This paper draws on one-year ethnographic fieldwork in a first-grade, public school, in a major Norwegian city, exploring how ethnic differences and similarities are understood and expressed by both children and teachers. The purpose of the study has been to scrutinize how ethnic diversification of pupil population transforms and modifies schools, contributing to the field of intercultural education and social justice in Norwegian Education. 

The study was conducted in a first-grade classroom in a neighborhood where immigrant population prevails. In addition to ethnography, which was carried out during the entire school year 2021-2022, a focus interview of first-grade teachers was conducted at the end of the observation period. The class consists of approximately 60 six-years old pupils, of which 21 are immigrants, descendants of immigrants, children of labor migrants, and refugees.

Departing from Barad's (2007) material-discursive performativity and Zembylas (2015) White discomfort, premiliminary analyses of empirical material reveal the unquestioned and invisible hegemony of dominant Eurocentric knowledge enacted through affects, bodies, physical organization, and materiality in primary educational settings in Norwegian schools.

Preliminary analysis illustrates the existence of different assemblages in first-grade classroom. Assemblage is a philosophical approach originated from Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Assemblages embraces the ontological diversity of agency, redistributing the capacity to act from an individual to a network of bodies, things, and discourses. Assemblages disseminate agency to materiality, bodies and affects, decentering actions to include material-discursive relationality and entanglements. Material-discursive performativity refers to how human action is entangled with the physical organization and materiality surrounding assemblages, so that actions are made possible by connections in assemblages, not just by individuals. 

In assemblages of children in this study, ethnic differences are played, expressed, compared, and discussed through materiality including toys, the body, touch, and talk. Children are daily concerned with their similarities and try to understand why they are different from each other. On the other hand, in teacher’s assemblages, pupils ethnic diversity seems invisible and non-present. Ethnic differences are not talked about by teachers in classrooms or taken up as a topic in teaching or other pedagogical practices. It seems that teachers understand ethnic differences as ‘cultural diversity’, a celebration of cultural expressions and material symbolism (flags, songs, food), without questioning the existence of hierarchies of power imbedded in colonial asymmetries between ethnic majority and minorities. 

Leaning on new material and decolonial perspectives, this study shows how children and teachers are immersed in assemblages where school's physical organization and materiality reflects western values and whiteness as naturalized. The study also suggests the mismatch between the way differences are named, understood, and expressed among teachers and children in school settings. 

Ethnography, participant observations, focus group interview with teachers

There is much more going on in children’s play than teachers realize. Children enacts in assemblages where toys, dolls, affects and their bodies are important materiality in trying to understand the experienced differences between them, reproducing dominant colonial hierarchies which seem invisible for teachers. In teacher's assemblages, it seems that an underlying discomfort is enacted by the physical organization of the classroom, discourses of pedagogical learning pressure, teaching materials, and lack of time, making it difficult for teachers to address children’s wonder and questions about hierarchies, power and differences regarding ethnic differences among children. The existence of different assemblages in one classroom puts in question what is important in education, who is recognized as normal, how children learn about ethnic differences, and who is acknowledged/valued as a good/proper pupil in first-grade classrooms in Norwegian schools.

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