Due to migration across borders and urbanisation within borders, societies across the world have Indigenous and migrant communities living side-by-side in urban centres. In the education systems, the languages of Indigenous peoples and languages associated with recent migration are often treated quite differently. In Norway, the Indigenous Sámi people have a right to Sámi language education throughout primary and secondary education, while there are limited opportunities for learning languages associated with recent migration within mainstream education. Rather, communities organize language teaching in afternoons and weekends.
This paper reports on a linguistic ethnography in Sámi language teaching taking place within mainstream education in a larger city in southern Norway and Arabic language teaching taking place on Sundays in a mosque in the same city. Over the course of three months, I followed two ambulating teachers of Sámi working with 29 students at 15 different primary and lower secondary schools, as well as one teacher of Arabic in a Sunday class at a local mosque. This class was voluntary, and the number of students varied between 9 to 15 students. The classes were recorded, teaching material was collected, and students and teachers were interviewed. During the classes, I also took fieldnotes. The paper at hand investigates the following research question: How are teachers of Arabic and Sámi positioning their students and how do students respond to their teachers' positioning?
Drawing on a poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity, this paper will analyse how teachers attempted to call their students into being in particular ways. In addition, I will demonstrate how the students responded to this positioning. McNamara (2019) defines subject positions as "possibilities for subjectivity, possibilities for being recognized as a certain kind of subject" (p. 10). Furthermore, he describes how subjects are called into being whenever they are assigned a certain subject position by others. Consequently, we come to see ourselves as we are seen by others. That is why subjectivity is also the result of power, insofar as the way other people call us into being or how they assign us to particular subject positions is an exercise of power.
This analysis demonstrates that the Sámi teachers in mainstream education actively and explicitly call their students into being as "strong Sámi children" based on traditional customs associated with Sámi culture and society in northern Norway. Similarly, the Arabic teacher actively and explicitly calls her students into being as "good Muslims" based on transnational Islamic practices and teaching of central tenets of Islam as part of language education. Both the Sámi and Arabic students confirm the teachers' positioning of them as "Sámi" and "Muslim" respectively but are also hesitant and ambivalent about how their teachers call these subject positions into being. Thus, I will discuss how the teachers' attempts to call their students into being can potentially alienate their students and cause insecurities in the students' self-positioning. Finally, I consider implications for the organization of diasporic language teaching.
