The subject Danish as a second language in teacher education: Decolonising multilingualism by bringing Southern epistemologies to Nordic classrooms

Danish as a second language occupies an unstable position in Danish teacher education. This is reflected in a highly turbulent history in the teacher education curriculum: Introduced as elective subject on a trial basis in 2001, made permanent in 2007 (36 ECTS), abolished as elective subject and replaced by a strongly diminished obligatory short course (10 ECTS) in 2013, and reintroduced as both elective subject (35 ECTS) and a further diminished obligatory short course (5 ECTS) in 2023. The ever-changing development in curricular form has been accompanied by constant negotiation of what counts as appropriate content within the field of Danish as a second language in teacher education
(cf. Jagenreuter, 2022; Benediktsson, 2024).

The empirical point of departure for this paper presentation is Danish as a second language as a curricular configuration at a particular time and space; namely the obligatory short course entitled Teaching multilingual students (10 ECTS, 2013 reform). The presentation reports on a small-scale teaching experiment conducted in a specific class of student teachers in a Danish teacher education institution. The teaching experiment is part of a larger research collaboration on multilingual learning materials across the global South and North, and in the teaching experiment, Danish student teachers are introduced to the innovative South African learning material iSayensi Yethu, featuring hybrid combinations of English and IsiXhosa and originally developed for use in science teaching in Grade 4 in primary schools in Cape Town (Guzula & Tyler, forthcoming). The empirical material from the teaching experiment in Danish teacher education involves multimodal and multilingual digital student texts and audio-recordings of classroom conversation.

The presentation is anchored in a critical sociolinguistic approach to multilingualism (Blommart, 2010), and the analysis of the empirical material from the small-scale teaching experiment is inspired by theories of the decoloniality of
language (ibid.). Preliminary analysis shows that knowledge about multilingualism produced in the global South can be positioned as authoritative in a Nordic teacher education context. The presentation thus aims to contribute to the rethinking of Nordic languages as second languages by exploring potentials for decolonising multilingualism by bringing Southern epistemologies to Nordic classrooms within the context of teacher education.