The lived class and racialization – histories of foreign-worker children’s school experiences in Denmark

The recent years have seen a rise in moral panics concerning students with migratory histories (particularly students perceived as non-Western descendants) who may not be performing to standard (Fabrin & Buchardt, 2015; Gilliam, 2009). These discourses reflect an assumption of a necessary upward class mobility through education for these groups of students. Historically, they have (since the 1970s) been targeted as requiring extracurricular efforts for inclusion in Danish education politics (Buchardt, 2016). They were categorized as “foreign workers’ children” in the 1970s’ education policy, as they often were children of migrant guest workers who participated in the so-called “guest worker programs” from the early 1960s. The ‘foreign part’ (often understood as foreign ethnic culture) of the foreign workers’ children tended to be emphasized in the media, policy and pedagogical materials targeting these groups (Buchardt, 2016), whereas ‘the worker part’ seemed to be neglected. There seems to be some historical frictions between the societal expectation of class mobility via education on one hand and the neglect of matters of class in the curriculum for migrant students on the other. This paper unfolds the tensions through the migrant students’ own voices by using oral histories of migrant students’ experiences of schooling in the Danish context from the 1970s to the 1990s. This paper will hence explore how the migrant students experienced the lived class (Skeggs, 1997) as tensions between the written curriculum (where class is a neglected issue) and the practices of schooling politics (where class is experienced by migrant students as interlocking with racialization (Myong, 2007)).