'We're really lucky': Co-creating 'us' and the 'Other' in school booktalk

Abstract

This article addresses how 'Otherness' is co-construed in booktalk in a Swedish school. The data consist of video-recorded teacher-led booktalk sessions, involving small groups of pupils in grades 4–7. Seven of the eight books discussed were, at least partly, set in settings foreign to the pupils. We found that a basic teacher device for constructing the 'Other', was to implicitly or explicitly compare a group of others with the participant children themselves, 'us Swedish children', accomplishing 'Otherness' by foregrounding dif ferences, setting up a series of implicit or explicit contrasts between 'them' and 'us'. Such contrasts concerned: literacy and language skills (Extracts 1 and 2), ways of 'sticking together' (Extracts 3 and 4), as well as contrasts in terms of the distribution of material educational resources and work demands on children (Extracts 5–8). Moreover, the last extracts also illustrate how pupils co-construct the teachers' implicit or explicit underlying moral agendas.