Successes and obstacles in the work of upper-secondary schools with newly arrived students: A constructivist-inspired analysis of teachers’ verbal accounts regarding their schools’ organizational and practical work

This study presents new knowledge arising from teachers’ verbal accounts of successes and obstacles inthe organizational and practical work of upper-secondary schools with newly arrived students. The ethnographic material is based on 33 teacher interviews and 11 fair copies of field notes from observations inupper-secondary school contexts. Analysis of the empirical data was conducted within the framing of socialconstructivist theories and previous research. The analysis reveals several dimensions contributing to the construction and reconstruction of successes and obstacles in the teachers’ accounts. Teachers areconstructed as actors with a power advantage relative to the “newly arrived student.” They set the agenda forstudent behavior, with an inclusive approach that is crucial to achieving success and counteracting obstacles. The approach imposes demands on how upper-secondary schools organize their work with newly arrived students and plays a role in determining supports and room for maneuvering that teachers have. The construction of normatively right (morally right) and deviant (morally wrong) action in the verbal interactive dynamic contributes to the creation and re-creation of both the recognition and exclusion of teachers and newly arrived students in and from the school context. This interactive dynamic implicitly highlights how actors with higher status in the school context (teachers) can use verbal means (language) as an interactive assertion of power to mark the position of actors with lower status in the school context (newly arrived students). The power to define and redefine the actor with lower status in the school context is conveyed, acted out, and exercised by teachers using verbal accounts. These interactions provide the space to control and oppress newly arrived students who, in that situation, occasionally are also engaged in a struggle for recognition in the school context. Previous research draws attention to the importance of raising awareness of teachers’ professional role in relation to power aspects and language used in interpersonal interactions in the school context. School success for newly arrived students: possibilities, obstacles, identities and collaboration