Make room for colleagues: Multilingual pupils and teacher’s relational agency

Make room for colleagues. Multilingual pupils and teacher’s relational agency

More than 20 percent of all pupils in the Swedish elementary school are multilingual (Swedish National Agency for Education 2022). During the last decades, reforms aiming at an educational success for these pupils have been endorsed. Newly arrived pupils are offered multilingual study mentoring (MSM), and multilingual pupils are entitled to classes with Mother Tounge (MT) teachers once a week. Moreover, multilingual pupils have the right to study Swedish as a second language (SSL), a subject that give the same qualifications as Swedish. Furthermore, staffed school libraries are to be mandatory from 2025 (Swedish Government 2023).
Arguably, the possibilities are good for pedagogues of different categories to cooperate concerning the school achievement of multilingual pupils, although some obstacles have been pointed out in earlier research (Avery 2014, 2015; Ganuza & Hedman 2015; Svensson 2016; Lundberg 2020). Swedish teachers and SSL teachers have good chances to plan for a demanding education with many opportunities of scaffolding (Cummins 2000, García 2009) in collaboration with multilingual study mentors, MT teachers and school librarians. A resource perspective (Ruiz 1984) on multilingualism is possible.
In this paper, focus lies on how pedagogues from all these categories discuss their collaborative endeavour concerning multilingual pupils’ educational success. Fourteen participants from one school district were interviewed in three focus groups on their specific roles in this context. The preliminary results from the interviews have been analyzed with the help of theories of relational agency and of distributed expertise (Edwards 2004, 2005 and 2011; Priestley, Biesta & Robinson 2015). Although working in the same local educational system, the participants have very different views on their possibilities of cooperation. During the interviews, the need of a common framework for all schools in the district was underlined. At the same time, the participants stressed the need for a collaborative space where the pupil comes first, not the assessments.