Between policy and practice : A study of newly arrived students’ pedagogical and social inclusion in school

The overall aim of the thesis is to investigate how schools’ formal and informal structures affect the pedagogical and social inclusion of newly arrived students, as well as how newly arrived students in grades 7-9 and school staff themselves understand and handle these structures. Formal structures refer to forms of pedagogical measures for newly arrived students. Informal structures refer to opportunities for and the quality of interactions and social relations between, on the one hand, newly arrived students and, on the other, non-newly arrived students and school staff. The majority of the newly arrived students in this study came to Sweden during or immediately after the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016. This is also a period when an extensive educational policy reform was carried out in Sweden in order to provide better conditions for schools to organize the reception and education of newly arrived students. By using a critical policy analysis, the theoretical focus is placed on a critical and contextualized understanding of how policy implementation can be understood in the relation between local practices and national support measures. The thesis is based on an ethnographic approach, and the empirical material was collected in two primary schools in the Stockholm region during academic year 2018/2019. Besides fieldnotes, interviews with newly arrived students and school staff formed the basis for the analysis. The thesis involves three empirical studies. In Study I, the meaning of inclusion is constructed in relation to three contextual perspectives: the contextual requirements, contextual opportunities and contextual limits. The study shows that organizational and pedagogical "solutions", whose purpose is to include newly arrived students, sometimes have exclusionary premises. The school staff constantly find a way to legitimize their practices in relation to what the policy prescribes. Study II shows that the students and teachers can influence the school's institutional habitus through informal structures. This entails creating places where newly arrived students are accepted as a legitimate part of the school's educational and social environment, in which solidarity comes to the fore through the institutional habitus of multicultural incorporation. In Study III, the analyses show that the schools’ authorized policy actors, such as school leaders, or in some cases teachers, have a legitimate mandate to interpret and enact policy regarding multilingual classroom assistance, which sometimes turns out to be different than what was intended in a certain policy decision. However, there are some actors who do not have a legitimate mandate, but in some cases, they can influence the formal structures and adapt local policy as nonauthorized policy actors. In conclusion, the thesis shows how the school contexts can offer belonging when implementation of formal policy has already created otherness. The outcome is thus not a unilateral distribution of power by principals and teachers, but their power is reduced by the students' relational practices