Multicultural school festivals as a creative space for identity construction – the perspective of minority parents

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, we explore how minority parents construct and promote cultural identities through a multicultural school event in Norway. Such events respond to the call for diverse and inclusive initiatives to facilitate learning, belonging, and cohesion in schools. Schools see these events as helping further inclusion. Prior research on the subject has criticised such events for promoting essentialist understandings of cultural identities, hence regarding them as counterproductive to the aim of promoting inclusion. This research has directed scarce attention to the participant perspective, among them minority parents. Inspired by a broad understanding of linguistic landscaping, we documented the displayed representations at the stalls. Subsequently, using the Kurdish stall as an example, we encouraged the Kurdish parents to reflect on the meaning of the representations in semi-structured interviews. The findings indicate that the Kurdish parents involved view the event as an important space for creative construction of transnational and diasporic identities, as well as an opportunity for a minority group to strive for acceptance for its cause. We end the article by reflecting on the pedagogical potential of representations in multicultural school events.