Negotiations on inclusive citizenship in a post-secular school: Perspectives of “cultural broker” Muslim parents and teachers in Finland and Sweden

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csje20 Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research ISSN: 0031-3831 (Print) 1470-1170 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csje20 Negotiations on Inclusive Citizenship in a Postsecular School: Perspectives of “Cultural Broker” Muslim Parents and Teachers in Finland and Sweden Inkeri Rissanen To cite this article: Inkeri Rissanen (2018): Negotiations on Inclusive Citizenship in a Post-secular School: Perspectives of “Cultural Broker” Muslim Parents and Teachers in Finland and Sweden, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, DOI: 10.1080/00313831.2018.1514323 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2018.1514323 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 04 Oct 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 388 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Negotiations on Inclusive Citizenship in a Post-secular School: Perspectives of “Cultural Broker”Muslim Parents and Teachers in Finland and Sweden Inkeri Rissanen Department of Education, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland ABSTRACT This study examines negotiations on Muslims’inclusive citizenship in Finnish and Swedish comprehensive schools. The data include interviews with Muslim parents and Muslim teachers (n= 8 in both countries), who serve as cultural brokers in public schools and mediate negotiations on the terms of inclusion. The study utilizes the notion of post-secularity and pays particular attention to how intersections of religion and citizenship emerge in the everyday life of the schools. The results reveal how the culture-bound interpretations of religious freedom engender solidarity gaps between the advocates of secular normativity and those who oppose to this discourse. The impact of country-specific factors (Islamic religious education in Finnish schools, the existence of Islamic schools in Sweden) on Muslims’experiences of inclusive citizenship are discussed. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 10 January 2018 Accepted 15 August 2018 KEYWORDS Muslims; inclusive citizenship; cultural broker; post-secular; school; Finland; Sweden Introduction This study examines negotiations on Muslims’inclusive citizenship in Finnish and Swedish mainstream (meaning non-religious) comprehensive schools from the perspective of “cultural broker” Muslim parents and teachers and pays particular attention to negotiations on the points of intersection between religion and citizenship. Citizenship is a “momentum concept”that needs to be continuously reworked to ensure its power to promote social justice. Developing the inclusionary potential of citizenship and challenging its exclusionary tendencies is a pervasive theme in the contemporary citizenship literature (Hoffman, 2004; Lister, 2007). Theorization around the concept of citizenship has become increasingly concerned with diversity and issues of how the recognition of individual and group identities influences people’s abilities to participate in the public sphere (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011). In the narratives of cultural and lived citizenship, identity, social positioning, a sense of belonging and recognition are emphasized over legal rules (Lister, 2007). In multicultural Europe, where a sense of the failure of national models to promote inclusion is common and minority rights are exceedingly tied to demands for loyalty to nation states and their core values (Himanen, 2012), empirical examinations of lived citizenship are needed. Citizenship can be understood as a set of critical practices giving people the tools to “work for social change within and across the boundaries of nation states”(Abu El-Haj, 2009, p. 275). Multicultural citizenship is based on the idea that different groups in a society not only will be recognized, but will also be entitled to © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. CONTACT Inkeri Rissanen inkeri.rissanen@uta.fiDepartment of Education, University of Tampere, Åkerlundinkatu 5, Tampere FI-33014, Finland SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2018.1514323 participate in the negotiations on the terms of citizenship (Modood, 2014). Despite the increasing prominence of these critical understandings of citizenship at the academic level, beyond academia the more enlightenment-inspired assimilative notions of citizenship prevail. Many scholars call for more research on schools as arenas for the negotiation and regulation of nation formation and the reconceptualization of citizenship in schools towards more critical perspectives (Abu ElHaj & Bonet, 2011; Osler & Lybaek, 2014). This study utilizes the notion of “inclusive citizenship”, which relates to lived experiences and contextual practices, and is concerned with both formal rights and recognition (Kabeer, 2005; Lister, 2007). According to Kabeer (2005), inclusive citizenship is about how marginalized people understand and claim citizenship –about their vision of what a more inclusive society might imply. Kabeer identifies four key values of inclusive citizenship, which are commonly expressed in these examinations of citizenship “from below”. These values are: justice (“when it is fair for people to be treated the same and when it is fair that they should be treated differently”[p. 3]), recognition (“of the intrinsic worth of all human beings, but also recognition of and respect for their differences”[p. 4]), selfdetermination (“people’s ability to exercise some degree of control over their lives”[p. 5]) and solidarity (“the capacity to identify with others and to act in unity with them in their claims for justice and recognition”[p.7]). These values construct a stance in the contemporary debates around citizenship –e.g., the universality versus particularity of rights, individual versus collective rights, hierarchy versus indivisibility of rights, and rights versus duties (Kabeer, 2005). The scholarly literature has used inclusive citizenship as both a normative and an analytical concept (Lister, 2007). This study does not rely on inclusive citizenship as a comprehensive normative notion of “ideal citizenship”, nor does it endeavour to confirm the legitimacy of the claims of its informants, but it concurs with the view that the bottom-up negotiations on citizenship merit attention, and uses the four key values defined by Kabeer (2005) as an analytical tool in making sense of Muslims’negotiations on inclusion and rights in Finnish and Swedish schools. The research questions are: 1. How are the values of inclusive citizenship (justice, recognition, self-determination and solidarity) negotiated? 2.What is the role of religion in these negotiations? 3.How are country-specific factors reflected in these negotiations? In what follows, I will discuss questions related to the development of Muslim identities in Europe, present the particular contexts of Finland and Sweden as well as the data and methods of this study. The results section is structured in such a way that it presents the observed negotiations on inclusive citizenship under the four key values. Answers to research questions 2 and 3 emerge as a pervasive theme in the results section and will be discussed more thoroughly and reflected in light of the Habermasian notion of post-secularity at the end of the article. Developing Muslim Identities in a European Context The study explores the development of inclusive citizenship in the context of Finnish and Swedish comprehensive mainstream schools –spaces where identity and belonging are continuously shaped through everyday discourses and practices. Schools are perceived as “intermediate subjects of recognition”(Laegaard, 2010) that mediate the legal recognition of minority rights by the state and where sometimes competing rights –such as the rights of parents to nurture their children according to their family values, and the state’s right to educate democratic citizens –are negotiated. The focus of the study is specifically on the experiences of Muslims in these school communities. In Europe, Muslim identities are commonly assumed to be in competition or irreconcilable with national identities and democratic citizenship, although evidence countering these perceptions has emerged (Grundel & Maliepaard, 2012). The discrimination and Islamophobia experienced by Muslims in the West has been much studied (see, e.g., Bleich, 2011; Welply, 2018); Members of Muslim minorities commonly highlight a lack of knowledge about Islam and its internal diversity as a prominent reason for the existing tensions between them and the majority (Juntunen, Creutz-Sundblom, & Saarinen, 2016). 2I. RISSANEN The problems of the essentialization of Muslim identities are well known. However, new universalist forms of Islamic identification also have stemmed from the diaspora experiences and many young Western Muslims’desire to fulfil some standards of “authenticity”and appeal to Islamic faith as a source of coherence and collective pride (Gest, 2015). The construction of a collective Muslim identity surpassing existing differences is also powered by shared experiences of exclusion (Tinker & Smart, 2012). There is global turbulence around the identity category of “Muslim”, and multiple parallel trends such as the emergence of neo-fundamentalist Muslim identities detached from cultural traditions (Roy, 2010), as well as the emergence of urban, commercialized and integration-seeking Muslim identities (Boubekeur, 2005). Kinnval and Nesbitt-Larking (2011) identify three identity strategies of western Muslims that have evolved as responses to the current securitization trends. Retreating into a private world is a common coping strategy for first-generation immigrants, while essentialism, which includes the development of fundamentalist religiosities, confrontational politics and may even lead to radicalization, is more often a reaction among the second generation. The third strategy, engagement, denotes engaging in the public sphere actively and constructively while cultivating religious identities. It is important to note that this study acknowledges the existence of these different stances and is also aware of the fact that essentialist views have sometimes been promoted in Muslim communities where the official picture emphasizes engagement (see e.g., Elander, Fridolfsson, & Gustavsson, 2015). The choice of informants in this study is not regarded as representative of the diverse Muslim identities in Finland and Sweden. The Muslim parents and Muslim teachers interviewed, who have taken the roles of cultural brokers in schools (this is explained in more detail under the section on data and methods), can be regarded as advocates of the engaged identity strategy. The study is interested in what kind of space and agency these Muslims, who cultivate their religious identities and aim at constructive engagement with society, have in negotiating the terms of inclusive citizenship in Finnish and Swedish schools. All in all, this study takes the view that inclusive citizenship in a multicultural context is about continuous negotiations on what identities can be recognized without imperilling the core values of a society, and who will have the agency to determine the terms of this recognition (Modood, 2014). Identities are not, however, regarded as fixed but constantly formed through these negotiations. Self-categorization is always multiple and misrecognition can be avoided only by orientating to people’s own identity definitions –both group and individual identities. Misrecognition may increase the likelihood of the formation of religious identities as oppositional and essentialist identities (Gest, 2015). The “over-visibility”of Muslim identity sometimes violates Muslims’feelings of belonging and ability to participate but offence is also caused by the invisibility of Muslim identity in situations where it is relevant and could be positively recognized. In contexts experienced as islamophobic, some Muslims struggle with the experienced need to promote positive recognition of Islam and exhaustion over taking the task of being the “positive example”Muslim, and for these reasons, sometimes prefer religious anonymity (e.g., Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011). Moreover, multicultural recognition of group identities is sometimes felt to be threatening by those minority members who do not identify strongly with their group (Verkuyten, 2009). This study is particularly interested in the points of intersection between religion and citizenship. The idea of post-secularity has emerged as a new paradigm in academic discourses on religion. A variety of meanings is attributed to the term; most commonly it refers to a resurgence of public religion and states that the secularization thesis is wrong (Beckford, 2012). Studies conducted under this paradigm focus, for instance, on faith-based citizenship engagement and the role of faith-based organizations in providing social services in European countries at a time of weakening welfare regimes (see Beaumont & Cloke, 2012). The paradigm of post-secularity has also been criticized for overstating the continuing or rising public presence and impact of religion in Western Europe, and more empirical research on the matter is called for (Köhrsen, 2012). In the field of education, criticism of the secular normativity of schools and the liberal-secular foundation of multicultural education have emerged against the backdrop of the notion of post-secularity. The banning of headscarves in French public schools, in particular, has raised intense debates (see e.g., Fernando, 2010), SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 3 but in the Nordic context, too, scholars have criticized the othering of non-secular and non-Western worldviews in educational thinking and practices (see e.g., Berglund, 2017; Poulter, Riitaoja, & Kuusisto, 2016). In this study, post-secularity is understood in terms of the emergence of a pluralistic public sphere. It encourages the researcher to pay attention to religion as a factor in the negotiations on inclusive citizenship in the school communities. The post-secular context also invites an analysis of religious literacy as a citizenship skill. Religious literacy is understood as the ability to “discern and analyse the fundamental intersections of religion and social/political/cultural life through multiple lenses”(Moore, 2016, p. 30). Misrecognition of the modern religious subjectivities and the diversity of religious identities as well as experiences of exclusion created by both religifying and religion-blind policies, for instance, have been observed as manifestations of religious illiteracy (Asani, 2011; Dinham & Francis, 2016). A decision to observe the intersections between religion and citizenship from the perspective of Muslims in particular has to do with the acute issues of Muslim inclusion in European schools. According to earlier research some Muslims’experiences of exclusion in public schools have increased the willingness to found Islamic schools in many European countries, including the Nordic countries (Larsson, 2009; Leirvik, 2009). Muslim parents’reasons for prioritizing faith schooling usually relate to concerns about the general well-being of their children –developing a positive sense of identity and belonging –and fears and experiences of discrimination in public schools (McCreery, Jones, & Holmes, 2007). In Finland and Sweden, for example, Somali parents feel that teachers reinforce their feelings of estrangement from their children –they are assumed to be unaware of what is in the best interests of their children (Haga, 2015). Furthermore, the suspicions of some Muslim parents towards public schools are difficult to allay because Muslims are rarely represented on the school staffor in parents’associations. Nevertheless, as Tinker (2009) illustrates, those on opposing sides in the debates concerning Muslim schooling often share similar concerns, such as rights, social cohesion and identity, and realizing this common ground could open up space for dialogue. However, previous research on the inclusion of immigrant Muslims in education is rather polemic and one-sided. Muslims are either posited as a social problem or incapable of integration, or teachers are accused of racism and Islamophobia (Niyozov, 2010). The vast majority of European Muslim students are educated in public schools, and seeking solutions to the existing tensions is of acute importance. Finnish and Swedish Contexts Both Finland and Sweden have been ranked as countries of fairly strong multiculturalism policies (Multiculturalism policy index, 2010); however, Sweden in particular has experienced a backlash of multiculturalism policies with the state taking less responsibility for immigrants’cultures and focusing its integration policies on individuals (Byström & Frohnert, 2017, p.vii). Finland and Sweden are highly secularized countries; the majority of their populations belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church. They are countries with traditionally strong levels of social trust, but currently experiencing polarization through increasing social, economic, ethnic and cultural divides (see Delhey & Newton, 2005). Despite the many similarities between Finland and Sweden, their differences – the existence of Islamic schools and an inter-faith approach to religious education in Sweden contrasted with Islamic religious education (IRE) offered in public schools and the absence of Islamic schools in Finland –make them interesting objects for comparison. Sweden has a longer history of immigration and a significantly greater immigrant population: Muslims in Sweden account for approximately 5% of the population, while the same figure is 1% in Finland (Larsson, 2015; Pauha, 2015). In both countries, the Muslim population is heterogeneous. The present combination of Protestantism and secularism in the Nordic context could be called “secular Lutheranism”(Poulter et al., 2016). In both countries strong ideals of ideological neutrality in education exist, while the mediation of fundamental national values based on liberal Protestant secularism often emerges as a central educational aim. (Berglund, 2013; Rissanen, Kuusisto, & 4I. RISSANEN Tirri, 2015). It has been argued that, particularly in Sweden, positions and principles that are claimed to be secular are often in reality atheistic –non-religious views tend to be regarded as “normal”or “neutral”, while religious positions are seen to be in contradiction to modern, rational and independent thinking. On the other hand, sometimes the hegemony of a “secular Christian”position also becomes othering towards purely secular views (Kittelmann-Flensner, 2015, pp. 115–120; Poulter et al., 2016). According to a recent comparative analysis of the current national curricula in Finland and Sweden, the Finnish curriculum employs a strong non-essentialist discourse of cultural identities by articulating diversity as a feature of all students, while the Swedish curriculum is surprisingly silent about diversity, and makes a distinction between the students’“own origins”and the “common heritage”(the latter including “basic values of Swedish society”) in a relatively essentializing manner. Furthermore, the Swedish curriculum posits the students’cultural background as a potential hindrance to the students’education, and advises school personnel to resist, for instance, restrictions on the student’s choice of study or vocation that may be based on his/her cultural background (Zilliacus, Paulsrud, & Holm, 2017); this reflects Sweden’s intensified focus on reinforcing the “basic values”of Swedish society (Elander et al., 2015). It seems that multicultural education in both Finland and Sweden is mainly understood in terms of increasing language participation, and no other barriers to achievement are recognized, which is a common trend in the Nordic context (Osler & Lybaek, 2014). The trend towards referring to students through their language identities (see, e.g., Zilliacus et al., 2017) can also be interpreted as an attempt at political correctness. The Finnish curriculum demands the recognition of religious and cultural identities, but in practice the ideals of concentrating on commonality and restricting religion to the private sphere prevail in educational contexts (Rissanen, Kuusisto, & Kuusisto, 2016). Data and Methods The study is part of a larger project in which interviews were conducted with Muslim parents and teachers, who are positioned as “cultural brokers”in their school communities (n= 8 in both countries; S1–S8 in Sweden, F1–F8 in Finland), as well as principals of Finnish and Swedish multicultural comprehensive schools (n= 10 in both countries) This article focuses on the perspectives on the former group and makes only some references to the principal data. The criteria for being a suitable informant for the study were a) self-identifying as Muslim, b) being the parent of a child or children who have attended a public comprehensive school in Finland/Sweden, and c) being employed in the Finnish/Swedish school system or an active member of the school community. Serving as a cultural broker, which is here understood in terms of mediating between Muslim parents, pupils and the school staffin order to improve understanding and communication (see e.g., Cooper, 2014), was not an official role for any of the informants, but they were continuously assigned or voluntarily took these tasks of mediation in their school communities. Among the Muslim interviewees there were 13 teachers (of religious education, languages, social sciences), two special needs assistants, and one chair of a parents’association. Nine of the interviewees were female and seven male; apart from two native Finns and one second-generation immigrant in Sweden, they were first-generation immigrants (from Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Turkey, Malesia, Morocco and Senegal). Two of them were Shi’as, two identified as Sufis and the rest were Sunnis. The saliency of informants’ religious identities varied. To protect the anonymity of the informants, their individual profiles will not be presented. They were fluent in Finnish, Swedish or English, and the interviews were conducted in these languages. The quotes from interviews conducted in Finnish or Swedish were translated into English by the researcher. The interviewees were sought with multiple methods –through relevant social media channels, by asking those who were interviewed to recommend other informants, and in Finland, three teachers of Islamic religious education were approached directly. This kind of sample, consisting of informants who were positioned and self-identifying as cultural brokers, resulted in data that is rich in perspective. Conducting research in the school context also enables the inclusion in the study of non-organized Muslims and Muslim identities differing SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 5 from those of “official representatives”, which has not always been the case in earlier studies (Bectovic, 2011). The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The data was analysed by means of abductive qualitative content analysis (see, e.g., Dubois & Gadde, 2002; Elo & Kyngäs, 2008). First, condensed meaning units were formed and coded, then these codes were linked to the theory-driven main categories (the four values of inclusive citizenship) and grouped into subcategories. After that the negotiations under these categories were analysed from the perspective of research questions 2 and 3. Results Negotiations on Justice In the post-secular European context, religion has come to be increasingly recognized as an equality strand and the inclusion of religious identities into the realm of multicultural citizenship is argued for (Modood, 2014). The cultural brokers of this study, many of whom had experience of living in several European countries, appreciated the level of religious freedom in Finland or Sweden. There were in general no experiences of major violations of religious rights in the school communities, but they were subject to constant negotiation. Whether equality of status was experienced during these negotiations, or whether the informants were positioned as “difficult”due to their claim-making, had a major influence on their experiences of inclusion. In this regard, there were great differences between the individual schools in both countries, and awareness of these differences led the informants to conclude that policies concerning religion in the school communities are mainly dependent on the principals’and teachers’personal preferences. This unpredictability and known variation in school policies occasionally created feelings of injustice. Here is how one SwedishMalaysian Muslim mother discussed a sudden change in practices after the school appointed a new principal: S3: So, they got a new principal, who is less understanding of the requirements of the students. Ninety percent of the students are Muslim students, and yet, they are not allowed to celebrate Eid, they are not allowed to fast, they are not allowed to pray, and they are brought to every single Christian celebration there is, Lucia, Christmas, end of term celebrations, Easter …it’s obligatory, and once I spoke out to the teacher that I wish that my son does not attend church because the end of term is so close to Christmas, and they sing hymns, Christmas carols, where they …the words are worshipping Jesus and things like that, and she said that this is a school activity, it’s part of the school, and if you wish to miss it, you need to get permission from the municipality. Because school is obligatory. Researcher: So what would you have to do if you don’t want to send your kids to these? S3: I would have to apply. […] a child can request for …to be out of school, if it’s less than ten days, then the power to give the permission is the principal’s, if it’s more than 10 days you have to apply to the municipality. So basically the power to approve whether my sons get the holiday or not rests with her, but she just said, municipality …but just to, like, intimidate us. […] when we encouraged like other faith-related activities, they use the excuse that no, it’s unfair to have just one religion or something, you know, then we have to invite all the religions, then …ok, then you take my son to church and that’s ok? Infringements of both positive and negative religious rights sometimes go unnoticed due to a lack of perspective on the intersections of religion and culture (Moore, 2016). In both Finnish and Swedish schools, the principals argued for granting visibility to Protestant Christianity due to its status “only as cultural heritage”, while Islam or other religions were commonly perceived as essentially more religious, and not having pedagogical relevance as a part of cultural heritage –even in schools where fewer than ten percent of the pupils were Christian. This clearly indicates the continuing perceived linkage between the Protestant tradition and citizenship and the continuing hegemonic position of “secular Lutheranism”(Poulter et al., 2016). As one of the Swedish principals put it, “Islam is not a tradition here”. In addition to the culture-bound interpretations of the distinctions between 6I. RISSANEN religion and culture, Protestant biases in the interpretation of religion and religious freedom were seen in how principals, whose conceptions of religion are based on Protestant tradition and its canonized doctrines seemed to have an inadequate understanding of the different logics of Islam and experiences of newcomers from Muslim majority countries when they have to truly decide for themselves for the first time what religious norms and rules to try to follow in a secular society. A poor understanding of the diversity of Islam as well as framing religious freedom as a group-based right led the principals to assume they could implement uniform policies on accommodating the needs of Muslim families by consulting e.g., one single imam. These practices were sometimes experienced as insults to religious freedom, or at least resulted in feelings of failure to respect Muslim families’rights to self-determination, as will be discussed below. In the framework of inclusive citizenship, the value of justice demands striking a balance between differential and similar treatment on a situational basis in order to achieve fairness and equality (Lister, 2007). The Muslim cultural brokers’claims to positive religious rights varied: some of them had more retreatist aspirations (Kinnval & Nesbitt-Larking, 2011) and supported the restriction of religion mostly to the private sphere and not being a too visible a part of the school culture. This was generally a reaction in situations where their claims had met with resistance, and they had become exhausted over being regarded as difficult members of the school community. None of them, however, demanded the removal of Christian elements from the schools; they mostly hoped that minority religions could be granted a more equal status with Christianity in terms of freedom to practise religion. Muslims in Europe, in general, are sometimes posited as exceptional in not following the path–dependent opportunities of minority integration and are deemed “difficult”for demanding differential treatment (Meer, 2012). The way in which the Finnish and Swedish Muslim parents and teachers posited themselves as spokespersons for all religious minorities and framed Islam as a value system and life choice comparable with other (religious and non-religious) values and practices, which are legitimized in the school communities, created a perception that they were seeking to challenge the view of Muslims as demanding special treatment by explicitly formulating their claims for justice as claims for equal treatment. They proposed ways in which adjustments are easily made for other practices or identities (e.g., vegetarianism vs. the halal diet), but choices based on religion are interpreted as opposing Swedish/Finnish values. One clear difference between Finnish and Swedish schools emerged: due to the existence of religious schools, Swedish principals seemed to be more confident in defending the legitimacy of the secular normativity in their schools. A common statement by Swedish principals was that if the parents felt that the school policies were unjust and if they could not commit to the school norms, they could always choose to send their children to an Islamic school. This indicated less space for negotiation due to the opportunity to “outsource”religious rights to religious schools. Recognition Recognition can be evaluated in terms of whether a person’s or a group’s sense of identity is affirmed or if they feel compelled to act in ways that compromise these identities (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011). As a value of inclusive citizenship, recognition includes the acknowledgement of equal worth, but also of distinctiveness (Kabeer, 2005). The current national core curricula in both Finland and Sweden mentions supporting students’cultural identities as the task of basic education. In the Swedish curriculum, this aim is mainly present in the curriculum for language instruction in pupils’ mother tongues other than Swedish, and a distinction is made between pupils’cultural identity and “common heritage”. According to the Finnish curriculum, cultural identities should be supported in different forms of language instruction as well as in religious education according to pupils’own religion. Furthermore, identities are presented as multifaceted and appreciation and celebration of cultural diversity in the school community is demanded (Zilliacus et al., 2017). According to the observations of this study, despite the differences in the curricula, the differences between individual schools were observed to be greater than those between the countries studied. SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 7 One Finnish-Iraqi female IRE and Arabic teacher, who taught in several schools, described this issue as follows: F7: In one of the schools I taught in last year, over 70% of the students were Muslims. There, these kids were taken into account so well and you could see it when they were asked what they believed in or what religion they belonged to, so very honestly and openly they said they were Muslims and spoke Arabic and like on Mondays they study Arabic and so on …Whereas in other schools, which are not so considerate, students even ceased studying Arabic because it was not regarded as something they could be proud of. However, in both Finland and Sweden, the aims of cultivating pride in language identities and making these visible were fairly well-adopted and sometimes contrasted with the assumptions of shame being attached to religious identities. In both countries a certain sacredness was associated with the ideal of restricting religion to the private sphere, which sometimes results in efforts “not to see”religions. The Finnish school system provides an official positive recognition of religious identities in the form of religious education according to students’own traditions (Rissanen, 2012). Eight of the ten Finnish principals, however, were opposed to this organizational model of religious education as it made the students’religious backgrounds too visible, a view that seems to reflect the tendencies of not articulating diversity in an attempt to avoid labelling any groups (Zilliacus et al., 2017). However, the Muslim cultural brokers’in this study rather unanimously deemed it important to counter shame and stigma attached to Islamic identity by increasing the visibility of positive or “everyday”Islamic cultural practices, and in some schools had been able to promote this. The salience of Muslim identity for the informants varied, but they all gladly identified as Muslims in their school communities. Here is how one Swedish-Somali Muslim father discussed the issue: S2: You have been working there for 25 years, everyone is asking, Ramadan, what is it about …it’s like …we have been in this country for so long and nobody knows what’s it about …So to just to give them the small things, you know, there’s Ramadan, there are two big festivities like the Eid after Ramadan the big Eid after we go to Mecca …you know, the..small details […]You know, even …invite the parents and have like a Ramadan table or whatever, to just see what the people in the school can bring. This kind of “food-and-festival approach”to multicultural education has been accused of exoticization based on stereotypical views (Kromidas, 2011), but low-threshold opportunities to get to know the cultural backgrounds of others were generally perceived by the Muslim parents in this study as facilitators of recognition. However, these informants’struggles for recognition in the school communities related to the need to resist both religion-blind and religifying discourses. Some of them claimed a need to be seen “only as a human”, without their choices and opinions being “religified”. Their experiences accorded with those reported in other studies (Hopkins & Blackwood, 2011): sometimes being seen “as a Muslim”leads to their not being taken seriously or even silenced, which results in feelings of a need to defend their choices as not being based on religion. On the other hand, wishes were expressed that positive pupil or parent behaviour would be associated with religion and recognized as “Muslim behaviour”. The low level of knowledge about Islam in the school communities and society at large was the most extensively discussed issue in the data. All informants regarded correcting the common misconceptions as their (often exhausting) duty, and the majority also presented it as the duty of their children and pupils. In general the Muslim parents defended the visibility of Islam in school communities mainly in terms of increasing the levels of religious literacy in the school community. Interestingly, claims regarding recognizing Muslims as Finnish/Swedish were very rare in the data. 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