Educational knowledge and politics of receiving migrant pupils. A contribution to Danish welfare state history during the late twentieth century

Dilemmas in Reception of Newly Arrived Migrant Students: A Local Third Way?

“…The subsequent transformation, on which this paper is centered, directs attention to how the already altered reception approach is transformed and pedagogized in schools (Bernstein, 2003). Thus, the focus in this paper is exclusively on the school level, as opposed to the national level (Enemark, 2023) or the municipal level (Enemark, 2024). Combined with street-level theory from Michael Lipsky (Lipsky, 2010), emphasis is therefore on which constraints and conceptualizations of their job impact how reception approaches are handled and molded in the hands of pedagogical staff, working at the frontlines of the Danish welfare state responsible for the schooling of newly arrived migrant students.…”

“…While debates intertwining migration and schooling thus occur at the national level, Rosenkrantz-Theil followed the decentralizing policy of former Danish Ministers of Education (Enemark & Buchardt, 2023). This is emblematic of attempts to solve the larger dilemma in relation to migrant people in Denmark, namely by means of decentralization.…”

“…For municipalities to interpret national policy on reception, and transform it into concrete pedagogical procedures at schools, they must look to ways of organizing the reception of newly arrived migrant students. While a multitude of reception approaches have historically been developed locally (Enemark & Buchardt, 2023), scholarship on reception approaches discerns between two main approaches in a European context (European Education and Culture Executive Agency, Eurydice, 2017, p. 18), namely the reception class approach 1 and the direct enrollment approach. 2 While there is limited contemporary literature on reception approaches in a Danish context (Moldenhawer, 2017;Rambøll, 2015Rambøll, , 2017, most municipalities in 2017 reported using one of the two (Styrelsen for Undervisning og Kvalitet, 2017).…”

Majority and Minority Exposure in Childhood: Studies of ethnic segregation in early life in Denmark and its consequences

“…Current integration policies in the country explicitly emphasize cultural assimilation into mainstream society through proficiency in the Danish language and active involvement in the labor market (Simonsen, 2017). Consequently, the education of minority children, and how to approach their education, have been central issues in school politics and pedagogical debates since at least the 1980s (Enemark and Buchardt, 2023;Vertelyte and Staunaes, 2021;Fernández and Jensen, 2017). This debate is also reflected in Denmark's reputation for being "hard-liners" within the Scandinavian context regarding immigration and integration sentiments.…”

“…Consequently, I argue that spatial assimilation and structural change are conceptually interconnected. 17 An exception to the standard practice is found in some municipalities' use of reception classes in periods, where immigrant children are placed in specialized classes with other immigrants for a certain number of years to receive education based on their mother tongue (Enemark and Buchardt, 2023). 18 While home-schooling is possible, it has historically been essentially non-existent in Denmark.…”