Sweden has experienced multiple waves of migration in recent decades, with the most noticeable changes occurring in urban areas, similar to other European countries. This diversity leads to new encounters and learning processes within schools; however, it can also contribute to the emergence of new status hierarchies, boundary work, and inequalities. Vertovec’s concept of “superdiversity” considers the complexity of migration-related differences (Vertovec, 2019). It explains “new social patterns, forms and identities that arise from migration-driven diversification” (Vertovec 2019, p. 125),

Segregated schools located in urban areas that experience territorial stigmatization often have a large population of immigrant students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, resulting in poor academic performance. Such schooling practices are typically seen as fostering social exclusion. However, some successful schools in these areas manage to achieve results comparable to the national average. An intriguing question arises: why are these schools more successful than their neighbouring institutions? To explore this question, one effective approach is to closely examine the school practices that contribute to this success. While research in the sociology of education frequently focuses on stratified educational outcomes, stigmatization and reproduction of school inequality, it often overlooks the actual dynamics within schools or interprets these dynamics solely as mechanisms for explaining disparities in outcomes (Guhin & Klett, 2022; Mehta & Davies, 2018: 8).

This paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding of successful educational practices in the classrooms of superdiverse schools, particularly concerning their academic outcomes. To identify the educational practices that contribute to a school's success, we consider that these practices are not solely dependent on classroom activities. Instead, the overall culture of the school and its local practices play a crucial role.

We analyze school practices using a set of concepts, with a normative focus on the superdiverse context and different modes of incorporation in society, in combination with analytic tools that aim to address the pre-conscious social rules of everyday life. On a macro level, we have an interest in the activating cultural structure of meaning and emotion. The concept of “multicultural incorporation” is of particular interest because it promotes a sense of ‘unity of difference’ (Alexander 2006, adapted in studies of inclusive school cultures (Lund 2019; Tajic & Lund 2021). In our analytic optic, we add another concept from Gilroy, “conviviality”, which points to “processes of cohabitation and interaction” and the “ability to live with alterity without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent” (Gilroy 2004, p. xi). How are multicultural incorporation, superdiversity and conviviality done in practice? Adapted to school practices, making halal food a standard option and leveraging resources from teachers and students with multicultural backgrounds, as well as other resources from within and beyond the community, are examples of practices in line with these notions.

Bourdieu’s concepts of “habitus” and “doxa” are valuable for a deeper examination of the unspoken social rules that govern everyday life in schools (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 168). In this context, the collective dispositions and practices within the school create a local field characterized by a specific doxa, which represents the institutional habitus. For people to get social everyday life to work, they must use collective misrecognition of objective conditions, a kind of collective self-deception or the taboo against the clearly expressed. This should not be understood as people consciously turning a blind eye, but rather as a cultural "truth" that, through habitus, conveys the agent's feel for the game, that one strives in the "right direction" (Bourdieu, 1995). This approach allows us to analyse the order itself – what characterises the doxa, the standard behaviours and language and the taboos and actions that disrupt the established order and study their consequences.

The project includes three primary schools, one municipal school, and two independent schools in urban areas that experience territorial stigmatization. According to the police authorities, these areas are socially challenged areas. Independent schools operate alongside the public school system in Sweden; they are publicly funded and must follow the national curriculum and regulations of public schools. We are conducting ethnography fieldwork in the schools, 10 weeks for each school, similar to yo-yo ethnography (Wulff 2002), focusing on the 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade classes and overall participant observations, studying discourse and documents, conducting interviews with students, teachers, parents/guardians and school staff (expect facility and service staff). Specifically, we study (i) how the school staff collaborate with each other, the students, their guardians and other external actors, (ii) how the school is organized and structured in terms of resource allocation, the school time management practice, planning and content of teaching, extra curricula activities, summer school activities, staff meetings, in-service training, home-school relations and other events organized by the school (iii) how values and norms are reflected in the classroom interaction and other school settings, for example regarding behaviours that are encouraged and those that are forbidden. This particular paper analyses the local school culture of a primary independent school in an urban setting, as described above. In our work in progress, we have observed the existence of a core group of teachers who have been working very efficiently together for a long time, ensuring the students reach high grades. The student body (approx. n=300) is multicultural in terms of having a handful of students with native Swedes as parents and the majority of students with parents who have Somalian origins, smaller numbers of students with parents from the Balkan countries and from e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Morrocco, Finland. The teacher/school staff body is roughly adjusted to the student body, not only in native countries but also in religion.

Lately, the school has changed its profile from a confessional to a non-confessional school. These former circumstances have profoundly shaped the institutional habitus and the local doxa. However, having a new owner, new management, and new colleagues challenges the doxa differently. In short, the primary dispositions no longer align with their new social context – will it change the institutional habitus and if so, in what way? As being a work in progress, there are some preliminary conclusions, but mainly things that need to be more and in-depth attended to. First, as mentioned earlier there have been changes both regarding ownership, management and recruitment of new staff, including new functions which they have not had before (special education consultant). Secondly, there are multiple challenges to the established order (doxa) by questioning how the teachers engage in the student’s performance, the responsibility for homework to be done, how students behave in the classroom, how to establish relationships and/or order in the classroom. Which qualifications are needed to fit in the school culture? How close friendship/kinship among colleagues, parents and teachers is considered good or bad.

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