Session Information
Contribution
Description: Knowledge transformation will be illuminated in this paper through a study of migrant teachers' encounters with the Swedish school system. The primary aim of this study was to try to develop a picture of how one group of unemployed migrant academics who had taken a two-year complementary program and acquired Swedish teaching certification as Science and Math-teachers perceived their encounter with the Swedish school culture and how they construed their "new" teacher identity, one year and three years after finishing their complementary teacher education programme. The theoretical framework include an institutional perspective where the school as an institutional setting means that there is an accepted, basically not questioned way to behave and relate. Institutions constrain and regulate behaviour and the institutional order put limits to what is possible to do. Furthermore a historical perspective is used with the specific development in the Swedish school system of how equality and "a school for all" has been realised through homogenisation process.
Methodology: The study was conducted in two parts. The first part of the study comprises interviews with 28 teachers - 14 with qualifications for elementary school and 14 qualified for high school - who had gone through the two-year complementary program. Interviews were also conducted with 12 administrators at the schools where the teachers were or had been employed. The study also includes a questionnaire survey encompassing a representative selection of administrators. 170 administrators completed the questionnaire, a response rate of over 70 percent. The second part was conducted three years later and comprises interviews with 26 of the 28 teachers.
Conclusions: The majority, 75 percent of the course participants who completed the program, was employed as teachers one year later, or was temporarily employed or was substitutes who had good prospects for continued employment. Three years later all but three teachers were employed (90 %). Almost all of the teachers were employed in schools where the majority of the students had migrant backgrounds and diversity in terms of ethnicity, religion and language. The teachers used different strategies in their encounter with the Swedish school culture. Increasingly they make use of their own migrant background and it becomes an important part of how they structure their professional identity. They regard themselves as a resource in relation to the students with migrant background in terms of knowledge, by being able to function as role models and by having greater understanding for the feeling of being left out since they have their own experiences of migration to relate to. They emphasize their deep command of their subject areas and many of them regarded themselves as having more knowledge about their subjects than did their "Swedish" colleagues. Difference is marked not similarity in relation to their "Swedish" colleagues.
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