Constructing the Other: Immigrant Minority Pupils' Identity Construction in the Discourse of a Native Dutch Teacher at a Dutch Islamic Primary School

Abstract

Immigrant minority pupils' identities take a secondary position in the curriculum of the Dutch (primary) educational sector where the jargon of minorities (Extra & Gorter, 2001: 5) addresses pupils as allochtone leerlingen (immigrant minority pupils) and where the teaching of their community languages has stopped following governmental regulations (Bezemer & Kroon, forthcoming). Consequently, Dutch (primary) school teachers are faced with the challenge of fostering mainstream (language) education as a means for their pupils' social emancipation while relying on the assumption of an untapped proficiency of these pupils in their home languages and affiliation to their home cultures (Spotti, forthcoming). On this basis, the present paper gives an analysis and interpretation of the ‘discourse models’ of a recently qualified Dutch-medium primary school teacher, unravelling how she constructs the identities of her pupils in a Dutch Islamic primary school classroom. The study contributes not only to raise teachers' awareness about the complexity of identity construction in (primary) educational contexts characterised by an Islamic outlook and by a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous student population. Also, it allows exploration of possible connections between this teacher's construction of pupils' identities and the larger Dutch macro-discourse of representation of its cultural others.