“Your language or mine? – Politics of Participation in Immigrant Integration Training Classrooms”
Channel: Helsinki Collegium
Date: 2018-11-16

The international symposium "Politics of participation: Anthropological reflections on power and interaction" took place at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies on October 18-19, 2018.

Panel 2: Institutions and the Regimentation of Participation
Chair: Don Kulick, Distinguished University Professor, Anthropology, Uppsala University

Irina Piippo, Postdoctoral Researcher, Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki: “Your language or mine? – Politics of Participation in Immigrant Integration Training Classrooms”

In educational contexts, especially those that involve students with immigrant background, participation is nowadays a central organizing value. From classroom pedagogics to active forms of citizenship, participation is seen as the key to involvement and integration. Moreover, often the two are discursively intertwined so that certain kinds of participatory pedagogical practices are seen to better enhance students’ participation in the society and labor market. Currently, especially translingual pedagogies are making their way into the classrooms bringing students’ first languages more tightly as a part of ratified semiotic means for language socialization. The ideal of translanguaging not only acknowledges multilingualism as a normal societal state of affairs but also embraces the idea that borders between languages are ideological and need not be necessarily upheld in interactional situations.

My paper explores the politics of participation in immigrant integration training classrooms in Helsinki metropolitan area against this background of changing pedagogical ideals. By drawing examples from my fieldwork in adult literacy training classrooms, I discuss the complex dynamics by which different languages are rendered visible and invisible in the school context, and forms of participation through those languages desirable or undesirable. My examples illustrate, how the everyday practices that regiment language use are fueled by practical concerns, deep-rooted norms of classroom conduct, and multiple and partly contradictory pedagogical ideologies that all in their own way value participation.