School(s) for All? Inclusion, Special Education, and Multilingualism at the Intersection of Disability and Migration in Sweden

• In Event: Inclusion and Special Needs Education for Immigrant Students in the Nordic Countries

Abstract

This study addresses the educational and social needs and rights of students with diverse backgrounds – in respect to first language (other than Swedish), ethnicity, culture and migration-status – enrolled in the Swedish school system. Disability Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit) is the framework used to examine policies and practices regarding inclusion. The concepts of ableism, the discrimination that results from regarding disability as negative and abnormal, and linguicism, the discrimination of languages seen as undesirable or of having a lower status (linguistically argued racism), are used to interrogate how education responds to migratory effects and how this response impacts on access to equitable education and for these groups. A School for All is the political vision that the Swedish education system welcomes all children and youth and that instruction is adapted for students’ individual conditions. School(s) for all in the title indicates that there is an increasing trend to question the ideal of inclusion. To begin with, Sweden has long had different school forms and in addition, the organization of instruction for students with varying abilities and needs is increasingly based on different types of diagnoses and categorization.

The first part of this study will focus on disproportionality in relation to compulsory school for students with intellectual disability and migration background focusing on previous research and patterns in enrollment over time. The second part of the study deals with different aspects of language in relation to special needs education in the Swedish school context. The study’s last part will provide a description of the organization and practice in a ‘resource school’ and the emergence of new local practices. Together, these signs of discriminatory practices and hindering structures in the intersection of linguisicm/racism/ethnicism and ableism reveal a pattern from the inside of school segregation. Disproportionality, disparities between policy and practice, and disregard of the importance of multilingual approaches in special education measures are presented. Diagnosis practices are a double-edge sword for segregating schools and the disproportionality reveals that misdiagnosis as well as ‘missed diagnosis’ seemingly occurs. Students do not receive multilingual classroom assistance and mother tongue instruction despite school policies and research advocating for such measures as successful routes for learning. This is an expression of disproportionality, namely, underrepresentation in receiving apt accommodations addressing the student group. This is due to persistent monocultural understandings that do not acknowledge the basic facts of heterogeneity in the student body and the assumed norm of Swedishness left uninterrogated will determine the response of the school system and increase ineffectiveness and inequality. The concluding discussion in this examination lays the groundwork for the emerging research field at the intersection of migration and disability in education.

Authors

• Liz Adams Lyngbäck, Stockholm University

• Nihad Bunar, Stockholm University

• Enni Paul, Stockholm University