The Forgotten Generation: Icelandic-Born Students of Foreign Background in Icelandic Compulsory Schools

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Perspectives Across the Educational Pipeline

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative study on the academic and social successes and challenges of Icelandic-born students of immigrant background as they complete compulsory school and move on to upper-secondary education. The theoretical framework of the study includes multicultural education (Banks, 2015) and multilingual education (Chumak-Horbatsch, 2012; Cummins, 2004). The findings shed light on the students’ educational experiences, their multilingual language use. The students exhibited a wealth of linguistic and cultural knowledge and navigated successfully within their multilingual and multicultural environments. However, the findings reveal a dissonance between the students’ language practices at home, where translanguaging is the norm, and at school, where a monolingual language policy is enforced.

Authors

• Anh-Dao Tran, University of Iceland

• Hanna Ragnarsdottir, University of Iceland

• Samuel Currey Lefever, University of Iceland