Eli Smeplass- Department of Teacher Education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Increasing linguistic diversity in schools has intensified debates about how bilingualism is understood and handled within educational institutions. The analysis draws on empirical material from the Nordic Unequal Childhood project (2019–2024) and focuses on two contrasting Grade 5 classrooms in the same Norwegian city, situated in schools with markedly different socioeconomic and linguistic profiles. Using a qualitative, theoretically informed approach, the article is based on analytic vignettes reconstructed from the author's fieldnotes written during data collection activities in classrooms and school visits. Integrating research on bilingualism with neo-institutional theory and perspectives on inclusion, recognition, and resilience, the article introduces the concept of welfare capital to capture how access to institutional recognition shapes children's possibilities for participation. The findings show that bilingual practices embedded in different classroom ecologies are evaluated through distinct institutional lenses, shaped by local norms, teacher expectations, and the symbolic status attached to particular languages and forms of participation. These institutional readings—rather than linguistic competence alone—condition whether bilingualism becomes legible as a contribution to learning and inclusion or as a problem to be corrected. The article concludes by discussing implications for multilingual pedagogy and institutional practice in welfare-state schooling.
Introduction
Across the world, increasing linguistic diversity in schools has intensified debates about how educational systems respond to multilingual classrooms. Global mobility and migration have led to a growing number of pupils being educated in a language other than their first language, challenging long-standing monolingual assumptions embedded in schooling [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2022]. International research shows that while multilingualism is often framed in policy discourse as a resource for inclusion and social cohesion, everyday educational practices frequently remain shaped by monolingual norms of instruction, assessment, and classroom order (Cummins, 2014; García and Wei, 2014; Valdés, 2017). As a result, children's bilingual practices are not simply pedagogical matters but become sites where broader institutional expectations about participation, normality, and belonging are negotiated.
These tensions raise fundamental questions about how bilingualism is institutionally interpreted and acted upon in school contexts. Notably, Yosso's (2005) concept of community cultural wealth, developed within critical race theory (CRT), demonstrates how minoritized students mobilize linguistic, social, and navigational resources that are frequently misrecognized or devalued by schools. This work has been influential internationally in shifting attention from deficit-oriented explanations to questions of institutional recognition and power, highlighting that what counts as “capital” in education is socially and historically contingent rather than neutral (Davies and Rizk, 2017; Cartwright, 2022; Vertelyté and Li, 2021). While Yosso's framework was developed in a U.S. context marked by racialized inequalities, its core insight—that institutions selectively recognize certain forms of knowledge and competence—provides an important point of departure for examining similar processes in welfare-state contexts.
This study is informed by a long tradition of school research examining how implicit norms and expectations shape educational practice beyond formal curricula. Classic work on the hidden curriculum has shown how everyday routines, interactional rules, and taken-for-granted judgments in classrooms contribute to processes of differentiation and inclusion (Jackson, 1968). Building on this tradition, Broady's analysis of the hidden or implicit curriculum in Nordic schooling demonstrates how schools transmit unspoken norms about legitimate knowledge, appropriate conduct, and valued forms of participation. These norms often align with dominant linguistic and cultural practices, making it more difficult for students whose resources fall outside these expectations to have their competencies recognized (Broady, 1981; Hummelstedt et al., 2025).
These global tensions are also evident in the Nordic countries, where schools have long been associated with equality, inclusion and social cohesion. Although critical race theory has been central for understanding educational inequality in contexts shaped by histories of racialization and segregation, the Norwegian case emerges from a different historical and institutional trajectory. Large-scale immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Norway. The comprehensive school (fellesskolen) and the social-democratic welfare state were established prior to multicultural diversification, with strong normative commitments to equality, universalism, and social cohesion. In this context, educational tensions related to bilingualism are less commonly articulated through the language of race and more often through categories such as ethnicity, language proficiency, integration, and classroom order. Following the post–World War II rejection of racial thinking in Europe, explicit racial classifications are politically and morally sensitive in Norwegian public discourse. This makes the Norwegian school system a particularly interesting case for examining how inequalities and misrecognition can emerge without explicit racial categories, through institutional routines and expectations that remain formally universal yet locally differentiated.
In recent decades, Norway has also experienced growing spatial and social differentiation linked to migration, housing markets, and local welfare capacity. While the comprehensive school model is formally universal, schools increasingly operate under unequal local conditions. Research from the Nordic Unequal Childhood project documents how children's opportunities for participation, well-being, and recognition vary systematically across neighborhoods characterized by different levels of socioeconomic resources and ethnic diversity (Smeplass et al., 2023a; Corral-Granados et al., 2024). In Norwegian cities, patterns of residential segregation have contributed to schools serving markedly different pupil populations, despite shared national curricula and policy frameworks. These differences are not exceptional but reflect broader structural trends in Nordic welfare states, where integration policies emphasize inclusion and equal access, yet rely heavily on local institutions to translate these ambitions into practice.
In Norway, linguistic diversity has increased markedly over the past decade: in 2022, 19% of pupils in primary and lower secondary education had an immigrant background, and nearly 40,000 pupils received special instruction in Norwegian as a second language (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2022). At the same time, far fewer pupils are offered mother-tongue or bilingual subject teaching, reflecting enduring tensions between inclusive policy aspirations and assimilation-oriented practices. Although Norwegian education policy emphasizes equity and participation, the organization of language support reflects enduring tensions between inclusion and assimilation (Domagalska-Nowak, 2023; Mohamad et al., 2025; Ryen, 2024). Despite strong commitments to equity within the comprehensive school model research shown how monolingual norms continue to shape everyday classroom interactions and the recognition of children's linguistic resources (Andersen, 2024; Myklevold and Speitz, 2021; Vikøy and Haukås, 2021). Against this background, this article asks: How can institutional expectations shape whether bilingual practices are recognized as resources for participation, or misrecognized as obstacles to inclusion?
During fieldwork in two contrasting Norwegian primary schools, I encountered classroom moments that highlighted how bilingual practices are differently interpreted and valued. These brief encounters motivated the present analysis, which explores how institutional expectations shape whether children's linguistic strategies are understood as supportive or disruptive. In bilingual education research, (Cummins 2014) distinguishes between additive and subtractive orientations, referring to whether schools build on or suppress children's home languages. While this distinction is well established in the literature (see Theoretical Framing for a more detailed discussion), the present study uses it primarily as an entry point for examining how institutional expectations shape the recognition of bilingual practices in classroom interactions. To discuss these dynamics, I introduce the concept of welfare capital, described as the structural, relational, and symbolic resources that children and their families draw on to navigate the welfare state, particularly its educational contexts. The term denotes a child's capacity to adapt to school demands, but also to access support and recognition across institutional arenas. Unlike the notion of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), which often emphasizes inherited class-based advantages, welfare capital foregrounds how institutional configurations enable or constrain children's agency and adaptation. In the Nordic context, where welfare services and education are tightly interlinked, resilience is not a matter of personal strength, but of navigating institutions that may or may not recognize a child's knowledge and experience as valuable. This approach aligns with research that conceptualizes resilience as a relational and systemic process (Ungar and Theron, 2020). While policy frameworks in Nordic countries promote equity and inclusion, research reveals persistent disparities in how children are positioned and supported in schools (Smeplass et al., 2023b). Particularly for children with minority or migrant backgrounds, success often hinges on the ability to translate personal competencies into institutionally recognized forms, a process that is far from neutral. As several studies have shown, language practices are key sites where social boundaries are drawn and maintained (Frønes et al., 2020; Fylkesnes et al., 2018; Thomassen and Munthe, 2020). The vignettes presented in this study illustrate how such recognition is negotiated in everyday classroom life, where institutional norms mediate whether bilingualism becomes a source of empowerment or exclusion.
Theoretical framing
The framework developed in this article draws on insights from bilingualism research and neo-institutional theory and is further informed by perspectives from critical welfare studies. Critical welfare studies examine how welfare-state institutions distribute not only material resources, but also recognition, trust, and moral worth through everyday practices and organizational routines (Hänninen et al., 2019; Beach, 2018). Rather than assuming welfare systems as neutral or uniformly inclusive, this body of research highlights how universalistic arrangements can produce differentiated outcomes depending on local institutional configurations and professional judgments. This perspective is particularly relevant for understanding schooling in Nordic welfare states (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland), where education functions as a central welfare institution, mediating inclusion.
Bilingualism is a complex and context-dependent phenomenon that defies simple classification. As (Surrain and Luk 2019) show in their systematic review of over 200 studies, researchers use a wide array of definitions and labels when describing bilinguals, ranging from simultaneous and sequential bilingualism to dominant, balanced, and heritage bilingualism. These variations reflect linguistic profiles, but also the sociocultural and institutional lenses through which bilingualism is understood. In studies of bilingual education, Jim (Cummins 2014) has argued that the recognition of children's home languages is crucial for both academic success and identity development. The concept of additive bilingualism suggests that when schools value and support children's first languages, this fosters cognitive growth and strengthens self-esteem (Ibid). Conversely, a subtractive approach, where the home language is ignored or devalued, can undermine both learning and belonging. However, whether and how bilingualism is framed as additive or subtractive is shaped by institutional routines, cultural perceptions, and expectations embedded in school contexts. (Roehr-Brackin 2024) emphasizes that the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge in additional language learning is often blurred in real-life educational settings, where learners must navigate both formal rules and social cues. In classrooms, this means that children's bilingual strategies, whether spontaneous translation, dictionary use, or code-switching, may not be evaluated on linguistic grounds alone, but through the behavioral norms and symbolic boundaries that schools enforce. Language in school serves both cognitive and social purposes. As (Pérez Cañado 2023) argues, the success of bilingual education depends on whether linguistic diversity is treated as an essential dimension of inclusion rather than as a pedagogical obstacle. When educational systems fail to recognize linguistic plurality, they risk reproducing inequalities despite their formal commitments to cohesion and equity. (Wedin and Wessman 2017) argue that including students' linguistic repertoires makes education meaningful while encouraging social justice, tolerance, and diversity, enhancing the importance of developing multilingual educational practices for inclusion.
I argue here that bilingualism cannot solely be understood as a linguistic phenomenon (García et al., 2017; Glick, 2014; Spotti and Blommaert, 2017). Rather, it must be situated within the institutional and cultural logics that regulate what kinds of knowledge and communication are recognized as legitimate in schools. Research has long demonstrated that language functions as both a cognitive and a social resource (Cummins, 2014), yet its institutional framing determines whether it is valued or marginalized. Within the Nordic welfare context, where education and social policy are closely intertwined, language practices become an arena where ideals of equality, inclusion, and order intersect with bureaucratic norms and cultural hierarchies. The distinction between additive and subtractive bilingualism (Cummins, 2014) captures how schools can either build upon or suppress children's linguistic repertoires. However, this binary framing is insufficient for understanding how bilingual practices operate within institutions characterized by competing expectations. As (Surrain and Luk 2019) demonstrate, the heterogeneity of bilingual definitions in research reflects deeper sociocultural assumptions about what counts as legitimate bilingualism. In Nordic classrooms, bilingualism is moral and institutional, bound up with teachers' perceptions of “normal” participation, proper language use, and acceptable behavior (Lagermann, 2013; Vertelyté and Li, 2021).
Inclusion refers to a systemic commitment to participation, belonging, and achievement for all learners by restructuring cultures, policies, and practices to remove barriers to learning (Ainscow and Miles, 2008; Booth and Ainscow, 2011; Slee, 2011). Recognition names the normative acknowledgment of learners' identities, histories, and contributions as legitimate within institutional life; misrecognition damages self-relations and social standing (Fraser, 2000; Honneth, 1995; Taylor, 1994). Resilience is understood as a multisystemic, relational process through which young people mobilize ecological resources (i.e. family, school, and welfare services), to do well under adversity; it is scaffolded by institutions rather than a fixed trait (Masten, 2014; Ungar and Theron, 2020). Placed in the context of bilingualism, inclusion requires designs that treat multilingual repertoires as resources for participation. Recognition implies that home languages count as legitimate knowledge and communication, and emerges where schools and welfare services create pathways, support, and status for bilingual practices (Cummins, 2014; García and Wei, 2014; Ungar and Theron, 2020). This aligns with the educational welfare lens by showing how access to recognition and support is institutionally mediated.
Neo-institutional theory offers a way to unpack these dynamics. Meyer and Rowan's (1977) notion of institutionalized myths suggests that schools adopt rationalized ideals, such as inclusion, participation, and equality, that guide practice symbolically rather than instrumentally. What occurs in classrooms, however, can be loosely coupled with policy ideals, leading to interpretive flexibility and variation (Brunsson, 2006). The contrasting responses to the bilingual children in this study exemplify how educators enact inclusion through different moral and organizational lenses. From a sociological standpoint, these variations can be linked to Pierre (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) concept of cultural capital, which explains how institutions reward specific forms of knowledge, behavior, and communication aligned with dominant class values. Yet cultural capital, while useful, does not fully capture how welfare institutions mediate access to recognition and support beyond family background.
Critical race scholarship has offered important revisions of Bourdieu's framework by demonstrating how forms of capital held by minoritized groups are systematically misrecognized within dominant institutions (Gillborn, 2015; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). Most notably, Yosso's (2005) concept of community cultural wealth shifts attention from deficit-oriented accounts to the multiple linguistic, social, navigational, and aspirational resources that racialized students mobilize in educational settings. Yosso's work has been influential in showing that what counts as “capital” is institutionally defined and deeply embedded in relations of power. While this perspective has been crucial for understanding educational inequality in contexts shaped by racialization and segregation, it is developed primarily within a critical race theoretical framework and educational systems marked by explicit racial hierarchies. In Nordic welfare-state contexts, where schooling is organized through universalistic and formally egalitarian arrangements, inequalities more often emerge through institutional routines, professional judgments, and local configurations rather than through explicit racial categorization.
Building on this, I introduce a concept of welfare capital to describe how children's capacity to flourish depends on their ability, and their institution's ability, to mobilize welfare-state resources, recognition, and relational support. Welfare capital thus operates at the intersection of personal agency and institutional structure. The idea draws insights from resilience theory that conceptualize adaptation as a process dependent on social and systemic conditions (Ungar and Theron, 2020). In Nordic welfare states, resilience can be understood as institutionally mediated, shaped by how schools translate universal policy ideals into everyday practice (Corral-Granados et al., 2024; Hänninen et al., 2019). This means that children's capacity to cope, learn, and belong is inseparable from how teachers, schools, and local welfare systems recognize their backgrounds and needs (Radišić and Pettersen, 2020). Welfare capital is therefore both material (access to support and services) and symbolic (recognition of difference as legitimate).
Unlike inherited forms of capital, welfare capital is not transmitted primarily through family background but is accumulated through interaction with institutions over time. Children gain welfare capital when schools create predictable routines, assign legitimate roles, and establish trust that allows students to navigate expectations without being sanctioned. For example, clearly authorized peer-support roles, explicit permission to use home languages for learning, and consistent teacher recognition of linguistic mediation as competence rather than disruption can incrementally build welfare capital. Conversely, when institutional responses are unpredictable or punitive, children may struggle to convert their knowledge and strategies into recognized participation. Welfare capital thus accrues through repeated encounters in which institutional actors validate, scaffold, and stabilize children's ways of participating, making access to support and recognition more likely in future interactions.
Welfare capital is also produced through families' capacity to navigate institutional systems where language, rights, and procedural knowledge matter. In practice, this capacity can be unevenly distributed and sometimes delegated to children. Research on interpreter-mediated professional encounters with minoritized children shows how language mediation is not a neutral technical matter but shapes participation, asymmetry, and what children are able to express and be recognized for (Kjelaas and Eide, 2015). More broadly, scholarship on child language brokering demonstrates that children's translation work can function as an important resource for families' access to services, while also creating responsibilities that resemble “growing up too soon” dynamics and role strain (Orellana, 2009; Titzmann, 2012). In welfare-state contexts characterized by complex bureaucratic interfaces, welfare capital can therefore be accumulated through access to competent interpreting, supportive school–home communication routines, and knowledgeable networks that help families claim rights and understand procedures—rather than through inherited class-based dispositions alone. At the same time, when institutional mediation is outsourced informally to children, the same “resource” may become a burden that affects well-being and participation.
Beach's (2018) meta-ethnographic work on Swedish schools provides an important bridge between these perspectives. Beach shows that inequality in Nordic education is often produced through organizational routines that appear inclusive on the surface but reproduce subtle hierarchies of value, what he terms territorial stigmatization and symbolic closure. His analyses of pedagogical discourse resonate with the Norwegian cases presented here, where linguistic behavior is read through moral and institutional codes that delineate who fits and who does not. Bilingualism, in this sense, becomes a site where welfare ideals and cultural expectations collide. Welfare capital provides a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing this alignment. It highlights how recognition, trust, and institutional flexibility function as welfare resources distributed unevenly across social and spatial contexts. Children in affluent areas may more easily convert their cultural and linguistic competencies into recognized forms of capital, while children in marginalized areas encounter structural and symbolic barriers that limit such conversion. This resonates with findings from the Nordic Unequal Childhood project, which document how children's well-being and sense of belonging vary systematically with local welfare capacity and organizational practices (Corral-Granados et al., 2024).
Methodology and analytical approach
This article is based on a qualitative, theoretically informed case analysis informed by survey data, researcher fieldnotes, and analytic vignettes from two Norwegian primary schools (Smeplass et al., 2023a,b). The study uses a maximum-variation sampling strategy to examine how bilingual practices are interpreted across contrasting institutional contexts. Data collection included pupil questionnaires administered in classrooms, pupil, teacher and leadership interviews, informal school visits, and reflective field notes. Analysis combined descriptive mapping of survey indicators with interpretive analysis of fieldnotes and vignettes.
I examine how pupils' well-being and social inclusion in two contrasting Norwegian school contexts can relate to how bilingualism is framed by adults. The analysis draws on empirical material from the Nordic Unequal Childhood (NUC) project (2019–2024), a large-scale comparative study of children's well-being and social inclusion in three cities in Finland, Sweden, and Norway. The overall project includes interviews with 140 participants from nine schools. Children, teachers, school leaders, and municipal actors, together with field-based reflections, document how institutional conditions influence children's social inclusion in school. The study design draws on the project's comparative framework, which combines multiple data sources (children's voices, staff perspectives, municipal actors, and policy materials) to examine how institutional arrangements shape children's everyday conditions for flourishing and inclusion (Smeplass et al., 2023a,b).
The NUC collaboration has developed a pupil questionnaire capturing self-reported experiences of belonging, support, exclusion, peer relations, and the recognition of language and background. In previous publications, these survey data have been analyzed using comparative and descriptive statistical techniques to identify patterned differences in pupils' well-being and sense of belonging across schools located in socioeconomically contrasting neighborhoods (Caspersen et al., 2025). While these quantitative data are not analyzed directly in the present article, they provide an important empirical backdrop for the case selection and for situating the two schools within broader institutional patterns documented in the project.
Sampling for this analysis targeted Year 5 students in two schools from the same Norwegian city that differ markedly in socioeconomic composition and neighborhood segregation. Schools were recruited through municipal collaboration agreements established within the Nordic Unequal Childhood project. Access to the field was negotiated with school leaders, and participation was voluntary at all levels. The two schools were selected using a maximum variation strategy to capture contrasts in socioeconomic composition, neighborhood segregation, and linguistic diversity. One school is centrally located with relatively stable majority-Norwegian enrollment; the other is situated in a high-poverty, highly segregated area with a large share of minoritized pupils. This maximum variation logic is consistent with earlier project cases that document how institutional and spatial factors (housing, marketization, and local service models) mediate schools' capacity to realize inclusion (Corral-Granados et al., 2024; Smeplass et al., 2023a). Instrument development was guided by prior project findings that show how children's narratives make visible uneven access to resources, belonging and recognition in Nordic urban schools. Items focus on (a) well-being and sense of belonging, (b) social inclusion among peers and adults, (c) perceived fairness and support, and (d) whether one's language(s) and background are valued in everyday teaching. This content echoes earlier analyses of children's accounts of well-being and exclusion in polarized neighborhoods (Corral-Granados et al., 2024) and of structural mechanisms that generate discrimination in Norwegian schools (Corral-Granados et al., 2023a,b). The study did not include planned or systematic classroom observations based on a formal observation protocol. The fieldnotes used here consist of reflective analytic memos written by the author during survey administration, school visits, and informal interactions with staff. These notes are not treated as observational data in a strict sense, but as contextual material supporting analytic interpretation.
Analytic strategy proceeded in three steps, informed by qualitative analytic traditions (Miles et al., 2013; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). First, descriptive distributions across core questionnaire constructs (belonging, well-being, recognition of language background, and exclusionary experiences) were produced at the school level to identify patterned differences between contexts. Second, researcher fieldnotes were used to contextualize these patterns and to identify situations where language practices became salient in everyday school interactions. Third, two analytic vignettes were constructed through iterative interpretive work, linking concrete classroom situations to institutional logics discussed in the theoretical framework. The vignettes function as analytically condensed cases that make visible how bilingual practices are differently recognized and evaluated across institutional contexts.
This methodological orientation resonates with comparative ethnographic traditions that examine how educational practices are embedded in social and institutional contexts (Beach, 2018; Beach and Dovemark, 2011). The aim is to uncover how structures and values materialize in everyday school interactions. Beach's work demonstrates how inequalities are reproduced through organizational routines and pedagogical discourses that appear neutral but privilege specific cultural norms. This approach aligns with the present study's concern for how bilingual practices are framed differently across institutional contexts. Similarly, (Hammersley and Atkinson 2019) and (Miles et al. 2013) have emphasized the analytic value of combining quantitative mapping with qualitative interpretation to capture both patterned tendencies and situated meanings within educational settings.
Researcher role and quality considerations reflect the project's partnership model with municipalities. Collaboration is used to access diverse settings and actors while preserving scholarly independence, confidentiality, and analytic rigor (Smeplass et al., 2023b). This approach is theoretically informed by organizational perspectives that attend to loose coupling between policy and practice and to the unintentional consequences of well-intended equity arrangements, an orientation already elaborated in the project's cross-municipal work (Smeplass et al., 2023a).
The study follows ethical principles for research with children's participation and voice and was notified to Sikt—the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. All procedures complied with GDPR and national guidelines; written parental consent and child assent were obtained. Responses were anonymized at the point of data cleaning, and schools, people, and locations are fully pseudonymized in reporting. The vignettes are constructed to protect identities while retaining analytic content. In line with the project's collaboration model, municipal partners facilitate access but do not review or approve analyses or interpretations; research decisions and publications remain the responsibility of the research team (Smeplass et al., 2023b).
Analysis
Analytic vignettes and institutional interpretation
The analysis presented in this section does not report results in the sense of aggregated findings or systematic observational data. Rather, it consists of analytically constructed vignettes based on the author's fieldnotes, used to examine how bilingual practices are institutionally interpreted in concrete situations. The vignettes function as theory-informed illustrations that connect situated classroom moments to broader organizational and welfare-state logics discussed in the theoretical framework. They are not intended as representative classroom accounts, nor as evidence derived from systematic classroom observation protocols.
Table 1 (below) provides a descriptive snapshot of the two anonymized Norwegian schools constructed from publicly available background information (municipal indicators and school documentation) and the researcher's regular fieldnotes from site visits and conversations; the categories function as analytic descriptors. They are included to contextualize the two vignettes illustrating how bilingual practices can be framed differently across institutional settings.
Table 1. Contrasting Norwegian school contexts relevant to bilingualism and inclusion.
The situations described in the vignettes occurred during researcher presence in classrooms in connection with survey administration and school visits. While this involved being physically present in classroom settings, these encounters do not constitute systematic classroom observations in a methodological sense.
Vignette 1—the “noisy” girl
I am collecting data in a classroom with about 20 pupils in school A. We have planned a session where the children will complete an online questionnaire, and several technical details must be in place. An important premise of the research design is that the teacher participates actively in the process. The teacher knows the pupils best and is far more experienced at facilitating instruction. Several adults from the university are present that day, and we also have research assistants with us. Only one lesson has been allocated to this activity.
The class we enter is highly multicultural, and this school is one of the socially disadvantaged schools in our study, where we examine well-being and socioeconomic background. We also interview teachers, school administrators, and leaders. The whole situation likely feels somewhat “important,” as our presence has probably created a sense of occasion. The teachers are welcoming and friendly in meeting the research team.
Most of the children get started with the questionnaire while the adults walk around the room and assist them as needed. The pupils are boys and girls in Year 5. We lean toward the children, whisper, and try to stay quiet so they can read in peace and so we do not influence how they respond. Still, they are young enough that they need help understanding what the questions mean, especially when the wording is unfamiliar to them.
At the front of the room are two girls sitting next to each other. Both have dark eyes and dark hair. I do not know where they are from, but I assume their parents come from the Middle East; many pupils at this school have backgrounds from Syria, Afghanistan, or Iran. One of the girls asks many questions throughout the session. She shifts constantly in her chair, speaks loudly and spontaneously. The teacher repeatedly asks her to calm down and moderate herself.
It soon becomes clear that several of the questions in the survey are difficult to understand. The questionnaire contains terms like parents/guardians, relatives, evening meals, and whether the family has “good or poor finances.” The teacher becomes impatient with the girl's behavior, as it slows down the session.
Eventually, it turns out that the girl who is speaking so much has only been in Norway for a few years. She grew up in a refugee camp and came to Norway with limited formal schooling. She therefore has less experience with the norms of classroom behavior and less schooling than many Norwegian children. But the reason she is asking all these questions is that she has recently gained a new classmate, another girl who can hardly speak Norwegian yet. She is translating into Arabic to help her friend understand the questions. The new classmate likely has similar life experiences with less schooling than other classmates.
There is something remarkably self-sacrificing about the way she takes on the role of the “loud one”, the one who dares to ask questions, because the newly arrived girl is quiet and barely asks anything. The new girl is probably overwhelmed by the Norwegian school environment, the language she does not understand, and the task of completing the questionnaire we researchers have brought.
From an analytic perspective, this situation illustrates how institutional expectations and situational demands shape how children's bilingual practices are interpreted. The girl's translational support for her peer becomes framed as disruption rather than assistance within a context where order, tempo, and task completion are prioritized. The teacher is undoubtedly doing their best with the resources they have. Still, I cannot ignore the fact that it is we, the researchers, the school's expectations, and the situation itself, that help create the “disruptive” girl who sits in the first row translating for her friend.
I take the two girls to another room, and together we finish their questionnaires there. The translator and the newly arrived girl complete their surveys together and then head out to recess hand in hand.
Vignette 2—the resourceful boy
We conduct the same research procedure with the questionnaire at school B: a school located in what we consider a high-status area in another part of the city. It is a very ethnic white school, and nearly all children have Norwegian parents. The parents here live in detached houses and villas, quite different from the district of the two girls, where most families live in apartment blocks and some in municipal housing.
Again, we are collecting data with researchers and assistants in a Year 5 classroom, but the process unfolds very differently. We explain how to log onto the online questionnaire, and the pupils manage this without much difficulty. The room becomes completely silent once they start the survey, and there are few, if any, questions.
I try to make myself useful and walk over to what I assume is a Norwegian boy. The boy appears phenotypically similar to the ethnic Norwegian majority in the class. He is discreetly holding something under his desk. It is a book. I ask whether he does not want to complete the questionnaire and tell him that it is fine if he chooses not to. He replies that he is completing it and looks slightly embarrassed that I noticed the book. The session ends with the pupils raising their hands one by one when they are finished. They are dismissed quietly and walk out to recess in an orderly manner. We complete the remaining survey data collection at the school without similar incidents.
Later, the teacher comes for an interview with our research team. I remember the episode from the classroom and ask him if he can explain what happened. The teacher proudly tells me that this boy arrived in Norway only a short time ago from another European country. He has learned Norwegian entirely on his own and often uses a dictionary in class to ensure that he spells everything correctly. He was looking up Norwegian terms for the open-ended questions in the questionnaire. The teacher goes on to explain that he has learned Norwegian at record speed and is well integrated into the class. I notice how proud the teacher is and how positively this is framed. They consider themselves a multicultural class. In this situation, the boy's bilingual strategy is interpreted as a sign of initiative and competence and is positively recognized by the teacher within the institutional norms of the school.
Discussion—institutional readings of bilingual practices
Taken together, the vignettes illuminate how different bilingual practices are read through institutional lenses that privilege certain forms of participation and backgrounded language ideologies. In School A, peer translation becomes hyper-visible as disruption; in School B, dictionary use becomes visible as diligence and invisible as disturbance. This selective visibility is not incidental. It reflects what neo-institutional theory describes as the gap between formal ideals and practice, where schools adopt rationalized scripts (e.g., inclusion, participation, equality) while everyday enactments remain loosely coupled and locally negotiated (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Brunsson, 2006). The same action—mobilizing an additional language to access and mediate content—receives opposite meanings because it aligns differently with classroom order, teacher expectations, and local “appropriate” participation norms.
The findings indicate that institutional logics, rather than linguistic competence per se, sort comparable practices into “resource” or “obstacle.” This aligns with neo-institutional accounts of loose coupling between inclusive ideals and everyday enactment (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Brunsson, 2006). Viewed through inclusion, recognition, and resilience, the consequences are patterned: misrecognition occurs where multilingual mediation is cast as disorder; recognition and resilience are scaffolded where multilingual strategies align with accepted participation norms (Ainscow and Miles, 2008; Booth and Ainscow, 2011; Fraser, 2000; Honneth, 1995; Ungar and Theron, 2020). The additive/subtractive framing of bilingualism (Cummins, 2014) thus depends on an institutional reading of the same practice.
Importantly, the contrast in how these children are recognized in the specific situations cannot be understood solely in terms of language use or classroom behavior. The children in the two vignettes also differ in terms of ethnicity, gender, and how their bodies and linguistic repertoires align with dominant norms in Norwegian schooling. The boy's bilingualism is mediated through a body and a first language that are easily read as “non-problematic” and compatible with majority expectations, while the girl's bilingual mediation occurs from a visibly minoritized position. These differences likely shape how inclusion practices are institutionally interpreted and how recognition is distributed, even in the absence of explicit racial categorization.
A recognition lens helps specify what is at stake. Recognition concerns whether identities, histories, and contributions are acknowledged as legitimate; misrecognition erodes status and self-relations (Fraser, 2000; Honneth, 1995; Taylor, 1994). The Arabic-speaking girl's mediation embodies solidarity and learning support central to the comprehensive school ideal, yet is read as a breach of silence and control. The boy's discreet strategy fits prevailing expectations of individualized self-regulation and is celebrated. These are not judgments about personal worth, but institutional readings that attach value to particular linguistic repertoires and modes of help. Over time, such patterned recognitions shape belonging and achievement—core aims of inclusion as a systemic commitment to remove barriers to participation (Ainscow and Miles, 2008; Booth and Ainscow, 2011; Slee, 2011).
Placing bilingualism in this frame clarifies why competence alone does not explain outcomes. Cummins' distinction between additive and subtractive orientations captures how schools can build on or suppress home languages (Cummins, 2014). Yet the vignettes suggest a further step: the same bilingual action can be constructed as additive or subtractive depending on how it is sequenced, voiced, and situated in the moral order of the classroom. Translanguaging practices are pedagogically powerful when institutionally legitimated (García and Wei, 2014), but where monolingual norms remain implicit, even supportive mediation can trigger sanctioning. Prior project work in Norwegian schools points to precisely such tensions: staff often associated linguistic diversity with classroom management challenges rather than as a pedagogical resource, and students perceived signals that their languages were undervalued (Corral-Granados et al., 2023a,b, 2024).
This is where welfare capital adds analytic traction. I conceptualize welfare capital as the intersection of structural, relational, and symbolic resources that enable children to convert what they know and can do into institutionally recognized participation. Structurally, do routines authorize translanguaging in bounded ways (e.g., planned language windows, named peer roles)? Relationally, does teacher–student trust make low-voice mediation legitimate rather than suspect? Symbolically, do local cultures ascribe status to particular home languages and strategies? The vignettes show that when these resources are present, bilingual practices are read as competence; when they are absent, the same practices are read as disorder. Because welfare services and schooling are tightly coupled in the Nordic model, the institutional environment scaffolds or constrains resilience—the multisystemic process through which young people mobilize ecological resources under adversity (Ungar and Theron, 2020). Resilience here is not a trait in the child but a property of the learning ecology.
Language policy research clarifies the policy backdrop. School-level rules and everyday corrections can function as language policing that ties “proper” language to order, morality, and employability (Cushing, 2020). Boundaries—between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” language, or between spaces where multiple codes are permitted—are not neutral; they construct linguistic borders that sort students into legitimate and illegitimate users (Valdés, 2017). In Norwegian classrooms, such borders often remain implicit. Teachers are asked to realize ambitious inclusion goals while navigating curriculum, assessment, and order, frequently with limited time for multilingual pedagogy and with monolingual norms embedded in routines (Myklevold and Speitz, 2021; Vikøy and Haukås, 2021; Fylkesnes et al., 2018; Thomassen and Munthe, 2020). In this context, it is unsurprising that peer translation becomes legible as noise and that silent dictionary use becomes legible as effort.
Two practical implications follow directly. First, schools can redesign micro-routines so that translanguaging is audibly present yet organizationally bounded: short “language helper” roles with whispered voice, time-boxing, and explicit teacher cues that signal when the helper role begins and ends, together with visible acknowledgment that peer mediation is learning support rather than misbehavior (García and Wei, 2014; Wedin and Wessman, 2017). Second, professional conversations can surface hidden monolingual norms by inviting staff to analyze concrete vignettes from their own classrooms against inclusion, recognition, and resilience criteria from the literature (Ainscow and Miles, 2008; Ungar and Theron, 2020). Neither step requires new mandates; both translate inclusion into recognizable classroom practices. Finally, these findings nuance the additive/subtractive frame. The question is not whether students are “more or less bilingual,” but whether institutional logics supply sufficient welfare capital for the same bilingual act to be read as participation, competence, and care. Where that capital is present, bilingualism appears as resource; where it is absent, bilingualism is rendered a burden. This institutional reading helps explain why formally egalitarian systems can still produce unequal experiences and outcomes (Smeplass et al., 2023a).
Welfare capital helps explain these institutional readings. It denotes the structural, relational, and symbolic resources that enable children to convert their linguistic repertoires into institutionally recognized participation. Structurally, routines must authorize translanguaging (e.g., bounded roles for “language helpers,” time-boxed peer mediation). Relationally, teacher–student trust must render quiet mediation legitimate rather than suspect. Symbolically, local cultures must attribute status to diverse languages and strategies. Where welfare capital is present, bilingual acts are legible as competence and care; where it is thin, language policing and implicit borders prevail (Cushing, 2020; Valdés, 2017). This helps account for the study's asymmetry: the Arabic-speaking girl's visible mediation collided with classroom order scripts, while the boy's discreet dictionary use matched valued self-regulation. The boy's discreet use of the dictionary suggests that even in contexts where bilingualism is positively framed by teachers, pupils may still orient toward a hidden curriculum of quiet competence and linguistic invisibility (Jackson, 1968; Broady, 1981). This nuance indicates that recognition in high-status settings can be conditional: bilingual strategies are welcomed when they align with dominant norms of self-regulation but may still be managed as something not to display too openly.
Two practice levers follow. First, redesign micro-routines so that translanguaging is audibly present yet organizationally contained and publicly named as learning support (García and Wei, 2014; Wedin and Wessman, 2017). Second, use concrete classroom vignettes to surface hidden monolingual norms and to align judgments with explicit criteria for inclusion, recognition, and resilience (Ainscow and Miles, 2008; Ungar and Theron, 2020). These steps do not require new mandates, rather re-couple declared aims with daily practice.
Conclusion—re-reading bilingualism through welfare capital
The goal of this study was to clarify how institutional expectations shape the recognition of bilingualism in Norwegian primary schools. The study was guided by the question: how can institutional expectations shape whether bilingual practices are recognized as resources for participation, or misrecognized as obstacles to inclusion? The analysis drew on material from the Nordic Unequal Childhood project, focusing on two contrasting Year 5 classrooms in the same city. Combining researcher fieldnotes, and presenting two analytic vignettes, the study showed how different bilingual practices—peer translation and dictionary-supported writing—were interpreted differently across institutional contexts. In summary, the analysis demonstrates that whether bilingualism appears as a resource or an obstacle depends on the welfare capital institutions make available in situ. Strengthening its structural, relational, and symbolic components offers a concrete path for schools to convert multilingual competence into recognized participation, and to bring inclusion, recognition, and resilience closer to everyday practice.
Welfare capital is introduced in this article as an analytical lens for understanding how welfare-state schooling shapes the conditions under which children's competencies become institutionally meaningful. The concept captures how structural arrangements, relational dynamics, and symbolic valuations interact to determine whether children's linguistic practices are recognized as legitimate participation in school life. Welfare capital accrues through repeated institutional encounters in which routines authorize particular forms of help, teachers interpret pupils' intentions with trust, and local school cultures attribute value to specific languages and modes of interaction. Under such conditions, bilingual practices can support access to recognition, stability, and educational support. Where these conditions are weaker, the same practices may generate friction and misalignment with institutional expectations. By foregrounding this institutional dimension, welfare capital directs attention toward the organizational and moral infrastructures through which participation, belonging, and learning are produced in everyday classrooms.
There are, nevertheless, limits to the present study. The analysis is based on two analytic vignettes and does not include systematic classroom observation. Future research could combine structured observations with small-scale institutional interventions, such as authorized peer-translation protocols, to examine how variations in welfare capital affect belonging, participation, and achievement across different school contexts.
Data availability statement
The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because there are identifiable individuals in the dataset. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to RWxpLnNtZXBsYXNzQG50bnUubm8=.
Ethics statement
The studies involving humans were approved by Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation in this study was provided by the participants' legal guardians/next of kin. Written informed consent was obtained from the individual(s), and minor(s)' legal guardian/next of kin, for the publication of any potentially identifiable data included in this article.
Author contributions
ES: Supervision, Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing, Investigation, Software, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Resources, Project administration, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing – original draft.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the participating schools and municipal partners for facilitating access, and colleagues in the Nordic Unequal Childhood project for constructive discussions.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The author(s) verify and take full responsibility for the use of generative AI in the preparation of this manuscript. Generative AI was used to assist with language editing and clarity and suggest structural revisions. The tool (ChatGPT, OpenAI; accessed in 2025) was not used to generate, analyze, or interpret data; to create figures or tables; or to generate citations. All AI-assisted text was reviewed, revised, and approved by the author(s), who accept full responsibility for the final content. No confidential or personal data were provided to the tool.
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Keywords: bilingualism, inclusion, institutional logics, recognition, resilience, welfare capital
Citation: Smeplass E (2026) Bilingualism as resource or obstacle? Educational tensions in contrasting Norwegian school settings. Front. Educ. 10:1751335. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1751335
Received: 21 November 2025; Revised: 16 December 2025;
Accepted: 26 December 2025; Published: 27 January 2026.
Edited by:
Yvonne Yu-Feng Liu, National Pingtung University, TaiwanReviewed by:
Juhar Yasin Abamosa, University of Inland Norway, NorwayEmma Miles, Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2026 Smeplass. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Eli Smeplass, RWxpLnNtZXBsYXNzQG50bnUubm8=