Due to the war in Ukraine, societies and school systems across Europe witnessed a sudden and large influx of refugee families in 2022 from March onwards. On a European level the situation gave rise to an unseen shared willingness to help and find common European solutions on this new ‘refugee crisis’. Denmark was no exception in this regard and special legislation was put in place to ensure the best opportunities possible for welcoming and accommodating the Ukrainian refugees, and, as a very concrete and visible sign of the solidarity, Ukrainian flags were soon to flow from official buildings.    

This paper present preliminary findings from an exploratory case study on a reception class for Ukrainian children in a Danish school. Particularly, the paper discusses, critically, the pedagogies of nation, which occurred in the reception class. The discussion rests on the assumption that reception classes can be considered arenas saturated in pedagogies of nation, given that enrolling newcomers into the national cultural of the receiving society is part of the raison d'être of reception classes.

The paper adopts Zsuzsa Milleis notion of pedagogy of nation, which is an educational form of everyday nationalism that ‘recounts the continuity of the everyday re/production of national frameworks through countless situated activities’ (Millei 2019: 84). In educational research, nationalism in schools can be approached in a top-down perspective, where focus is on how learning about the nation and nationalism occur in the official and taught curriculum, and in a bottom-up perspective, where focus is how the nation and nationalism is impeded in everyday practices in formal and informal settings in the school (Mavroudi and Holt 2015). Focus is both on pedagogies of nation where the Danish nation or the Ukrainian nation occur in formal teacher initiated teaching activities and teaching materials and in the everyday practices in the reception classes among the children and teachers.

Using reception classes for Ukrainian children and youth as a case, the paper considers reception classes as an arena, where national sentiments and narratives are being (re)enforced and negotiated in high degree. When perceiving reception classes in a critical pedagogical perspective (McLaren 2017), the discussion rests on the presumption that reception classes are places where categorization revolving the nation prevail at the expense of other identity categories such as gender, class, religion etc., offering to children and youth a restricted site of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2006) with less opportunities for positive identification and a delimited set of social locations available.

Thus, the paper addresses the following research questions:

1. How are ‘Denmark’ and ‘Ukraine’ discursively constructed in formal teaching activities and everyday practices in the reception classes?
2. What characterizes the pedagogies of nation in the reception classes?
3. What narratives of identification and positionality (Anthias 2002) are offered in the reception classes, understood as an arena for the pedagogies of nation?

The empirical basis of the paper is generated during field work at a school in Denmark during the school year of 2022-2023 by the author together with other members of an interdisciplinary research group. The field research was child-centered (Fattore et al. 2012) and art-based methods were employed to offer to the children and youth a multitude of modes to express their sentiments and viewpoints (Busch 2012; Quiroz et al. 2014). The empirical material consists of observation notes of everyday activities at the school both in formal and informal educational settings, interview with representatives from the municipality and school management, teachers, children and youth, and drawings created by the children and youth as part of the research.

The paper offers a thick description (Geertz 1973) of pedagogies of nation occurring in reception classes in the school, presenting both an operationalization of Millei (2019)’s research program for studying ‘pedagogy of nation’, in the context of reception class education, as well as new knowledge on the reception class system from a critical pedagogical perspective. By adopting a child-centered perspective (Fattore et al. 2012), the paper contributes to closing a gap in the previous research where there the has been a lack of inclusion of the perspective of children and youth (Mavroudi and Holt 2015). Moreover, the paper contributes with new insights to a growing field of educational research on nation and nationalism and migration (Antonsich et al. 2016: following; Mavroudi 2010; Mavroudi and Holt 2015). Yet, by focusing on everyday nationalism in the reception class system, the paper offers new knowledge to a much understudied educational context (cf. other studies on nationalism in education: Arnott and Ozga 2010, 2016; Baumann 2013; Bonikowski 2016; Fox 2017; Haydn 2012; Kotowski 2013; Lappalainen 2006; Mitchell 2003; Sautereau and Faas 2022; Spyrou 2011; Zembylas 2021).

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