How I live [participate] now: Re-negotiating social belonging and linguistic participation in book-group discussions

Abstract This paper focuses on how Gabriella, an upper-secondary student in Sweden, re-negotiated social belonging and linguistic participation in book-group discussions involving students in the school subjects Swedish and Swedish as a second language. Gabriella immigrated to Sweden due to forced migration. As a Swedish language learner, she worried that her language proficiency was regarded as insufficient by her peers. Within the frame of linguistic ethnography, and with the aim of identifying Gabriella’s trajectory of participation in book-group discussions over time, audio-recorded group discussions about the novel How I live now, interview data, and observational fieldnotes were analyzed by means of an epistemic stance analysis. Building on learning as participation, it was possible to unfold how Gabriella went from a passing participant to a driving force. Her trajectory of participation was spurred by the content of the novel and a sense of epistemic responsibility to share her first-hand experience of war, while her classmates responded with silence. From an educational perspective, this paper emphasizes the importance of classrooms as contact zones where students are not only provided with rich opportunities to gather around literature that stirs up questions of what it means to be human, but more importantly, it accentuates the need for literary education to include responsive practices to help students accommodate each other as co-learners.