Becoming at home in a globalised world: Citizenship and inclusion in relation to cultural diversity within the context of Icelandic education

• Main Author: Harðardóttir, Eva
• Other Authors: Berglind Rós Magnúsdóttir, Ólafur Páll Jónsson, Deild menntunar og margbreytileika (HÍ), Faculty of Education and Diversity (UI), School of Education (UI), Menntavísindasvið (HÍ), University of Iceland, Háskóli Íslands
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Iceland, School of Education, Faculty of Education and Diversity 2023
• Subjects: Cultural diversity; Inclusion; Citizenship; Borgaravitund; Inngilding; Margbreytileiki; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/4479

The Icelandic education system has developed largely in line with the Nordic social welfare model emphasising principles of democratic citizenship and inclusion. In the past two decades, Iceland has moved from marginal immigration to being one of the highest immigrant intake countries in Europe. Based on three separate studies and subsequent peer-reviewed articles, this PhD project seeks to understand how citizenship and inclusion are presented and perceived in relation to cultural diversity within the context of Icelandic education. The research draws on critical scholarly work on global citizenship education (GCE) and inclusion in conjunction with selected conceptual ideas from Hannah Arendt; in particular her metaphor of visiting as a way to engage with diversity. The research includes an analysis of policy documents, unstructured group interviews with teachers and semi-structured individual interviews with parents with immigrant and refugee status. It also includes a theoretical inquiry into the role of GCE as an inclusive way of engaging with cultural diversity within national educational settings. The research thus contributes to the broad range of studies pertaining to educational inclusion of immigrants and refugees. It is unique in the way it makes use of diverse data and analysis as pertaining to the education of migrant students and the significance of GCE. Findings from the analysis of policy documents and the teachers’ narratives indicate overlapping discursive orientations of citizenship and inclusion as assimilative being on the one hand and as competitive performance on the other. The analysis of the parents’ interviews suggests that parents with diverse sociocultural background, education and migration trajectories, experience various forms of internal exclusion within Icelandic schools. That is where their perspectives and experiences are either invalidated or disregarded completely. Such notions risks maintaining and recreating binary and unequal power positions between Icelandic parties on ...