Educare (Sep 2008)
The right of all to inclusion in the learning process
Abstract
With its background in research on the development of the second language and the language use of immigrant children as portrayed in political discourse, this article discusses the significance of the mother tongue in the access of newly-arrived pupils to teaching in school subjects while the development of their second language is in its earliest stages. The starting point for the project is a socio-cultural perspective of teaching and the development of knowledge, and that language is discourse. If one sees citizenship as an expressed goal of education with the aim of stimulating inclusion and critical thought, language plays a decisive role in how all voices can make themselves heard. Two preparatory classes in Malmö were invited to problem-solving work sessions in the technical workshop at the School of Education. The student teachers acted as supervisors and observers alternately, and documented the conversations that took place. Sequences of conversation were recorded for analysis. The study illuminates and problematises the content of the conversations during problem-solving, what initiatives to conversation are taken by pupils and students, what the possibilities of problem-solving using the mother tongue are, and what the pupils’ texts contain and if they are functional, in the sense that it is possible to understand what the pupil wants to mediate to the reader. Excerpts from the recordings show that both children and students use a variety of “strategies” in the conversations and this has a number of consequences for the processes of knowledge.
