Pedagogical Collaboration for Multilingual Support in Swedish Compulsory Schools

Abstract

The present study analyzes and discusses mother tongue teachers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary collaboration with two specific groups of professionals: mainstream teachers and SEN teachers. A purposeful sampling with a maximum variation was chosen to obtain the highest possible representativeness. Thereafter, 13 individual, thematical, open-structured interviews were conducted. To discuss the themes arising from the abductive analysis of the interviews Bronstein’s (2003) theoretical model for interdisciplinary collaboration was used. The study forms part of a doctoral dissertation, which aims to get a more in-depth view of different measures that support multilingual students’ learning in the Swedish school context. In this paper, however, only results concerning mother tongue teachers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary collaboration with mainstream teachers and SEN teachers are presented. The results show that mother tongue teachers have a firm and consistent perception of their professional role, relying on the subject curriculum when planning, implementing, evaluating, and grading. However, interdisciplinary collaboration with mainstream teachers and special educational needs teachers is limited to solving structural and administrational challenges. The findings suggest that valuable multilingual resources would be made better use of when structural and administrative matters were formalized.