Various forms of bilingual education programmes have been offered for decades to both majority and minority language speakers all over the world (e.g., García 2009). These programmes usually emphasize that two languages are used for instruction. In the literature, the students of these programmes tend to be presented as a homogenous group and as first or second-language speakers of these languages. This is also the case in Finland where the study reported in this presentation took place. Finland is a bilingual country by Constitution (1917/2000) and has an established network of immersion bilingual education programmes in the two national languages Finnish and Swedish as well as CLIL bilingual education in English (Björklund & Mård-Miettinen 2011; Nikula & al. 2016). The latest developments in Finland in this field concern bilingual pedagogy in Finnish and Swedish and language showers in various languages (Palviainen & al. 2016). The rapidly growing multilingualism in Finland results in groups in education that consists of children with diverse language backgrounds. As a result, all teachers including those who work in bilingual education, need to develop multilingual practices to take into account children’s multilingual resources and to enhance inclusion and participation (e.g., García & Li Wei 2014). The present paper reports on an ethnographically informed case study in early childhood education and examines the changing discourse on pedagogy of a teacher who moved class, having initially taught monolingual children of Finnish-speaking background and then working with children with multiple language backgrounds. The teacher was observed and interviewed in 2019-2020. The main data presented are three thematic interviews, analyzed with a discursive approach, nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004), to identify the teacher’s discourses around her multilingual practices. The research question is: What concepts, places and people circulate in the teacher’s discourses and how have they affected her teaching in a multilingual group? Hence, we connect the larger macro-level discourses with micro-level practices of the teacher. In the presentation, we will combine extracts of the teacher’s discourses and transcripts of the observed practices. The findings show that the discourse of equality between languages frequently recur in the data. In multilingual pedagogy, equality not only concerns the two main languages of instruction but also includes taking into consideration the home languages of the children in multiple ways.

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