4 - Negotiating Cultural Identities: Outdoor Play, Classroom Discussions, and Future Orientation

Summary

Chapter 4 is the first of five empirical chapters. It examines different ways that young people negotiate cultural identities with particular attention to the different ways that children from immigrant backgrounds and those from the white Christian majority are offered and negotiate different approaches to learning. The first case discusses the "curriculum of the cold" and examines how the youngest children were offered different kinds of outdoor play in the snow and its relationship to what this signifies in terms of being "Norwegian". The second case looks at the offers made by formal education to last year kindergarteners examining the use of transported and maintain cultural identities particularly obvious in the ways that children from backgrounds offered to a highly formal structured form of language education. The third case shows how young people rework older immigrant identities as they pursue a form of "new Norwegianness”.