The Danish primary school is generally structured through subjects, compulsory subjects, cross-curricular themes and supporting teaching, which are organised by grade level from kindergarten to 9th grade (Primary School Act, 2024). For each of the primary school subjects, national curricula have been prepared, ‘Common Objectives’. In addition to the school’s compulsory subjects and elective subjects, there are certain subjects that are only offered to certain children in the school, including ‘bilingual students’. These include teaching Danish as a second language (DSA), mother tongue teaching and the elective subject ‘common immigrant languages’. In contrast to the school’s other subjects, which are for all children in primary school, these subjects are only offered based on the students’ linguistic backgrounds or linguistic competences. These three subjects each have special frameworks that differ from each other, but to a greater extent from the rest of the school’s organisation.

In this presentation, I delve into DSA from a subject didactic perspective to examine how it can be understood as a phenomenon in school. DSA is referred to in policy documents with various terms, such as teaching, subject, special subject area and dimension. The purpose is thus to examine how DSA's emergence as a subject is created through communication in the subject's policy documents. The different names illustrate a certain uncertainty about its character and form, which can make the concrete organisation in Danish primary schools difficult, because are a subject, subject area and dimension the same? If there are ambiguities about what DSA fundamentally is, how should school actors implement it pedagogically and didactically in practice?

Drawing on an ongoing PhD project, the purpose is to examine how the subject's status and identity are created through communication in the school's policy documents with a theoretical basis in communicative subject didactics (Ongstad, 2006; Borgnakke, 2013; Christensen & Hobel, 2021). Subjects must be seen as a socially constructed phenomenon, shaped by time and place. Subjects are culturally conditioned, and created in the light of educational policy ideologies, strategies and priorities (Ongstad, 2006). Subjects are changeable and dynamic, and are often linked to society's (competitive) labor market, which demands specific competencies from its citizens. Ongstad describes subject didactics through a communicative approach, because when subjects are changing, they must be communicated, reflected and discussed in order to be legitimized in new contexts. Communication about subjects occurs, among other things, via the didactic questions: who, what, why, how, where and when. A subject's self-understanding and metalanguage are thus made part of the subject didactics.

Finally, questions are raised about potential opportunities and challenges that the status of the subject leaves for pedagogical and didactic practice in Danish schools and discussed in a postmigrant theoretical perspective (Foroutan, 2019; Schramm et al, 2019).

A subject and its policy documents are recontextualized at different levels, which curriculum theory can be used to illustrate. Goodlad (1979) emphasizes that when working with curricula, one should distinguish between the following curriculum levels: the ideological (the underlying thoughts, values, and ideologies), the formal (the official documents), the perceived (the individual school actor's understanding of the formal curricula), the implemented (what actually happens in teaching) and the experienced (the teachers' and students' experiences of teaching). The curriculum levels are closely connected, but between the levels, interpretive processes by school actors take place due to the recontextualization of the curriculum, which results in reformulation (Borgnakke, 2013; for visualization, see Christensen & Hobel, 2021). By distinguishing between these, a better understanding of the development and mediation of curricula is gained when the policies are concretized and interpreted from local contexts. Methodologically, I use document analysis, drawing on Bacchi’s (2009) WPR-approach, “What is the Problem Represented to be?”. Bacchi (2009) draws on Foucault’s discourse theoretical analysis and idea of problematization, i.e. how certain challenges are made into problems in a historical and social context – and for Bacchi specifically in policy. The approach consists of examining which problems are represented in policy documents, and is done by examining how language and discourses construct and represent problems. The use of Bacchi's WPR-approach gives me a methodological analytical apparatus that enables me to analyze the ideological curriculum level of the policy documents. The link between communicative subject didactics and the WPR-approach also enables me to see how the documents' representation of the 'problem' creates a specific subject identity for DSA.

I argue that DSA is so diffusely, vaguely and ambiguously defined and characterised in terms of its content and organisation that, on an ideological and formal curriculum level, it does not have status as a subject in its own right when the communication in and around DSA is examined in more detail. It is rather compensatory, and has its raison d'être in relation to other subjects and subject didactics. The fact that the subject can be organised in numerous ways, is not allocated a set number of hours or does not have more content dimensions than the linguistic disciplines (read, write, talk, listen) leaves the subject's identity and content at a minimum in its own right. When DSA is made a task for all teachers in the school, there is a danger that issues regarding resources (e.g. teachers' hours and competencies) and the schools’ finances will become decisive for the implemented and experienced teaching. The DSA subject is thus shaped by time and place, and is conditioned by the political environment and cultural practices at the individual school as well as its priorities and resources. When there are ambiguities and room for interpretation in the formal curricula, it can provide greater freedom and flexibility for local implementations, but it can also leave school stakeholders in uncertainty and frustration that can lead to challenges or under-prioritization of the DSA subject. This leaves questions about what kind of school life is offered to multilingual students in primary schools with a need for language support. Do they actually receive the corresponding education they need and to which the legislation entitles them? Does the education reflect our world, where multilingualism and migration are a condition of society? Or is it also of an assimilative and compensatory nature?

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