“Or even Frisian, yes. No, no”: The negotiation of space for a minority language in narratives by pre-service teachers

3.1 Design and procedure

The eight interviews analysed in this study were selected from a larger corpus of semi-structured, qualitative interviews (Dörnyei 2007) with pre-service teachers of both primary and secondary education who self-identify as multilinguals and who are active in the north of the Netherlands. A theory-driven interview guide was developed, including questions focusing on five general themes: own linguistic background, knowledge of and views on multilingualism, experiences with multilingualism at school during ITE, own opinion about multilingualism in education, and own projected behaviour in multilingual classrooms. The interviews were conducted at a time and a place convenient for the respondent, most often individually. Each interview was recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, as well as translated into English (for interviews conducted in Frisian and Dutch). Interviews were conducted between March and July of 2019 by students of the Bachelor programme Minorities and Multilingualism at the University of Groningen, previously trained to conduct qualitative interviews. During the interviews, respondents’ attitudes, experiences, and opinions were elicited and interviewees were encouraged to elaborate on the topics raised (Dörnyei 2007). Respondents were made anonymous in the transcriptions by obscuring personal information such as names, places they had lived or visited and the names of the schools they had worked at.

3.2 Sample and sampling strategy

The sampling strategy used to select interview participants was mixed purposive sampling of key informants based on the expectation that these informants would yield an important perspective on the research topic (Collins 2010; Given 2008). Respondents had to meet two inclusion criteria: they were pre-service teachers for either primary or secondary education, studying at either bachelor or master levels; and they self-reported as multilingual. Institutions in the northern Netherlands that offer ITE for both primary and secondary education were contacted and asked to inform and recruit their students. All respondents were either doing an internship at the moment of interviewing or had finished one in the recent past. All interviewees were between 20 and 25 years old. From the larger corpus, we focused on the eight interviews in which experiences with Frisian in education were mentioned (Table 1). A total of 21203 transcribed words were analysed containing 26 narratives of encounters with Frisian.

* Languages are listed in the order indicated by respondents themselves and include both languages they grew up with (generally the first to be identified) and languages they learned at school or in the community.

** Number of words of the English translation if the interview was originally conducted in Dutch or Frisian.

Of the three respondents speaking Frisian as a first language, two identified Frisian as their sole L1. All respondents claim a certain proficiency in English as a language they learned at school and/or use regularly; another frequently reported language was German, which is taught in all Dutch secondary education.

3.3 Data analysis

The interview method used was not narrative, that is to say: the interviewees were not “deliberately invited to organize their account in a story format” (Murray and Sools 2015: 137). However, as Lengelle and Meijers (2015: 317) put it, experiences of difference are typically “translated” into a narrative, and it can therefore be expected that accounts about encounters with Frisian in Dutch schools will regularly take the form of narratives. In order to locate these, we searched the transcripts for instances where the interviewees engaged in such translation from experience to narrative. In other words, we looked for moments where the interviewees engaged in “narrative work” – “the interactional activity through which narratives are constructed, communicated, and sustained or reconfigured” (Gubrium and Holstein 2009: xvii) – about Frisian in education.

Narrative work and the narratives it produces can be studied with a very wide range of possible approaches, and narrative analysis is often eclectic, as it pragmatically selects its concepts and methods from various disciplines in which narrative studies have been developed, depending on the case that is being studied (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012: 23). Roughly speaking, there are three types of narrative analysis, focusing on either (1) the events and experiences that are ordered by and represented in the narrative (De Fina and Georgopoulou 2012; cf. Mishler 1995); (2) the narrative structure and the coherence it establishes (cf. Kukkonen 2014); and (3) the social interaction that is created through narrative and within which it is embedded.

Although our study will employ all three forms of narrative analysis, our starting point is the second. That is to say, our main object of interest is the plot of the narratives we find in these interviews. We mean plot both in the sense of a narrative’s “global structure”, and its “structuration”: the sequences of events as presented in these narratives, and how these events are placed in relations of necessity to each other (Kukkonen 2014). We see this as the outcome of emplotment: the ordering of events in such a way that they form a probable and inevitable sequence (Ricoeur 1984: 41). In the context of the present study, focusing on emplotment is useful, because it is through emplotment that narrative work helps us structure, express, and make sense of our experiences. In this way, narrative is not only a form of communication, but also a specific type of knowing: we make sense of reality through emplotment, turning our various experiences into something more stable and coherent, which allows us to reflect on them (Ricoeur 1992: 141; Lengelle and Meijers 216: 316). As emplotment is also always an act of judgment (establishing how this leads to that), we are not merely making sense of our experiences when engaging in narrative work, we are also evaluating the people involved, and the actions they engaged in (Korthals Altes 2014: 92). Narratives are not only descriptions of events, but also prescriptions of how these events should be evaluated (Ricoeur 1992: 115). Thus, studying these narratives allows us to see which values are attached by these teacher trainees to Frisian and its occurrence in educational settings. It is important to keep in mind that such valuation through narrative work may happen as much despite, as because of the person who created that narrative: narratives do not merely convey “the intentions and values” of their creators, rather, narrative work is embedded within “sociocultural webs of meanings” that those involved may not be fully aware of (Meretoja 2018: 28).

In any case, narrative is “never ethically neutral, but [...] rather implicitly or explicitly induces a new evaluation of the world” (Ricoeur 1988: 249), as it attempts to answer the question ‘what happened’ (or, in the case of hypothetical narratives, ‘what may happen’). There are, of course, other cognitive strategies at our disposal to answer this question (scientific inquiry, for instance), but narrative work offers us the possibility to answer it with a focus on experience and agency: through narrative we do not merely establish what happened, but also who made it happen, why they did so, how they managed to do so, what exactly they did, and with which results (Moenandar and Huisman 2017 b: 135). The answers to these questions form the four stages of Greimas’s famous narrative programme, an underlying pattern that organises any narrative, consisting of a manipulation stage, competence stage, performance stage and sanction stage. All narratives revolve around the relation between a subject and an object, and this relation transforms over the course of these four consecutive stages: in the manipulation stage, the subject develops a desire for the object; in the competence stage, the subject gathers the means to acquire that object; in the performance stage the subject either acquires the object or fails to do so; and in the sanction stage, the consequences of acquiring, or failing to acquire the object become clear.

Subject and object are the two main actants, or roles, in any narrative, but according to Greimas, all narratives contain four more such actants, defined as “beings or things that participate in processes in any form whatsoever, be it only a walk-on part and in the most passive way” (Greimas and Courtés 1982: 75). These are the sender, who causes the subject to desire the object; the receiver, to whom the subject hands over the object in the sanction stage; a helper, aiding the subject with acquiring the object; and an opponent who obstructs the subject’s attempts to acquire or keep the object. It is important not to confuse these roles with characters who play some part in the narrative: one character may fulfil several roles, while several characters can fulfil one particular role. Furthermore, actants do not have to be human, but can be animals, phenomena or even a state of mind (Robichaud 2003; Moenandar and Huisman 2017b).

The actantial model and the narrative programme are arguably the two most important elements of Greimas’s work on narrative syntax. Originally attempts to map the underlying structure that regulates all narratives, they have become important tools for the analysis of narrative, not only of literary narratives, which was the focus of most of Greimas’s own work and the structuralist narratological tradition within which he is a foundational figure, but also narratives in settings such as organisations (e. g., Robichaud 2003) or education (e. g., Moenandar and Huisman 2017b). The actantial model can be seen as a “relational system” (Robichaud 2003: 39), which allows us to analyse how those who are acting or being acted upon (Ricoeur 1984: 55) relate to each other. The narrative programme comprises a “pattern of transformations” (Robichaud 2003: 41), four constitutive types of events that together comprise actions performed by the actants, as well as the meanings that can be attributed to these actions. As such, it allows us to see which values are negotiated through a particular instance of emplotment: while the manipulation stage establishes “the incentive, desire, or imperative to act”, the sanction stage assigns “meaning and value” to the action in the other stages, so that establishing the underlying narrative programme of a certain narrative enables us to tease out the “values and meanings [...] at stake” (Korthals Altes 2014: 295n3).

We used the actantial model and the narrative programme to map the narratives we found in the transcripts (see for an example Appendix 1). These maps helped us analyse how the interviewees work through (Baboulene et al. 2018) their – real or hypothetical – experiences with Frisian. They do so by emplotting these: establishing relations between the different actants involved and connecting the events that make up the experience. Analysing these acts of emplotment allowed us to see which roles are ascribed to Frisian by these teacher trainees, and what they imply regarding the (im)possibilities for and the value of its inclusion in learning environments.

As an aid in creating such maps, we designed a fill-in sheet based on Greimas’s actantial model and narrative programme (Figure 1; an earlier version of this map was developed in Moenandar and Basten 2015). After locating an instance where an interviewee recounted an experience in which Frisian played a significant role, we would first give that experience a title. Formulating such a title, staying as close as possible to the interviewee’s own words, helps focus the analysis and summarise the significance of a particular narrative (Murray and Sools 2015: 140). Subsequently, we mapped out the entire narrative with the aid of the fill-in sheet. Typically, this starts with establishing the subject-object axis around which that particular narrative revolves, followed by identifying the other actants involved in the narrative, and then the transforming relation between the subject and its object. The 26 narratives we mapped were distributed unevenly among interviewees (see Table 1). After mapping the narratives in this way, we compared them to find whether there were recurring themes in these stories about experiences with Frisian.

4.1 Inclusion leading to exclusion

Many interviewees reflected on the need to create an inclusive learning environment when considering multilingualism and the use of Frisian in class. In this context, fairness was a central concern of several teacher trainers. Paradoxically enough, the wish to establish a fair and inclusive learning environments leads to the exclusion of Frisian, or at least, that is the implication of a few narratives. An example of such a narrative can be found when one interviewee is speaking about her experience as a trainee teaching at an international primary school:

I: So, I don’t know, during class, I think I would prefer them to speak English, or, I don’t know, Dutch, but that’s my language, but, yeah

R: Or even Frisian

I: Or even Frisian, yes. No, no, I think I would prefer them to speak English because then everybody can understand them (I1)

A simple plot is created, where the teacher trainee’s desire for inclusivity in the manipulation stage, leads to a monolingual learning environment in the sanction stage. The interviewee casts herself as a subject with an object that can be summarised as linguistic fairness. In a learning environment in which pupils with different linguistic backgrounds come together, all pupils should be capable of understanding what is being said. This has consequences for the value of Frisian: since not everybody can understand it – or at least, that seems to be an underlying assumption – that language and those who speak it end up in the role of opponent. Thus, Frisian is something that needs to be dealt with, that is, neutralised. In order to do so, the interviewee imposes a rule, “so that they only speak English during class” (I1), thereby effectively banishing Frisian from the learning environment.

Interestingly, for the interviewee this seems to be more emphatically the case for Frisian than for Dutch, even though both those languages would not be understood by everybody in the international school she taught at. This initial readiness to accept Dutch, which leads to a short moment where the inclusion of Frisian is considered – immediately followed by total rejection – is in line with the peripheral status of Frisian: it would simply be too strange, it seems, for this trainee to envision it could have a place at an international school. Thus, the goal of linguistic fairness implies for her a hierarchy of languages along an axis ranging from helpful (English), to somewhat helpful but also problematic (Dutch), to maybe helpful but obstructive (Frisian).

Further considering the hypothetical inclusion of Frisian in the international school she worked at in another narrative, the same interviewee establishes conditions under which Frisian may be permitted in the learning environment after all: “if you want to discuss something with your neighbour, or he or she doesn’t understand it, or you don’t understand it and you ask a question, then, you can do that in your own language” (I1). Thus, acknowledging that a monolingual learning environment may hamper students’ sense of belonging and study success (see also Section 4.2 below), while staying true to her conviction that as a minority language, Frisian needs to be regulated in the name of fairness, the teacher formulates the conditions under which the use of any other language than English may be permitted. There is a tension between the earlier narrative, where the object was linguistic fairness, and this narrative, where the object is helping pupils to understand the curriculum and achieve study success, for which they sometimes need to have recourse to their own language. Frisian shifts from the role of opponent to that of helper: it can be used briefly among minority speakers if it helps their understanding, but “otherwise, they [should] speak English no matter what” (I1). Thus, the use of Frisian still needs to be strictly regulated and is thereby kept in a clearly demarcated, peripheral space in the learning environment, outside of which the use of the dominant language will be enforced.

The same need for strict regulation of Frisian in order to guarantee fairness is found in other interviews as well. One teacher trainee (I17) illustrates this need to regulate Frisian in the name of fairness by sharing his own experiences in primary school. He recalls how the rule in the classroom was that if there was anybody present who did not speak Frisian, nobody would speak that language. This, to him, is good practice: it prevents exclusion, since the language is not accessible to everyone. To stress that this is not because of a dislike of Frisian, he sketches another situation where only one pupil would speak English: “they can’t expect me to speak English to the entire class because only he knows English” (I17).

Another teacher trainee (I7) links aspects of linguistic in- and exclusion to the influx of immigrants to the Netherlands, which to him makes it even more important to uphold Dutch as the dominant language in his learning environment. He is concerned with the fact that his immigrant pupils “have to learn and practice their Dutch”. Allowing them to speak their own language at school would be unfair towards them, as it would hinder them in acquiring proficiency in Dutch, and thus be an obstacle to study success. It would also be unfair to others, since it would exclude those who do not speak that language and could lead to disorder in the classroom: “It feels like gossiping otherwise too. Yeah, you don’t know what they are saying, it could be bad.” Thus, the teacher trainee’s object is enforcing the use of Dutch only: “so at school it is just Dutch, and also to each other”. In this narrative, anyone speaking other languages in his classroom becomes an opponent to that goal, most notably a group of Syrian pupils, who speak Arabic at times. To stress how undesirable and unfair this behaviour is, the interviewee suddenly addresses the researcher. Possibly in an attempt to defend his strong monolingual stance, he says, “imagine, we are in front of a class, and I suddenly start talking Frisian to you, that’s not fair either right?” In this short hypothetical narrative, meant as a parallel to his pupils speaking Arabic in class, Frisian is judged in the same normative way as that migrant language: in a Dutch classroom where fairness is one of the highest values, it is cast as undesirable. This is especially significant since – as we will see in Section 4.3 – he also cares deeply for the Frisian language and would like it to be taught well at schools in Fryslân.

There is also a slight modification of his negative stance towards speaking Frisian in the classroom in a later narrative about how Frisian pupils sometimes respond in Frisian to his Dutch prompts. First, he repeats the need for maintaining order: “you have to do something about it”. We see the same plot as with the Syrian pupils: encountering the use of other languages than Dutch, the teacher trainee yields his authority to prevent linguistic chaos. However, he then makes it clear there is a difference, too: “But yeah maybe you accept more, because you understand it yourself, and the rest understands it too”. Thus, in a Dutch learning environment in Fryslân – which is where he did his internship – there seems to be a formal language hierarchy in which any language other than Dutch should be excluded, and an informal one in which Frisian is allowed some, albeit limited, space. The touching stone is fairness: since most members of the learning environment understand Frisian, some tolerance towards it seems reasonable – although it still threatens classroom order. Thus, it also makes sense that this interviewee has nothing against the use of Frisian, or indeed any language other than Dutch, outside of class. There, the demand of educational fairness does not apply, and it would be acceptable for the teacher trainee to speak Frisian to Frisian and Dutch speaking pupils or to have them choose the language they wish to be addressed in. Relegating Frisian to these informal settings does, however, reify its peripheral status.

4.2 Success as motivation for marginalising Frisian

As we saw in the previous section, a concern with the educational success of pupils can reinforce monolingual ideologies. This becomes even more apparent in narratives that have either the pupils as subjects with success at school and in life as their object, or the teacher trainees as subjects with helping their pupils attain such success as their object. Here again, Frisian functions as opponent in the plot. As one interviewee (I7) puts it, speaking Frisian, or even speaking Dutch with recognisable traces of Frisian “can work against you”, especially when this is coupled with other drawbacks, such as a low IQ. What is significant here, is that he is himself an L1-speaker of Frisian: “But I can manage really well in Dutch, so I don’t really have a problem with that” (I7). In the plot of this short, one-sentence narrative, Frisian is, automatically it seems, a possible obstacle on the way to being successful.

This role for Frisian also turns up in a narrative shared by another interviewee (I20). The subject is a fellow teacher trainee “who only speaks Frisian at home with his parents”. When this person had to attend “a lecture in English [...] he had to switch from Frisian to Dutch to English”. She concludes, “In that case I think it is a disadvantage”. This narrative functions as a contrasting example for the teacher trainee herself, who speaks Dutch with her parents, and only speaks Frisian with “the older people in [her] family”. Apparently, this makes her better equipped to participate in education than her fellow student. Thus, Frisian is valued as something that belongs to the past: if people younger than the generation of “grandma and grandpa and brothers and sisters of my grandma and grandpa” continue to use it, this is to their detriment.

This basic plot – Frisian as something that needs to be overcome, and proficiency in Dutch as helpful in being successful – recurs regularly. Sometimes, the interviewee may resist it. One teacher trainee (I8) describes herself as a “proud Frisian”, albeit somewhat ironically, as this assertion is immediately followed by self-deprecating laughter. The picaresque narrative (cf. Moenandar and Huisman 2017) that starts with this claim of pride in her minority identity, has her stand up for her right not to consider being a Frisian speaker a “disadvantage” (as suggested by the interviewer): “some teachers told me that my Dutch would deteriorate. I don’t know if that is true”. Note, however, how Frisian is still acknowledged as a possible complication if one wants to be successful, to which flawless Dutch remains the key, even in a narrative in which commitment to one’s heritage language is the object.

Similarly, there is another teacher trainee (I4) who agrees that a multilingual learning environment could be in the best interest for pupils, drawing on personal experience: “I remember while being a child I actually secretly liked it better to learn in English, so it can help with motivation, for example”. This memory becomes the manipulation stage for a narrative in which she explores the hypothetical experience of allowing a certain degree of multilingualism, which could lead to her pupils being better equipped for their future: “it’s a skill they can always, most likely, use later in life, especially if it’s a global language like English or Chinese”. This utilitarian approach means that in this narrative, multilingualism needs to again be strictly regulated by the teacher, because “it should be considered how important a certain language is” and “[c]hildren can’t decide for themselves what they would like”. Given that “Frisian is so scarcely used” it does not really contribute to achieving the object of preparing her pupils for a “world [that] is becoming more multicultural”, unlike “important” languages (besides English and Chinese, she mentions Spanish, which she laments is often not even offered at Dutch schools). However, admitting that “of course [Frisian] shouldn’t die either”, she is willing to allow it some space in her ideal learning environment: “I wouldn’t start from kindergarten on [but] maybe you can say like, we offer it as an optional subject [in middle school]”. Thus, even when she envisions a learning environment strongly supportive of multilingualism, Frisian is marginalised, confined to a limited space. Again, it is represented as something of the past, on the verge of dying out and of no use in the future.

In other narratives, it is not so much the success of the pupils, but the success of the teacher trainee, or even the learning environment, that may be obstructed by Frisian. One interviewee (I17) seems to assume that facilitating multilingualism in a learning environment would mean he needs to grant all kinds of linguistic privileges to those who speak a different language than Dutch. Speaking hypothetically, he says:

you must handle it differently, because he is multilingual. [...] if a student says to you: I would like my test in Frisian, or something, or stuff like that, that’s difficult. That’s a lot of extra work.

Thus, a willingness to grant Frisian some space in education may lead to conflict, as the teacher trainee’s object of running his classroom smoothly and effectively becomes obstructed by demands that go beyond feasibility.

Another trainee (I21) even has a sense of failure because of the presence of Frisian in the learning environment. Not being able to speak or understand Frisian herself, she felt obstructed in achieving her object of establishing contact with her pupils. With those willing to speak Dutch, she still obtains her object: “they quickly notice ‘oh, this teacher does not speak Frisian, so we’ll do it in Dutch’. They adapt.” She describes, however, that when she was teaching, as she puts it, “in the heart of farmers’ village Fryslân [...] the children thought ‘okay, this teacher does not speak Frisian, we’ll just go to the other teacher’”. Thus, she emplots her experience so that pupils switching to Dutch become helpers, and those sticking to Frisian opponents. In the sanction stage there is a sense of lost struggle, as she concludes, “[t]hat was very hard”. Significantly, in the competence stage of the underlying narrative programme of this plot, she seems to need pupils willing to speak Dutch to obtain her object; an obvious alternative – trying to obtain some proficiency in Frisian – remains completely unacknowledged. Furthermore, speaking Frisian and the refusal to switch to Dutch are situated in a rural, peripheral space: at the end of this narrative, she says she now teaches in a city, “and there it isn’t a problem”. In other words, only by avoiding Frisian, the teacher trainee feels she can acquire her object of being a successful teacher.

There are a few narratives which have educational success as the object, but now the teacher trainee acknowledges that instead of a liability, allowing pupils to speak their own language may be an asset, with speaking Frisian now in the role of helper. One example is a narrative about teaching geography. The teacher trainee (I17) repeats several times that “multilingualism is a handy tool for that”, and allowing pupils to express themselves in their own language is therefore “nothing but good”. In fact, he distinguishes himself from “old nuts”: old-fashioned colleagues who refuse to allow for multilingualism. In his eyes, letting pupils write in other languages than Dutch would be good for them, as they could then also practice their language skills: “That’s not only multilingual but also multidisciplinary”. And it is good for himself, as his geography classes become more successful. However, the teacher restricts the languages pupils can use to those he “can read and grade” himself: “in English or Dutch, or in Frisian”. Note the order of languages, with Frisian added somewhat in the form of an afterthought, even though the interviewee is an L1 speaker of this language. This suggests a hierarchy reminiscent of the ones we discussed in Section 4.1.

Typical of all the narratives discussed in this and the previous section, with Frisian either in the role of opponent or, exceptionally, helper, is the need to regulate it. Whether the teacher trainees cast themselves in open conflict with speakers of Frisian or are willing to create some space for the use of this minority language, it always represents a challenge: Frisian must be managed, dealt with, and if the teacher trainee fails to do so, there will be chaos or failure.

4.3 Quality of Frisian education

Several of the trainees have a Frisian background themselves, and during the interviews they would look back on their own experiences with Frisian as pupils in primary and secondary education. One teacher trainee, for example, who is an L1 speaker of Frisian (I8) replies as follows when the interviewer invites her to describe her Dutch and Frisian language skills:

In Dutch I think I’m better than in Frisian definitely written because I have not had a lot of education in Frisian, even though I would really like to, uh so in written form I’m definitely better in Dutch. [...] Because Frisian is quite a uh it has quite a well difficult spelling and I never really learned that.

The emplotment she engages in to make sense of experiences with Frisian in education results in a narrative of frustration. Having had a strong desire (manipulation stage) to be as proficient as possible in her native language, and implying that good education is a means to achieve that object (competence stage), she concludes that this was never offered to her (performance stage). Therefore, she is now not as proficient as she would have liked (sanction stage).

Paradoxically enough, an interviewee (I7) who, as we saw in previous sections, strictly limits the use of Frisian in his own classroom and sees speaking Frisian as a possible obstacle for success, also laments the limited amount of Frisian he himself was offered as a pupil: “every now and then a class, only in the eighth grade”. Furthermore, it was badly facilitated: “all of a sudden we’d get a short task or something”. Like I8, he emplots these experiences into a narrative of frustration: any interest in improving his proficiency in his native language was obstructed by the fact that education in Frisian was, as he puts it, “really nothing”, concluding his narrative with the conclusion that “that was really bad”. This narrative of the past gains poignancy when the interviewee contrasts it with the current situation: “What you see now more is that it is implemented from the first grade onwards, we really didn’t have that”. This sense that not offering good education in Frisian means pupils are missing out on something also imbues another narrative that he shares a little later in the interview. Now speaking of his internship, he states a desire to teach his pupils Frisian. However, even now this object seems all but out of reach: “you want to teach it to them well, but if you don’t have the right materials for it, you have to come up with it all by yourself”. A conflict is introduced here, with school as the main opponent, as it fails to facilitate the teaching of Frisian: “the methods sucked”. Having barely obtained his object, he looks back with frustration: “that is a lot of work and effort so that makes it more difficult”. In another narrative about this experience, he raises the stakes. Explicitly acknowledging the language hierarchy we have already seen, he says, “English is ranked higher than Frisian at primary schools”. As a result, Frisian gets elbowed out, with colleagues being prone to “skipping it for [another] lesson if that is how things go”. This time, the impossibility to teach Frisian well does not only lead to personal frustration, but a sense of doom: “Frisian is at a critical point in the sense that yeah, will it survive, as you can say? So yes, it is very important to devote some attention to that”. Thus, he emplots his experience in such a way that the result is a narrative of continued marginalisation: a lack of commitment in the manipulation stage leads to the possible demise of his language in the sanction stage.

All these narratives can be described as failed Bildung narratives: narratives in which the subject tries to become a better version of herself throughout a trajectory of learning and emergence (Moenandar and Huisman 2017), in this case by improving their proficiency, which is obstructed by schools and educational policy makers. In one interview we find an interesting variation on this theme, however, in which the latter become helpers instead of opponents. Here, a third teacher trainee (I18) who grew up in Fryslân but does not have Frisian as her L1 offers a more picaresque narrative, saying “I just didn’t care very much about it” when thinking back to the Frisian classes she had to follow during her primary and secondary education. While emplotting this experience, two factors that we already encountered before play an important role in the manipulation stage. First, the teacher trainee mentions she “was very busy with other languages and [...] didn’t want any more languages” establishing a by now familiar language hierarchy in which Frisian comes last. Second, she explains that the place where education took place played an important role: “If I lived in a Frisian speaking village, I probably would have cared more about the language”. Again, Frisian is relegated to a peripheral, rural location: only there, it has value enough to care about it, despite the fact that it is the official language in the entire province and is spoken in the cities too. In any case, the object in this narrative now becomes dodging Frisian – “for me it was like: ‘I don’t want to learn’” – and relief is offered by the school: in elementary school she is still bothered by the fact that “Frisian was promoted”, but in high school, she only had to take the subject half a year, which allowed her to let the language go “in one ear and out the other” – a common saying describing a situation where information does not stick at all. She admits that the sanction to this is that she now has difficulties understanding the language, but the low value she negotiates for Frisian in her narrative makes it clear she does not mind this outcome very much.

1 Selecting the narrative

The mapping and analysis of the narratives where Frisian played a significant role began with locating instances of such experiences in the interviews. Below you can see a passage selected from Interview 1 in which the interviewee, a trainee at an international primary school, provides her views on multilingualism in the classroom:

“I: so, how do you feel about a multilingual student exhibiting their multilingualism in class?

R: ....... You mean when someone performs their language in school? Or-

I: yeah, when they use- when they use it in class

R: well, I think to a certain limit it’s okay, but... Therefore I think how the international school in [large city X in the West of the Netherlands]did it was very good, because normally when you teach, you teach in English, and, well, I’m not a miracle with other languages, so if they would speak their own language I wouldn’t understand a thing. So, I don’t know, during class, I think I would prefer them to speak English, or, I don’t know, Dutch, but that’s my language, but, yeah

I: or even Frisian

R: or even Frisian, yes. No, no, I think I would prefer them to speak English because then everybody can understand them. And then on set times they can speak their own language. But I also had that teacher actually agreed with the children to speak Dutch if they wanted to help them, each other or, I don’t know, so maybe... I would change my mind about that, but at first I think I would like them to speak English.

I: but if you would speak Hindi, would you mind a child in your class speaking Hindi?

R: that’s difficult, because then I would say yes, but then it’s kind of unfair to the other students, if you can- if you say in a Dutch setting, well, you can speak Dutch or English, then it’s unfair to the children who don’t speak Dutch... so in that case, I think I would draw one line, so that, so that they only speak English during class. But, yeah, I can also imagine that teachers say that if you want to discuss something with your neighbour, or he or she doesn’t understand it, or you don’t understand it and you ask a question, then, you can do than in your own language. Depending on the person, of course, who is sitting next to you and if he or she understands the same language, because otherwise, they would... speak English.... no matter what... that, I think- yeah”

2 Mapping the narrative

The narrative was then mapped on the fill-in sheet:

3 Analysing the narrative

The mapped narrative reveals the relations between the different actants and the unfolding of the narrative stages. As such, we can analyze the role ascribed to Frisian by the teacher trainee, and the implications it has regarding the value of its inclusion in learning environments:

In this narrative of Respondent 1, Frisian plays an opponent role towards achieving a “fair” linguistic environment for all students. Here, the goal of the trainee set in the manipulation stage can be deduced to be fairness: “I would prefer them to speak English because then everybody can understand them”; “if you say in a Dutch setting: well, you can speak Dutch or English, then it’s unfair to the children who don’t speak Dutch” (I1). Achieving this goal would therefore not be possible were pupils allowed to speak their “own language”, which the rest of the classroom would not share, one example of it being Frisian (I1). On the other hand, a helper in this narrative is the trainee’s ability to impose rules in the classroom and to limit and regulate possible exceptions: mainly, the students “would... speak English.... no matter what”. Then, in specific situations, where two pupils sitting together share a language not understood by others, they can ask each other questions during class “I think to a certain limit it’s okay”. The imposition of these rules and limitations in the competence stage of the narrative sets the background in which a “fair” linguistic environment can be reached. As such, in the performance stage of the narrative, where the trainee imagines a situation where she was a speaker of Hindi and a student spoke Hindi in class, she would not allow it: “in that case, I think I would draw one line, so that, so that they only speak English during class”.

In the sanction stage of the narrative we are presented with an outcome where all students are part of a monolingual environment, where they are not subject to the use of foreign languages. We see how in this narrative what is presented as fairness towards the greater group leads to the exclusion of the pupils’ individual linguistic background. Furthermore, a classroom policy meant to lead to an inclusive and fair environment by avoiding feelings of linguistic exclusion is shown to be restricting the use of these pupils’ native languages, with the exception of situations where the use of their native language were only exhibited to other speakers.

In this narrative Frisian is named as one of the languages whose use is discouraged or conditioned by the rules and exceptions delineated by the trainee. Despite the trainee’s knowledge of both Dutch and Frisian, the mention of Frisian by the interviewer triggers an emphatic rejection of its use in the international classroom. Where the interviewee had previously shown a willingness to entertain the option to allow Dutch in the classroom despite the fact that it was not shared by all members of the classroom, the use of Frisian is resolutely rejected and strengthens the monolingual position the trainee ultimately upholds:

“So, I don’t know, during class, I think I would prefer them to speak English, or, I don’t know, Dutch, but that’s my language, but, yeah

I: or even Frisian

R: or even Frisian, yes. No, no, I think I would prefer them to speak English because then everybody can understand them.”