Background and Aim

In 2022–2023, a series of policy interventions targeted Danish upper secondary schools with high interculturality, amplifying critical master narratives that framed some institutions as “risky” or “less desirable” (Piekut & Qvortrup, 2023). These interventions interacted with long-standing discourses on allocation, choice and school reputation, creating a narrative environment where interculturality was simultaneously celebrated and problematised. This paper explores how narratives of the ‘intercultural’ are produced, circulated and transformed across system level, from policy and public discourse to organisational sense-making and classroom interaction in six Upper Secondary Schools in the capital region of Denmark. The study addresses two research questions:

1. How do master narratives about interculturality and community travel and shift across macro (policy), meso (organisation) and micro (interaction) levels?
2. How do these narrative shifts shape students’ participation patterns and conditions of belonging in upper secondary schools?

By focusing on narrative infrastructures rather than isolated practices, the paper contributes to understanding how systemic discourses of inclusion and belonging are enacted, contested and reframed in everyday schooling.

Theoretical Framework

We conceptualise schools as narrative ecologies binding macro, meso and micro practices (Gabriel, 2016). This approach foregrounds the circulation of stories as a mechanism of governance and identity work across scales: Macro (policy–public sphere): The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) guides analysis of how policy logics (allocation/choice) script problems and solutions, rendering some schools publicly “risky” or “less desirable” (Jones et al., 2022; Somers, 1994). In Denmark, allocation changes interacted with public labelling of particular institutions, reinforcing deficit framings of interculturality and shaping parental choice. These macro narratives create ambivalent conditions, as schools navigate between policy imperatives of inclusion and public framings that cast interculturality as a risk.Meso (organisation): Drawing on Czarniawska’s view of narratives-as-organising and inhabited institutionalism, we examine how leaders and staff articulate, align and live organisational identities in strategy and routine practice, and how these stories circulate vertically within organisations (Czarniawska, 2011, 2024). Organisational narratives often mediate between policy imperatives and local legitimacy, producing hybrid storylines that stabilise or unsettle  interculturality and inclusion.Micro (interaction/identity): At classroom and peer level, we use performative narrative/positioning analysis to trace how master narratives (e.g., deficit tropes about ‘diversity’, “brown” or “drop-out” schools) are internalised, reworked or resisted through counter-stories that reclaim voice, agency and belonging (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004, 2020; Hyvärinen, 2020).. To theorise inclusion and exclusion, we draw on recognition theory (Honneth, 2003) and communities of practice (Wenger, 2011/2021) to explain how recognition, participation and shared repertoires function as narrative resources that scaffold—or constrain—students’ sense of legitimate membership in school communities. Ahmed’s (2012) notion of “diversity work” clarifies how symbolic performances of interculturality can coexist with under-enactment in practice, revealing tensions between policy rhetoric and lived experience.

The paper speaks to a wider European context marked by political restrictions on migration and increasingly polarized debates on interculturality and diversity in education (Dervin et.al., 2012; Perez-Jorge, D. et. al., 2023; Landini, I., 2025). Across Europe, school systems with choice and allocation rules face reputation effects that shape enrolment patterns and public perceptions of “desirable” schools. These dynamics often produce ambivalent narratives: interculturality framed as both an educational value and a potential risk. By applying the concept of narrative ecologies and the Narrative Policy Framework, the study offers analytical tools to trace how such narratives travel across levels and how they condition inclusion and belonging. This approach aligns with ECER 2026’s call on the production and use of educational research by foregrounding how systemic narratives mediate reform uptake and everyday practices. The findings are relevant for European systems grappling with similar tensions between policy ideals of inclusion and contested public framings of interculturality.

We adopt an empirical mixed‑methods multiple‑case design to capture how intercultural narratives travel and shape participation across system levels. The study was conducted in 2023 at six upper secondary schools in the capital region of Denmark that were publicly framed as “challenged” due to declining applications and skewed student composition; school selection and contextual documentation derive from Region H’s commissioned report and accompanying materials. The evaluation is informed by a theory‑based programme evaluation approach rooted in a critical realist perspective (Chen, 1990; Pawson & Tilley, 1997; Mayne, 2011). This approach emphasizes local causal mechanisms and contextual modifiers that enable or hinder intended effects. Rather than isolating “best practice,” the study foregrounds contextualized good practice and examines how interventions interact with intercultural framings in organizational and classroom settings. Data collection: Document analysis of strategy and value statements to identify intended actions and intercultural positioning at six schools. Two days of observations per school during induction periods to trace how interventions and values materialized and were received, supplemented by brief “on‑the‑spot” student interviews. Interviews and focus groups: One leadership interview per school, two teacher focus groups, and two student focus groups (1.g and 1.hf/hhx) per school, totalling 28 interviews. These explored understandings of intercultural initiatives and short‑term effects (Kvale & Brinkman, 2015; Barbour, 2018; Cyr, 2024) Comparative cases: Interviews with leaders at five perspective schools that successfully reversed negative trends provided a comparative lens for identifying enabling mechanisms. Survey data were collected from first‑year students in October 2023 (n = 782). Items covered background, school narratives, perceived intercultural characteristics, introduction activities, educational choice, expectations, emotional/social/academic wellbeing, and drop‑out considerations (mostly five‑point Likert scales). Analysis combined descriptive statistics, exploratory factor and cluster analyses with iterative coding of qualitative data. Coding moved between theory‑driven themes (strategy documents) and inductive patterns from observations and interviews. Survey indicators triangulated qualitative findings to strengthen validity. This design enables a nuanced understanding of how interculturality is narrated and operationalized in interventions and how these narratives shape participation and belonging.

Master narratives in educational institutions are deeply embedded, not only in policy and leadership discourse but in the ways schools imagine themselves. These narratives provide coherence and legitimacy, yet often frame interculturality as something to be managed, softened, or even erased (Ahmed, 2012; Czarniawska, 2011; Somers, 1994). Our findings confirm that attempts to shift these narratives—through rebranding, renaming, or symbolic diversity work—rarely alter the underlying narrative logic. Silencing interculturality does not erase demographic realities or students’ choices; such strategies may reshape surface perceptions but leave structural tensions intact. Empirical evidence from six schools shows that interventions designed to improve enrolment and inclusion operate within these constraints. While strategic documents promote interculturality as a value, everyday practices often reproduce deficit framings. Observations and interviews reveal hybrid organizational narratives that oscillate between inclusion and control, creating conditional belonging for students. Survey data triangulate these patterns, highlighting uneven participation and persistent reputational effects. By situating these findings within a European context of polarized debates on migration and interculturality, the paper contributes to understanding how systemic narratives shape or exclude educational equity. Potentially, tt offers tools for re-narrating interculturality in ways that move beyond symbolic inclusion toward substantive participation and belonging. Expected outcomes- brief: 1. Contextualized insights into good practice, showing which organizational strategies mitigate stigma and foster intercultural inclusion. 2. Comparative lessons from schools that reversed negative trends, offering actionable knowledge for leadership and policy. 3. A multi-scalar framework for analyzing how systemic narratives interact with local practices, relevant for European systems facing similar tensions between migration politics, school choice, and intercultural education.

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