Multilingualism: “a hidden curriculum” of Norwegian L1?

In this presentation I discuss the notion "hidden curriculum" (Jackson, 1968) as a potential tool to visualize discrepancies between curriculum rhetoric and teaching practice in the Norwegian L1-subject in Upper Secondary School. On the one hand, in the curriculum, there are competence goals with multilingual content focusing on multilingualism as a resource. On the other hand, the common curriculum goals are interpreted in diametrically different ways by different teachers in the teaching practice (Hultin, 2012), and in different textbooks (Vikøy, 2021). Furthermore according to the Education Act § 2-8, pupils with other first languages than Norwegian and The Sámi language have right to L1 instruction and/or bilingual education if necessary, but should as soon as possible be integrated in the majority language class when their Norwegian language skills are sufficient. Due to the little focus on the importance of the mother tongue, this has been called a problem-oriented view on multilingualism (Hauge, 2014). Thus the Norwegian L1-subject still seems to be characterized by "monolingual instructional assumptions" (Cummins, 2014) which clearly do not go along with a resource perspective on multilingualism in the curriculum in the first part. Practices that become consensus are, according to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the most effective form of power, since we cannot imagine another way of doing and thinking about things (Fairclough, 2001: 86). Searching for a "hidden curriculum" is crucial for understanding society's reproduction of power relations through social control in the classroom. The focus of CDA lies both on how we are shaped by discourses and how we are shaping the discourses (Fairclough, 2001: 61) with the scope to make aware of "hidden agendas". Discourse is the whole process of social interaction, included the text. The texts in my study are textbooks and pupils reflecting on multilingual tasks from the teaching material.