Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
To answer my research questions, I follow the development and transformation of a political and pedagogical category that in its legal formulation emerged as ‘foreign children’ in close relation to a category that was at the time called ‘foreign workers’—that is, the children’s parents.
The descriptions of this group of pupils—which during this period was also created as a specific group of pupils, a group which at a distance might be called pupils with a migration history—developed during the 1970s and up until the beginning of the 1990s into categories such as “foreign language pupils” and later “bilingual pupils.” A main finding that will be unfolded in this chapter is that understandings of culture—especially from the 1980s religion in the form of Islam and Muslims—played just as important of a role for policy development and pedagogical strategies as the naming of the group itself.However, this chapter is not a history of the experiences of the pupils to which these categories were ascribed. Such a focus has not yet been explored in depth from a historical perspective in Denmark, and only a few studies elsewhere address this (e.g. Myers and Grosvenor 2011). Interview studies and classroom research from the first part of the 2000s, for example, point to how pupils in Danish classrooms conceived of as ‘Muslim pupils’ reinterpreted the categorisations.2 An exploration of the experiences of being a parent with a migration history in the Danish school system in various periods of educational and migrant policy since the 1970s is also much needed. To conduct such research, however, it is important to uncover how powerful politico-pedagogical actors framed the field of schooling that these pupils and their parents entered and thus also the practiced concepts and understandings on the field of education that politico-pedagogical actors produced.
The exploration is informed by a theoretical foundation drawn from the disciplinary fields of history and the sociology of education and the curriculum.
I understand ‘curriculum’ to be a historically embedded formation of knowledge and schooling related to social structures in society—for example, the division of labour (e.g. Lundgren 1981; Bernstein 1990, 2000; Goodson 1990, 1992)—and thus not limited to juridical instructions on teaching and the formal organisation of schooling. Rather, I conceptualise the curriculum as a social and discursive phenomenon that can be studied on different levels of socio-political practice—for instance, state bureaucracy, public political debate, and the classroom—and which also contains the objects and subjects of schooling (e.g. pupils and their parents). Such a curriculum history not only requires the study of curricular content in a formal sense; it also demands an examination of the objects and subjects of schooling and the way in which paradigms of interpretation have been organised and developed historically (Popkewitz 2001; Baker 2009). I then continue by studying the knowledge production directed towards pupils with a migration history and their parents, focusing on the socially practised conceptualisations that framed their opportunities to be school pupils and the parents of schoolchildren. It is in this respect that I point to the culturally different Muslim family as an entity that became pedagogised as a specific object of schooling (Bernstein 1990).