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The reason children at this Swedish preschool say ‘Konnichiwa’

In an increasingly globalized world, teaching children to appreciate different perspectives and to be culturally sensitive to others is key to a modern education.

The reason children at this Swedish preschool say ‘Konnichiwa’
Photo: Futuraskolan International

Raising children who value and respect diversity is often a priority for international parents. But finding a school that can appropriately foster this particular brand of empathy isn’t always so simple.

Promoting international mindedness is an everyday focus at Futuraskolan International Preschool Brunbärsvägen. Part of a network of seven preschools and seven schools in and around Stockholm, the preschool – which opened its doors in 2008 – has 40 nationalities and 35 languages represented across 22 staff members and 120 children. 

Find out more about Futuraskolan International Preschool Brunbärsvägen

The mission at all Futuraskolan International schools is to shape children into future world citizens. But how to do this when your students are aged between one and six years old? By celebrating both individuality and diversity, explains Ivett Tamayo, Principal at both Preschool Brunbärsvägen and Preschool Warfvinges Väg.

Photo: Futuraskolan International

“At Futuraskolan, we believe that to be internationally-minded we must know ourselves and our values to be able to be respectful and curious about each other and other cultures. Here at Brunbärsvägen, we encourage this by helping the children to get to know who they are as well as by celebrating differences using many pedagogical tools,” Ivett tells The Local.

A uniquely diverse environment, the international preschool works rigorously to break down intercultural barriers and encourage openness and inclusiveness. The teachers skillfully engineer this through a combination of innovative teaching methods and activities that promote cross-cultural sensitivity.

“We have many different projects to advance our main goal of being a stepping stone for future global citizens,” says Sascha Slavnic, preschool coordinator at Brunbärsvägen. “One of our longstanding efforts involves the families of the children as much as possible by, for example, celebrating many different holidays and festivals such as Diwali, Chinese New Year, and Swedish Midsummer. We have found this to be a very effective way to make the children comfortable with who they are as well as with their cultural differences.”

Photo: Futuraskolan International

At an organizational level, Brunbärsvägen’s work to reach the goals of the Swedish LPFÖ curriculum is inspired by two international curricula: the International Primary Curriculum (IPC) and the International Early Years Curriculum (IEYC). In addition to being modelled on the latest neuroscience of learning, these curricula tie neatly in with the Swedish curriculum.

“If you look at the Swedish curriculum, it talks about the need to reflect cultural diversity and to have cultural awareness as well as ensuring that children’s mother tongues are featuring in preschool life,” says Naomi Hudson, who is responsible for Brunbärsvägen’s Scorpions Group. “And I feel that for us at Brunbärsvägen, this is not an abstract concept or something we need to find and bring in; I think we live it, it’s what our preschool is at its heart.”

Always encouraging the children to be proactive and reflect on their role in the world, each year, Preschool Brunbärsvägen focuses on a particular theme to guide everyday activities. This year the focus is language and, in this spirit, parents have been invited to come in and speak to the children in their native languages.

Find out more about Futuraskolan International’s schools in Stockholm

“This fall we’ve had mother tongue storytime, for example, so we’ve been inviting parents to come in and tell their personal stories. This has been a fantastic experience for the children and you can tell how this has benefited their self-esteem and made them more open to each other and new experiences as well as inclined to share,” says Naomi. “Every day in the groups, we see everything from children teaching their friends how to count in their mother tongue to children saying Konnichiwa to each other.”

Futuraskolan doesn’t exclusively rely on its diverse student body to promote international mindedness. Since its inception, Futuraskolan International Preschool Brunbärsvägen has actively worked to involve the children in the wider world through community outreach at elderly homes and sustainable development initiatives such as school-wide cleanups and recycling. 

For the past four years, the Global Citizenship project (now up and running at all Futuraskolan schools) has made the children active participants in an ongoing outreach program in the Philippines.

Photo: Futuraskolan International

“Throughout the year, we have a lot of fundraising activities where the children sell their handicrafts and donate the money to the schools we are supporting and working within the Philippines,” says Shezana Syed, Administrator and Admissions Coordinator at Preschool Brunbärsvägen. “In this way, the children get a chance to help other children in a way they can relate to and at the same time see for themselves – from an early age – that it’s possible to help others and make an impact in the world.”

This article was produced by The Local Creative Studio and sponsored by Find out more about Futuraskolan International’s schools in Stockholm.

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‘Will they pass as British?’: The challenges of raising bilingual kids in Sweden

Twelve years into bringing up his bilingual children in Sweden, Richard Orange wonders if they will ever feel or come across as wholly British.

'Will they pass as British?': The challenges of raising bilingual kids in Sweden

We’re twelve years into raising our bilingual Swedish-British children and the outcome remains uncertain.

My ten-year-old son speaks with an almost comically English accent, like a diminutive Hugh Grant, while my twelve-year-old girl has absorbed an American twang, adopting the YouTube English used by her the rest of her girl gang.

Both still occasionally trip up on phrasal verbs, which often use different prepositions in Swedish from: they might “look on the TV”, for instance. When they were younger, they would create hybrid words, mixing the English “milk” and the Swedish “mjölk” into “myilk”.   

But of the children I know living in Sweden with one British and one Swedish parent, my own probably closest to passing for British.

This is entirely by accident.

When our eldest was born, I was 37 and had only been in Sweden six months, so could barely speak a word of the language, and like many people who start learning a language in middle age, I’m still far from fluent. My Swedish wife, on the other hand, attended American and international schools between the ages of six and seventeen, so for her speaking English comes as naturally as Swedish.

As a result, English has been our main language: in the home, when we’re out and about and very often, when we’re socialising, as we’ve made friends with other families with one English-speaking parent. 

My wife usually speaks Swedish with the children when she’s alone with them, but not always, and if I’m in the room, she’ll often switch subconsciously to English. When the children speak alone with one another, I’m not sure if they have a preference, but if anything English is slightly dominant. 

The only person who suffers from the amount of English spoken at home is me. I’ve tried to switch our evening meals to Swedish to help improve my fluency, but it’s never stuck. 

School and society

My wife’s parents had to work hard to stop her and her brother speaking English at home when they were growing up in Africa, so she sometimes feels guilty that English is so dominant for us. 

She needn’t worry, though, as no Swede talking to our children would ever suspect them of being anything other than Swedish. She insisted on their going to the local municipal school, rather than to an international school, so school and after-school – where they spend roughly half their waking lives – has been almost entirely in Swedish.

I say “almost entirely” as my daughter, in particular, speaks English with her friends, who have parents from Ghana and Cameroon. Sweden’s system of mother-tongue tuition also means that all the English-speaking children in the school are brought together once a week for a lesson. I’m not sure how much the teaching helps their English reading and writing, but it certainly helps bring them together. 

More recently, I’ve been surprised to discover that even my children’s schoolfriends with two Swedish parents are starting to speak English when they hang out. Indeed, the level of English spoken by my daughter’s classmates is rapidly catching up with her own.

For Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, English is so dominant, almost everyone absorbs it in the end. 

Passing for British

That’s why for me, it’s not really enough for my children to be bilingual in Swedish and English, as that more or less goes for practically everyone their age growing up in Sweden. I want people from the UK who meet them to think of them as British. 

It came as a shock when I first realised this might not happen.

My daughter was still a toddler, and I was interviewing an Australian in Sweden about taking parental leave for an Australian newspaper. When I spoke to his children, then seven and nine, their English was heavily accented and quite limited. I then discovered that a couple of our adult Swedish friends, both of whom spoke English with a definite Swedish accent, had grown up with a British father.  

I was surprised how upset it made me that my daughter started speaking with an American accent, just as I’ve been surprised at how important it is to me that they like Marmite, the bitter salty yeast spread beloved of Brits. I tried to laugh the accent off when we returned to the UK to meet my family and my daughter, understandably, took this badly. A couple of years later, she still resents me for it.

The main thing I’ve done to try and make them pass for British is to return to the UK and stay with my brother and his three similarly aged daughters over Easter and Christmas as often as I can. They are quite close to their cousins, and for me it’s an important link to home.  

From the start, I’ve tried to expand their vocabulary by reading them English children’s books every night, and a few years ago, we started ordering The Beano, a venerable British children’s comic which has been going since 1938. It’s been a surprise hit. For the last two years, they have competed weekly over who gets the first chance to read it. Both read it from cover to cover. 

What to do next? 

For my children to pass as British or even to feel British, will, I suspect, require an extended stay in the UK in their teens or early 20s: a term at a sixth-form college, a semester or more at university, or, like so many of their Swedish colleagues, a few months working in a shop or pub somewhere in the UK. 

It might not work. I’ve heard of half-British children who have gone to the UK to study or work and felt very far from home.

If that happens, if they come back feeling less British than they did before they went, will it matter?

Right now, I feel it will. I will feel like I’ve failed to pass on something important, that they’ve lost a part of their identity I wanted them to have. But with any luck if it does, by that time, I will myself have become too Swedish to care. 

What’s your experience raising a bilingual child in Sweden? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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