Abstract
This article offers an analysis of four Norwegian policy documents on inclusion of minority language pupils. The main concepts of this policy will be reconstructed and re-described, applying Niklas Luhmann's systems theory at different levels of the analysis. Luhmann's theory about society as a conglomerate of self-referential social systems investigates how these systems construct meaning and what consequences these constructions have for inclusion and exclusion processes. This article will focus on the Norwegian educational policy towards minority language pupils, defined by the policy as pupils who have a different mother tongue than Norwegian and Sami language. It is argued that this inclusion policy is excluding in its social form, and that it exhibits an increased emphasis on education when it comes to inclusion in society. Re-descriptions based on logic of forms will show how binary distinctions such as ‘inclusion/exclusion', ‘majority language pupil/minority language pupil' and ‘early intervention/wait and see' emerge in the timespan of 2004–2012. Based on this, it is claimed that descriptions of inclusion and exclusion are mutually constituted in the policy, thus giving rise to the question of whether the policy goal – ‘full' inclusion in society – is realisable. A paradox will be uncovered: minority language pupils are being included as excluded as well as excluded as included in the documents, displaying how inclusion and exclusion are two sides of the same coin. The strategy early intervention is introduced to remedy exclusions, thus converting the problem of inclusion into a problem of time.
Highlights
Since 1994, inclusion has been an important conception in the educational debate of most countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Fasting 2013)
If we look more closely at how the documents describe inclusion of children and young people who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, there seems to be a shift in the political documents during the timespan targeted by the analysis
I have reconstructed the political descriptions of inclusion of minority language pupils, conceptualised as semantics in a structural coupling between the function systems of politics and education in the Norwegian state organisation
Summary
Since 1994, inclusion has been an important conception in the educational debate of most countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Fasting 2013). The concept of pupils with minority language is mentioned in the earliest documents, D04, but the addressee of this document is more frequently children and young people with immigrant background or just immigrant/descendant of immigrants This can be due to the fact that this particular document is an overall White Paper, concerned with the inclusion policy for society as such. Educational communication is for example coded educable/not educable (Luhmann 2006), meaning it includes everything and everyone that can be coded as educable, and excludes its opposite It is not the pupil’s minority language or social background itself that causes their educational exclusion, but rather how language and background are perceived as a challenge for educational communication, and how these pupils are addressed as a group associated with educational failure and drop out. A relocation in the temporal dimension adds to the communicative strategies which obstruct the political system to reflect on exclusion as a phenomenon that is socially structured by social systems themselves
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