Struggling to teach “those who struggle”. The education of newly arrived students with limited schooling in two Swedish compulsory schools

Abstract

This study examines the teaching of a student group that is often overlooked in research and policy: newly arrived adolescent students with limited previous experience of formal schooling (NALS). Drawing on ethnographic data produced at two junior high schools with different reception models for newly arrived students, we asked how NALS were approached at the schools. Employing the notion of difference blindness, the study shows that, at one of the schools, NALS were primarily approached as “weak” learners in general or as “weak” Swedish learners in particular. We argue that NALS are caught here in an “oscillation” between visibility as a group with particular needs on the one hand and invisibility resulting from difference blindness on the other. At the second school, a bilingual model was employed. Here, NALS pedagogical needs were to a higher extent tied to school subject knowledge. We demonstrate that when Swedish acquisition was not the primary goal of the educational practice, this enabled a pedagogy that was less “blind” to the needs of NALS.

Keywords

• Newly arrived students
• limited schooling
• difference blindness
• ethnography