Sammendrag
In this article, we explore how minority parents construct and promote cultural identities
through a multicultural school event in Norway. Such events respond to the call for diverse
and inclusive initiatives to facilitate learning, belonging, and cohesion in schools.
Interestingly, while schools see these events as helping further inclusion, prior research on the
subject has criticized such events for promoting essentialist understandings of cultural
identities, hence regarding them as counterproductive to the aim of promoting inclusion. This
research has directed scarce attention to the participant perspective, among them minority
parents. Using the stall of the Kurdish parents as an example, we conducted fieldwork
applying the method of Linguistic Landscaping. In addition, we conducted semi-structured
interviews with the parents asking questions about the festival and the meaning of the
displayed representations in their stall. The findings indicate that the Kurdish parents involved
view the event as an important space for creative construction of transnational and diasporic
identities, as well as an opportunity for a minority group to strive for acceptance for its cause.
We end the article by reflecting on the pedagogical potential in multicultural school events as
tools for creating inclusive school practices.
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