Issues of inclusion/integration and the recognition and celebration of diversity as a crucial aspect of (powerful) societies has been on the agenda of policy makers in Europe over the past half century (see eg. Makoni, 2012). International and national educational policies play an important role in both shaping these issues and attempting to provide solutions to them (Bacchi, 2009). In other words, policy contributes to (re)produce assumptions about what diversity is, including issues of identity, language and culture in society. We adopt critical pedagogy (e.g., Freire, 2000; Giroux, 2010) as a theoretical framework to systematically discuss the impact of policy documents on the construction of national discourses on the provision of support for linguistic diversity in education systems in two European countries, Italy and Sweden. Critical pedagogy emphasizes the interrelation between society, education, and policy, to reflect power relations, political interests, and social control which determine the configuration of the social space and its value references and conceptions of the world.

While guidelines in both countries offer the opportunity to attend mother tongue tuition (MTT, Sweden) and instruction of the language of origin (ILO, Italy), their political motives, structural provision and formal status differ considerably. For instance, membership in ethnic communities that are framed as “migrant” is not a requirement in Swedish policy in order to avail of MTT. Rather, a “basic knowledge” and use of the language in a family context is the criterion used for eligibility. In Italy ILO is not provided as a mandatory part of the curricula, although some offers exist for children which speak additional languages - except autochthonous minority languages that are officially recognised. In other words, what a language is and its status of official recognition (or not) is a contested issue related to i) the community that uses that language in society and ii) the language position in policy and the educational curriculum in the two countries.

In a range of research fields, and not least in the educational sciences, a proliferation of neologisms like super-/hyperdiversity, trans-/polylanguaging, supervernacular have arisen, in the wake of post-Cold War globalization and migration (see eg. Blommaert & Rampton, 2011, Garcia 2009, Vertovec, 2007). While this terminology stems from the UK and USA and continues to proliferate both in research and policy and lately also in the regulations concerning both ILO and MTT (see also Pavlenko, 2018, Bagga-Gupta & Messina Dahlberg, 2018), it is of analytical interest to investigate the use of these concepts in how they frame educational issues of inclusion, diversity and multilingualism in the educational policies of two countries that are part of the European landscape. From such a line of thinking, it is analytically relevant to focus on the issues that lie behind and beyond the policy documents in terms of a complex sociomaterial entanglement wherein the relation between what is stated and what is assumed and meant to solve is far from linear. Our interests thus lie on the distribution of agency across people and things to investigate the ways in which (new) educational landscapes shape and are shaped by them (Landri, 2015).

Taking the above as point of departure, this paper aims to shed light on the following issues: 

• What are the ways in which MTT and ILO are framed in terms of their motives, goals and strategies of implementation?
• Who are the sociomaterial actors involved (teachers, cultural mediators, pupils, family members, texts, other technologies, etc) and what are their roles for the implementation of MTT and ILO?
• How are discourses and key-concepts -such as multi-/,bi-/polilingualism, translanguaging, (super)diversity, equity/equality, migration and integration/inclusion- (re)constructed in (inter)national educational policy documents?

Given the aim of this paper, the analysis focuses upon a selection of national policy documents in Sweden and Italy that deal with the planning and provision of MTT and ILO since the 1990s. Examples of policy in the dataset are school laws, regulations and reports that include national, regional and local policy. A selection of supranational documents are also part of the dataset (OECD, EU and UNESCO for instance). We take a sociomaterial perspective in the investigation of the (re)production of the educational space of the ILO in Italy and MTT in Sweden. A sociomaterial analysis implies, in this study, to critically trace the ways in which language ideologies are enmeshed with legislative, political and educational discourses. We do this by following an inductive and retroductive process, wherein key-concepts, themes and critical configurations of ILO and MTT are mapped, compared and critically discussed in terms of a complex system (see also Barad, 2007, Fenwick, Edwards & Sawchuck, 2011, Landri, 2015). We decided to analyze policy documents in Italy and Sweden because of the differing approaches to the instruction of heritage languages in public schooling and the different terminologies used in this field. Italy’s geographical position is strategically central for migration waves to Europe that originate from the Global South. Swedish immigration has historically been characterized by labor migration (see eg. Kupský, 2017). Thus, the two countries’ ideological and political agendas build upon different cultural and historical frames of reference that, in turn, affect the ways in which inclusion and integration are framed in policy and implemented in practice (Messina Dahlberg, Vigmo, Surian, 2020). There is, to our knowledge, a paucity of comparative research that deals with the study of policy documents regarding the planning and implementation of formal educational activities that target pupils with a migrant background or those who speak other languages in family context. One study compares MTT policies in Sweden and Denmark (Salö et al, 2018), with interesting results that show that, in a Nordic context, there are substantial and important differences in how MTT is conceived of, legitimated and implemented. Our study aims to contribute to such research from a different theoretical perspective and by including two countries that are located at the antipodes of the European geopolitical space.

The results show significant differences in the ways in which the policy documents analysed in the two nations frame MTT and ILO. Even though Italy has a long history of migration, ILO is generally not yet considered a priority without clear guidelines or uniform approach on ILO, and the implementation of ILO depends on the financial resources (Gross, 2020, 2021), even if national guidelines for the integration of pupils with a migration background (Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 2007; MIUR 2014) refer to the need for schools to appreciate the multilingualism of individual children and suggest supporting ILO. In Sweden MTT has a relatively strong legal and formal position in the compulsory educational program in light of the Swedish Language Act (SFS 2009:600) that stipulates that all children have the right to be given access to their language, along with Swedish, that is the main language in the geopolitical space of Sweden. This implies that MTT is part of the national compulsory school curriculum and has a syllabus like any other school subject. MTT and ILO are educational spaces of struggle, of which policy is a constitutive part and where theoretical/analytical concepts coexist and overlap with political intentions, fashions and trends (Czarniawska, 2005). Both ILO and MTT are neither an issue that exclusively concerns the relevant linguistic groups, nor is it a purely political matter of a single nation. Rather, it is an issue with significant implications for individual development – such as personality and identity – but also for socio-transnational development – that is, global citizenship, ethics, democracy, justice, equity, dialogue, and coexistence. The analysis of educational policy for the instruction of heritage languages (MTT and ILO), sheds light on processes of marginalization and what could be a viable path towards more inclusive and socially just educational practices.

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