This paper revolves around what I term ‘reception policy’ and how this is understood and practiced in a particular municipality and in two particular schools in that municipality. Reception policy is understood as the centrally comprehensive approach outlining to schools and school administrations how newly arrived migrant pupils are to be (gradually) included in the mainstream classroom at public comprehensive schools in Denmark (the ‘folkeskole’). While there is a national legislative framework, the framework is open for local interpretation.

Newly arrived migrant pupils have in the past couple of years increasingly emerged as a distinct group of interest in Danish research (Breidahl, 2017; Danmarks Evalueringsinstitut, 2019; Kristjánsdóttir & Jacobsen Perez, 2016; Rambøll, 2015). This comes from an ongoing interest into how the Danish welfare state institutions and its actors have met this group and their parents (Buchardt, 2018; Moldenhawer & Øland, 2013; Moldenhawer & Ruskjær, 2017; Øland et al., 2019; Padovan-Özdemir & Moldenhawer, 2017; Padovan-Özdemir & Øland, 2020). National policies aimed at the group of newly arrived migrant pupils are condensed, and it has instead largely been relegated to municipal agencies to elaborate on these through decoding and recoding. What policies and practices the pupils receive is therefore largely dependent on the locally recoded policies within the municipality as well as the subsequent discretion of bureaucracies and street-level actors (Gaus, 1931; Brodkin, 2015). Inspired by Singh et al (2013), I investigate the recontextualization of discourses from the Official Recontextualizing Field (the national policies) and how they are recontextualized and recoded and decoded at the Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field with regards to policy and practice for reception of newly arrived migrant students. I do this to gain insights into the education policy processes of the Danish welfare state and to illuminate the role of (street level) bureaucrats and teachers in decoding and recoding policy.

The municipal policy investigated derives from a particular municipality with an interesting reception policy history. They have previously used mother tongue classes (Enemark & Buchardt, in progress) and in 2017 they transitioned to reception classes only at selected schools and direct enrolment of pupils into mainstream classrooms with minor levels of language support in other schools. In the school year 2022/2023 (beginning in August), they will transition towards a new type of “turbo classes” with brief stays in centralized Danish language classes and then transition into mainstream classrooms. My PhD project investigates this policy process as experienced by the street-level bureaucracy: the mid-level policy actors in the municipality, the school leadership and teachers with managerial tasks.

This paper is part of an ongoing PhD project beginning January 1, 2021, on the organizational policies of schooling for newly arrived migrant students. This paper draws on a subset of the data collected in this regard, using particularly the semi-structured interviews with upwards of 10 policy actors and street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010). These have been conducted to investigate the process of adjusting a particular reception policy aimed at newly arrived migrant students in a Danish municipality. These interviews are from prior to the implementation of the adjusted reception policy and therefore revolves around the policy making process and how the existing policy is decoded and recoded. The interviews therefore center around the rationales for making the coming adjustment. I combine these interviews with the publicly accessible policy documents as well as observations conducted at a municipal workshop for school leaders and for Danish as a second language-bureaucrats in schools. Firstly, I will identify the official discourses in the state-mandated policies, as inspired by Singh et al (2013). This offers a context both in policy and politics and outlines the structural conditions between the Official Recontextualizing Field (the national policy level) and what I deem the Pedagogical Recontextualizing Field (the municipal level and the schools). Secondly, I use my interviews with both democratically elected municipal politicians and the bureaucratic mid-level policy actors as well as municipal policy documents to investigate the recontextualization at the Pedagogical Recontextualization Field. This is followed by investigating additional interviews with street-level actors close to and at the school level to investigate how the recontextualization of the reception is decoded and recoded in the practice of the policy (Chouliaraki, 2001; Evelyn Z. Brodkin, 2013; Lipsky, 2010). Lastly, I go on to discuss how these tensions have consequences for the policy and practices for newly arrived migrant students and the dilemma the tensions create. What this framework offers me is a way to view macro-policy developments outside the pedagogical field as recontextualized in the pedagogical field and then investigate how it is more concretely decoded and recoded into local practice. By not just viewing the front or mid-level workers as mere executors or reproducers of policies, but as distinct street-level actors with degrees of discretion and the opportunity for resistance, I am able to nuance local contemporary policy-making processes and its consequences for newly arrived migrant pupils.

Conclusively, I will accentuate and re-iterate the emphasis in Danish discourse on the “social mix” for migrant students to socialize with native Danish-speaking students as well as dispersion of migrant students (Jacobsen, 2012; Li & Enemark, 2021). This is related to the broader discourses on inclusion as assimilation for migrant persons in a Danish political context. I also argue that this focus on dispersion and the “social mix” intertwines reception policy with housing policies. Inclusion is therefore not just emphasized politically at the micro-level in the classroom or as a socialization in similar welfare state institutions, but also at other levels through municipally created policies and practices. I argue, The Official Recontextualizing Field’s discourses on inclusion, where inclusion is understood as assimilation or dissolution, is present at the municipal level, but recontextualized to inclusion-through-dispersion at the Pedagogic Recontextualized Field. This creates a prominent dilemma in the municipal policy in question, as it seeks to centralize efforts and competencies at selected locations, but simultaneously argues for a dispersion of newly arrived migrant students. In this paper, I seek to outline the tensions and intersections of the Official Recontextualizing Field and the Pedagogic Recontextualizing Field. As noted by Singh et al, between these fields there can be “struggles over pedagogic texts and practices” (Singh et al, p. 468), but while I argue that there is relative alignment across the street-level bureaucracy, this leads to contradicting objectives in the policy and practices (Brodkin & Larsen, 2013).

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