Pre-primary and primary educational settings are changing because of increased migration and mobility, with many classrooms characterized by considerable linguistic diversity. This heterogeneity poses challenges in particular to inclusive education: that is, the aim of offering quality education for all while also respecting diversity as well as different needs, abilities, characteristics and learning expectations. Pre-primary and primary teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and knowledge (ABK) of multilingualism are critical factors to achieving inclusive education. Teacher cognition addresses the interplay between teachers’ ABK and the pedagogical and language developing practices in schools and classrooms. Four major factors have previously been identified to interactively shape and be shaped by teacher cognition: teachers’ own schooling experience, teacher education, contextual factors such as the organization of education, and classroom practices. With these factors in mind, our study addresses multilingualism, teacher cognition and inclusive education in Sweden, offering an empirical investigation of pre-primary and primary teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and knowledge of multilingualism. We employ a mixed-methods approach (semi-structured interviews and large-scale online survey), studying which factors correlate with these.
In this presentation, we offer an overview of our larger ongoing project, before moving to preliminary results from the first interviews with pre-primary and primary teachers from varied school demographics. Our focus is on their experiences with multilingualism in the classroom as well as their insights from their own backgrounds and teacher training. Our results are expected to generate new understandings of teachers’ perceptions of classroom diversity and of children who speak languages in addition to Swedish, as well as how these perceptions are shaped and how they influence classroom practices. Thus, our study will contribute to the theoretical perspectives of teacher cognition and inclusive education, as well as offer insights to researchers and educators beyond the Swedish context.