Inclusion in refugee classes

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Work with diversity in sustainable education

Proposal

This session aims at exploring how inclusion is practiced in the Norwegian refugee classes for newly arrived youth, qualified for education and an introductory program. Inclusion is considered a core value of the Norwegian public school system, comprising pupils with widely different backgrounds and capabilities (Haug 2014). However, what inclusion is in practice is not necessarily given. The demands of the school system as well as classroom interactions can show the limits and the diverse situations that might constitute inclusion. I therefore ask: How is inclusion practiced in Norwegian refugee classes?

The aim for this session is to explore the range and the boundaries for how inclusion is practiced for immigrant pupils in school. I argue that descriptions from the refugee classes might reveal deep controversies and boundaries in what constitutes inclusion and question its aim as a golden standard for Norwegian education.

Many key challenges of inclusion do not fit predefined ethical rules. Inclusion tends to evolve differently in practice and through action. In this session I will therefore turn to practice based perspectives. I give a reading of Deleuze and Guattari to establish an empirical and interactional approach to inclusion. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Deleuze (2009), ethical issues must be studied as events and practices at the boundaries between people, materials, discourses and orders of society. Inclusion can be studied as events, revealing different degrees for capacity for action for teachers and pupils.

The study is an empirical and qualitative case study, where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in refugee classes in the eastern part of Norway (Flyvbjerg and Cambridge 2011, Madden 2010). In this paper I will conduct a thematic content analysis of two excerpts from fieldwork in one refugee class with pupils from grade 8 to 10

The analyses show the refugee class in a period of transition to a regular school. The class will be split up and the pupils transferred to different schools. On the one hand, the analyses show an inclusive group in terms of affirmative and safe personal relations. The group is characterized by great tolerance for diversity and support for vulnerability. However, as the transition to a regular public school approaches, and the focus of both the teachers and the pupils is to “fit in” to the new school, to becoming Norwegian and becoming so-called “ordinary”. “Becoming ordinary”, then, is a standard of inclusion with a high price to pay in terms of loss of individuality and a devaluation of diversity. Youth crossing boundaries in life and coming into the Norwegian school might not only display the different practices of inclusion, but might question the very concept of inclusion.

Author

• Ingrid Reite Christensen, University of South-Eastern Norway