1980s–1993: Discovering the Muslim Family
While the 1980s did not bring much legislation on school strategies directed towards pupils with a migration history, the decade brought a changed debate on what was increasingly labelled ‘Muslim immigrants’ following the media attention on the Iranian revolution and the war in Lebanon (Würtz Sorensen 1988; Pedersen 1988).
The family situations of those who were increasingly labelled ‘Muslims’ subsequently caught the public eye through, for instance, newspaper campaigns in the mainly left-intellectual daily Information (The Daily Information), where the main theme was that Muslim women were specifically oppressed due to so-called ‘Muslim culture’ (Pedersen 1988, 126).During the conservative-liberal government (1982–1993), the ideological signals regarding education drew on the so-called canon approach, inspired by the US American scholar Harold Bloom’s ideas of the canon of ‘Western culture’ (Rasmussen 1996). Along with the focus on the culture of those who were now increasingly called ‘immigrants’, especially those of a so-called ‘Muslim culture’, a focus on Danish culture and values started to emerge.
Investment in culture as a pedagogical category also came from a growing field of experts in the teaching of ‘foreign-language pupils’, or—as they were increasingly dubbed—‘bilingual pupils’, namely as the promotion of multicultural education and interests in the ‘cultural background’ of the pupils.
These investments also brought religion to the fore. In The Multicultural School: About Intercultural, Anti-Racist Education, a 1986 handbook for teachers, religion was, on the one hand, presented as a resource; immigrant parents could, for example, be invited to talk about societal discrimination or everyday Islam. On the other hand, religion was considered an obstacle within schooling as it caused ‘cultural clashes in school’, for instance, the ‘immigrant parents’’ attitude to sex education and dress codes (Clausen 1986).
Islam had become part of the cultural difference defining ‘immigrant parents’ and their children, and the focus on the parents as an explanatory factor in relation to the schooling of their children increased. With regard to the latter, the same was the case with other families in schooling, but in the case of ‘the immigrant family’, the significant feature was the Muslim culture ascribed to them. The foreign worker family had transformed into the immigrant family, which in turn was increasingly understood in the light of Islam as a culture.The development that had taken place was mirrored in the themes of the annual publications from LUFE: in 1981, the theme was ‘Young immigrants’, while in 1990, it was ‘Muslim children in Denmark’ (Braunsweig et al. 1981; Sondergard and Christensen 1990).
Culture was becoming the central category of description, replacing terms pointing to a specific relation to the labour market, and the interest in the language of migrant pupils became professionalised and increasingly connected to ‘culture’.
With the School Act of 1993 put forward by the new Social Democrat-headed government, the term ‘culture’ became the main purpose of schooling. The new opening paragraph, which still prevails in its basic form, stated that ‘The Folkeskole shall familiarise pupils with Danish culture and contribute to their understanding of other cultures’ (The Act on the Folkeskole of 1993). The formulation establishes a hierarchy of knowledge categories: ‘Danish culture’ should be learned intimately, whereas the wording surrounding ‘other’ cultures indicated that these cultures were to be studied at a distance. In the legal remarks, Christianity was the only example given of ‘Danish culture’ (Dupont and Holm Larsen 2004). In addition, the legal text on the school curriculum, the contents of instruction, underwent a ‘cultural make-over’. For instance, the teaching of Christianity was re-described in cultural terms (Fagh?fte 1995). ‘Culture’ now appeared as a category of knowledge imbued with ethnic national culture: ‘Danish culture’ and ‘the others’.
In the same process, the teaching of Danish as a second language—which was taught in special lectures, for example—for the first time got a curricular guideline manual of its own in line with other school subjects. This was seen as a huge step forward by the association for the teachers of bilingual pupils (now called UFE) (Sogaard Thomsen 2004a. See also Kristiansdottir 2006). On the one hand, the instruction of those who were now called bilingual pupils had been regulated and professionalised, as professional teachers’ organisations and migrants’ civil organisations had requested decades earlier. On the other hand, children with a migration history, among them pupils not even with migrant parents but rather with migrant grandparents, had been culturalised, and culture as explanation was extensively filled in with religion in the form of being a Muslim—possessing Muslimness (cf. Buchardt 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016; Buchardt and Fabrin 2015).