Between a rock and a hard place

On multilingualism and teacher agency in Norwegian vocational education

Abstract

The article explores how Norwegian vocational subject teachers respond to language-related dilemmas in their teaching of mainstream vocational classes, specifically related to students’ multilingualism. I investigate which languages vocational teachers allow space for in their classrooms, and what their language-related decisions reveal about their experienced space for agency (Priestley et al., 2015). The data material consists of teacher interviews gathered through linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Norwegian upper secondary school in 2020–2021. I analyse selected excerpts using Jaffe’s (2009) (meta)sociolinguistic stance. The teachers establish and maintain Norwegian-speaking classrooms – expressions of and contributions to reproduction of a monolingual ideology (Iversen, 2021b; Ortega, 2019; Woolard, 2020). The teachers report allowing space for English more often than other languages, and I argue that this is an expression of an elite multilingual ideology (Barakos & Selleck, 2019; Nørreby, 2020). The article shows how vocational teachers’ stances provide insight into their experienced space for agency. This space is not only shaped by the institutional, practical, social and material environment, but also by the teachers’ habitus and visualisations of the future. For instance, factors related to students’ future professional lives and social considerations in the student group play into the teachers’ decisions. I argue that language ideological conditions – in the educational and professional realms – contribute to shaping the teachers’ space for agency. The teachers do have space for agency, and they exhibit agency in their professional practice. However, the teachers’ language-related decisions are not just theirs, but also products of the institutional structure that they work within.