This ethnographic study investigates cooperation between homes and schools in a Danish context from the perspective of 'ethnic minority fathers'. I analyse how experiences of an 'implicit' mistrust can make ethnic minority fathers reluctant to cooperate with child institutions such as schools. It is argued that this mistrust is related to a…

This article reflects on how participatory processes inspired by action research hold a genuine potential for developing social educational work in a more democratic way. We present our concept of 'Upturned Participation', which is built upon the methodological framework of Critical Utopian Action Research. First Critical Utopian Action Research…

This study investigated whether a country's policy context for immigrant integration was related to native adolescents' attitudes towards ethnic minorities in European countries, using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. We found that students in a country with more inclusive and multiculturalist policies for…

Denmark has persistent challenges with an unacceptably large 'residual group' of young people with no upper secondary education. Vocational education and training programs continue to suffer low enrollment and high dropout rates. Far too many ethnic minority boys drop out of school and educational system in Denmark. At the same time, there is a…

The purpose of this article is analysis of discursive marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states. What knowledge do Nordic research discourses produce about marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states? What are the Nordic contributions to research discourses on marginalisation through education? We apply a discourse…

Most societies today are culturally diverse. Increasingly, minority groups are demanding recognition and self-governing rights to protect their ways of life against that of the majority. These demands represent a serious challenge for the state: how is it to balance between the equally legitimate claims of the many cultures inhabiting its…

This article suggests how we should study media and information literacies (MIL) and do so at a time, when young people nurture these literacies through multiple media practices and across spaces of learning. Our basic argument is this: in order to gain a robust knowledge base for the development of MIL we need to study literacy practices beyond…

This paper deals with the ways in which minority students in the Danish public school system bring mono-lingually based norms into their poly-lingual peer group interaction. In sequential micro-analyses of interaction we show how the students use the voice of an authority in their reproduction and negotiation of linguistic norms. We base our…

This article contributes a framework for analyzing learning as an expansive process in which persons come to partly transcend marginalization. Expansive learning is a kind of learning that partly transcends marginalization through changed participation and recognition by others of participants in their changed communities. This article draws on…

The article presents a curriculum-sociological study of "religion" in the classroom. More specifically, it is a study, inspired by Bernstein, Foucault and Bourdieu, that examines various forms of identity politics tied to "religion" and "culture" as these concepts unfold in the classroom in relation to knowledge…

Teachers and schools in Denmark are presently trapped in a dilemma between political discourse concerning monolingual and monocultural education in the national curriculum and their professional knowledge about children and learning processes. Out of 690,000 students in primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark, approximately 10% are…

The aim of this article is to help clarify N. F. S. Grundtvig's influence on the history of education in Denmark, in particular the comprehensive school. Is this school a result of Grundtvig's achievements? Or is Grundtvig receiving credit due to a misinterpretation of the history of education of the twentieth century? We claim that the latter is…

The agonistic approach--aimed at embracing opposing perspectives as part of a qualitative research process and acknowledging that process as fundamentally political--sheds light on both the construction of and the resistance to research identities. This approach involves reflexively embedding interview situations into the ethnographic context as a…

There is a dearth of knowledge about factors correlated with suicide risk among minority groups in Western societies. In the present study we compared suicide risk among persons with foreign background with that of the majority population to determine whether certain minority groups are at a particular risk for suicide, as well as to illuminate…

This article presents a case study of the Roskilde Integration Project designed to enhance the school-readiness of ethnic minority preschool children. The process of implementing the Roskilde Integration Project involved linking a community of practice--consisting of the integration team, educators, and other professionals--with the immigrant…