation-state and welfare state projects the four welfare states sought to overcome.  The nation-state project was more decisive in the Mother Tongue Instruction policies of Denmark and (West) Germany, whereas the welfare-state equity dimension was stronger in the case of policies in Sweden and the Netherlands.

Bio

Nanna Ramsing Enemark is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Education Policy Research at Aalborg University. Her project revolves around local reception of newly arrived migrant pupils in the Danish welfare state. Her research areas include the organisation of migrant education, welfare state’s education policies,  comparative and international education.

Politics of headscarf in Turkey and the conceptualization of the “Turkish nation”

Women’s headscarf has been one of the most contested and multilayered symbols in Turkish politics. Nation building in Turkey can be read as a struggle to define “ideal womanhood” with reference to women’s clothing and headscarf. Headscarf is a complex signifies with multitude of meanings ranging from piety and political affiliation to status and class. In this presentation, I explore the multiple forms and meanings of the headscarf between 1982 (the year of the first official headscarf ban) and present. I argue that the political actors who succeed to get control over the meaning of headscarf (even temporarily), define not only the “ideal womanhood” but also what or who constitutes the “nation” in Turkey.    

Bio

Esra Özcan is a Communication Studies scholar at Tulane University, Department of Communication in New Orleans. Her research focuses on the representations of gender in news media, and feminism and anti-feminism in Turkey. She is interested in right-wing women’s activism and their role in carrying authoritarian men to power. She is the author of the book Mainstreaming the Headscarf: Islamist Politics and Women in the Turkish Media (I.B. Tauris, November 2019).

Headscarf policies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. A pedagogical approach

The acceptance of the 'Islamic headscarf' – or hijab – and other practices of female veiling in the public sphere are being debated controversially in many European countries. These debates over women attires challenge national identity imagery, anti- discriminatory approaches to citizenship and pluralistic policies. The heterogeneity of the argumentation patterns reveals the different ways in which the religious and the secular are defined and related within modern nation-states.

National acts in several European countries allow in some cases restrictions of religious freedom and exceptions from the rule of non- discrimination on the grounds of religion (ECHR, Article 9). Restrictions and exceptions to this general rule are sometimes justified with increased demands for secularity or neutrality in the public realm. However, under the premises of modern and liberal legal conceptions of citizenship and statehood, the hegemonic protection of the public sphere – which commonly includes public educational institutions – from private heterogeneity has become problematic (cf. Berghahn 2012, 105).

The paper aims to examine and compare legal regulations towards veiling in public schools in the German- speaking area regarding their pedagogical assumptions and implications.

Therefore, the argumentation of three legal regulations issued by Austrian, German and Swiss authorities are analyzed against the background of the different configuration of state- religion relations. For this purpose, a qualitative content analysis according to Mayering is applied (cf. Mayering 2010). Of particular interest will be the discussion of what norms operate in the production of specific subjects as recognizable or acknowledgeable persons while making it difficult to recognize or acknowledge others (Butler 2009).

Austria has a long tradition of religious tolerance, and the right of wearing a headscarf can specifically be derived from the 1912 ‘Muslim Law’ recognizing the Muslim minority in the occupied territory of Bosnia- Herzegovina (cf. Gresch; Hadj- Abdou, 2009). Nevertheless, in 2019, under the center-right/ far right government, a ban on headscarves for students up to the age of 10 was passed to be executed by school stakeholders. In 2021, the Constitutional Court has annulled the law as violating the Constitution (cf. VfGH G4/2020).

In Germany the Federal Constitutional Court decided to transfer the competence to regulate teachers‘ veiling from a national to the province level 2003, with the result that eight

provinces adopted school acts banning the teachers´ headscarf, and five of them passed clauses in favor of Christian religious symbols (cf. Berghahn 2012, 99). In a recent decision, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the headscarf ban imposed by Berlin's 2005 Neutrality Law was unlawful (FAZ, 2023).

In Switzerland, both school education and the regulation of the relationship between religious communities and the state are matters of cantonal law. In 1996, the Geneva authorities - based on the principle of confessional neutrality as well as the laicist orientation of the Geneva cantonal constitution - prohibited a Muslim teacher from wearing a headscarf during lessons at a public school. The verdict was confirmed by the ECtHR (cf. ECtHR Dahlab vs. Switzerland).

All three legal regulations unfold the pedagogic fundamental question whether the classroom should be constructed “as a neutral or impartial space” (Fancourt 2022, 143). The cases to be discussed have in common, that the political debate on the necessity to regulate women’s attire reveals a shift in the way of how secularism is understood: a shift from a political doctrine that guarantees the constitutional right of equality and the expression of religious freedom to a paradigm of state neutrality, that justifies mechanisms of sanctioning and excluding veiled women from the public sphere. The pedagogical consequences of such a paradigm shift will be discussed.

Sources:
 

Berghahn, Sabine (2012). Legal regulations. Responses to the Muslim headscarf in Europe. In: Rosenberger Sieglinde, Sauer Birgit (Ed.), Politics, Religion and Gender. Framing and regulating the veil. London: Routledge, 97-115.

Butler, Judith (2009). Frames of War. When is life grievable, London/ N.Y.: Verso.

ECtHR Dahlab vs. Switzerland: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001- 22643%22]} (01/02/2023)

ECtHR, Article 9 (2022). https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/guide_art_9_eng.pdf (6/02/2023).

FAZ (2023). https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/neutralitaetsgesetz-berlin-erfolglos-mit-verfassungsbeschwerde-zum-kopftuch-18647187.html (05/02/2023).

Gresch, Nora; Hadj- Abdou, Leila (2009). Selige Musliminnen oder marginalisierte Migrantinnen? Das österreichische Paradox der geringen Teilhabe von Kopftuchträgerinnen bei ›toleranter‹ Kopftuchpolitik In: Berghahn, Sabine; Rostock, Petra (Ed.), Der Stoff, aus dem Konflikte sind. Debatten um das Kopftuch in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, Bielefeld: transcript, 73-99.

Mayering, Philipp (2010). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken, Weinheim: Beltz.

Nigel, Fancourt (2022). The educational competence of the European Court of Human Rights: judicial pedagogies of religious symbols in classrooms, Oxford Review of Education, 48:2, 131-147.

VfGH G4/2020 (2021). https://www.flexlex.at/generated/books/2cz19GSivQrk9.pdf (04/02/2023).

Academic Profile
 

• 2021 - PraeDoc at the University of Vienna
• 2020-2023 - Teaching at the Institute of Educational Science, University of Vienna
• 2020-2021- Research associate at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen Nuremberg
  Long-term project “Normativity of Qur`an in the context of social change”, University of Friedrich-Alexander, Erlangen-Nürnberg and Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen
• 2019-2020 - Praxis Fellowship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt a. M.
  Long-term project “Normativity of Qur`an in the context of social change”, University of Friedrich-Alexander, Erlangen-Nürnberg and Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen
• 2019-2021- Mentor within the project “Educational Basics for Displaced Teachers” University of Vienna
• 2016-now - Diverse teaching activities and lectures in Austria and Germany
• 2015-2016 - Competence center of Islamic Education at the Department of Religious Education (IRPA), Vienna
• 2014 –now - PhD-student at the department of Educational Science, University of Vienna
  Under the supervision of Prof. Henning Schluss
  Working title: Between the prevalence of bond and autonomous learning activity- the learning subject in the Islamic tradition
• 2009-2019 - Lecturer at the University of Vienna
• 2005 – 2013 - Studies in Chemistry, Philosophie, Psychologie and Pedagogy
  University of Vienna, Masterthesis at the department of religious psychology under the supervision of Prof. Herman Westerink
  Title: Austrian and Islamic- Possibilities and opportunities of religious identity formation in the context of Islamic education in Austria

Teaching and lecturing activities

• 9.2022 Co-organization of a workshop on climate crisis and pedagogy in the context of the ÖFEB- conference, Graz
• 9.2022 Paper presentation "Discourses of Alterity in Quranic Narratives- a Possible Constructive Contribution to Social Cohesion?, SIG EARLI- Conference Dortmund
• 3.2021 Lecture “Between Geltungsbindung and self-learning. The learning subject in the Islamic tradition", KPH Vienna und eigene Lerntätigkeit. Das lernende Subjekt in der islamischen Tradition“, KPH Wien
• 4.2020 Co-organizer and workshop leader at a symposium for teachers of religion on the topic of normativity in the Koran, Stuttgart
• 3.2020 Lecture at the symposium " Muslim Adult Education in Germany", Muslimisches Bildungswerk Erlangen
• 10.2019 Lecture on the pedagogical implications of the Koran, Muslimisches Bildungswerk Erlangen

 

Publications

• Rahman, Sara (2022). Rezension zu: Schreiner, Martin (Hg.): Pluralitätsfähigkeit evangelischer Schulen. Die Münsteraner Barbara-Schadeberg-Vorlesungen. In: Österreichisches Religionspädagogisches Forum (30), 285-288.
• Rahman, Sara (2022). Koranische Erzählungen als Praxisfelder einer koranischen Ethik: Eine hermeneutische Annäherung aus pädagogischer Perspektive. In: Fahimah Ulfat, Mouez Khalfaoui, Mohammed Nekroumi (Hrg.): Normativität des Korans im Zeichen gesellschaftlichen Wandels. Theologische und religionspädagogische Perspektiven, Baden- Baden: Nomos, 413-440.
• El Maghraoui, Abdelaali; Rahman, Sara; Suleiman, Farid (2021): Die Normativität des Korans im Spannungsfeld überzeitlicher Gültigkeit und historischer Gebundenheit. Frankfurt a. M.: AIWG wifo paper. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21248/gups.62400

Affective politics around diversity language. Lessons learned from Danish high schools

Since at least the Danish cartoon crisis, which highlighted racialization and anti-Muslimism sentiments in Denmark (Hervik, 2011) as well as the international #MeeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, there has been intensified debates about what words and images are possible to use in relation to issues of diversity. The language (words, phrases, terms, discursive connotations) used around issues of diversity has become a matter of not only wording but wor(l)ding diversity (Haraway, 2016). Such ‘wor(l)ding-debates’ not only reflect the power struggles and tensions of minority-majority, racialization, or sexual harassment. They also materialize generational tensions and differences between (grand) parents and their (grand) children, educators, and students. During ethnographic research at two Danish gymnasiums, we encountered words used by students and teachers around diversity issues that are affectively charged. They bring forth discomfort, embarrassment, feelings of righteousness, and aspirations for change. While students wor(l)ded diversity in a more straight forward, easy-going  manner, the educators ‘ran out of words’, stumbled, and expressed discomfort about the vocabulary available in relation to issues of gender, cultural, racial, and sexual diversity.

We examine how the language of everyday diversity work takes generational shapes and how different generations have varied ways of approaching their common day language around diversity. The object of our analysis is not only words, phrases, and terms, but the atmospheric tensions around these wor(l)dings. This makes us wonder how diversity is affectively performed through wording and gestures; and through what may be termed, ‘nice’ pedagogical language versus the ‘dark language’ where the cut-of-words, like the N-word and even ‘race’, is haunting the conversations and creating tense ambiances (Ladson-Billing 1998; Gordon 2008).  To embark on how generational differences around the diversity vocabulary come into tensions we deploy analytical concepts from feminist new materialism (Barad, 2010; Bennet, 2010) and affect studies (Ahmed, 2014) that emphasize the affective entanglement of words and worlding (Haraway 2011).

References

Ahmed, S. (2014). Not in The Mood. New Formations, 82, 13-28.

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological Relations. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240- 268.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matters. A political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kinship in the Chtulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2011). Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture's Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country, Australian Humanities Review.

Hervik, P. (2011). The Annoying Difference: The Emergence of Danish Nationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books

Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press

Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7-24.

Bios

Dorthe Staunæs is a professor in social psychology at Danish School of Education, Aarhus University with a focus on leadership and diversity. Her working areas include feminist, affective-discursive-materiel methodologies performativity, affirmative critique, gender, race/racialization and intersectionality. Currently she is leading the projects ‘Diversity work as Mood work in Education’ and “Affective Investments in Diversity Work in STEM”

Mante Vertelyte is a postdoctoral researcher at Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Her research examines the ways that processes of inclusion-exclusion; particularly racialization plays out in everyday practices in welfare state public school contexts. Currently she works on the projects ‘Diversity work as Mood work in Education’ and “Affective Investments in Diversity Work in STEM”