Introduction

This chapter presents data from a Chinese complementary school in Eindhoven and a Polish complementary school in Tilburg, the Netherlands.Footnote 1 Its focus is on the practices and perspectives of Chinese and Polish language and culture teachers, in relation to the broader institutional context in which their teaching takes place. The main method used is key incident analysis of classroom events that were selected from ethnographic case studies that we conducted in these two schools. Our analysis draws on contemporary theories on language and culture teaching in an era of globalization and superdiversity, on top-down and bottom-up language-and-culture-in-education policies and on teachers’ curricular practices and perspectives. It leads to conclusions about possible (dis)continuities resulting from national languages and cultures becoming the object of heritage language and culture teaching in diasporic contexts.

Languages, Cultures, Policies and Practices

Languages and Cultures

The main ambition of parents with a migration background who send their children to complementary schools, is to make them maintain the language and culture of their country of origin. Ancestral or heritage languages and cultures are the main subject in these schools’ curriculum. The way a language is referred to however, depends on the specific (political, social, educational, popular) contexts in which it is used (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). What is a national and majority language in Poland or China, becomes an immigrant, ethnic minority or community language in the Netherlands. Students in complementary education however, might at the same time go to mainstream Dutch schools, have Dutch as their dominant language, participate in English on social media and might only at home or in their immigrant community be confronted with their (grand)parents’ native language and culture. For a growing number of these students the community’s language might even appear as almost a foreign language. The same applies to culture: what was ‘normal’ and part of mainstream societal behavior in the country of origin, becomes potentially conspicuous or even strange or ‘abnormal’ in the context of the immigration country.

A question to be asked here, is whether a heritage language can still be taught following the national curriculum of the students’ country of origin, i.e. as a language that is acquired in primary socialization, if it is no longer the so-called native language or mother tongue of the students in question. Or whether it would be better to teach it as a second language, a foreign language or as a part of an individual student’s linguistic repertoire (Blommaert & Backus, 2013)? The reality of linguistic and cultural superdiversity in an era of globalization and mobility leads to a definition of ‘language’ as a verb (‘languaging’) rather than as a noun (Arnaut et al., 2016). From this perspective, people simultaneously use multifaceted language repertoires, consisting of the ensemble of linguistic features and characteristics that stem from their own and others’ language resources (Spotti & Blommaert, 2017). At the same time however, language education – in mainstream and complementary schools – still seems to engage in teaching specific, well-defined languages in a fixed form and format. It therefore risks losing its connection to the everyday complex linguistic realities of poly- or translanguaging (Jørgensen et al., 2016; García & Wei, 2013) in which features and elements of all languages that inhabit the linguistic repertoires of their users, are successfully used to make meaning. The same again applies to the way education should deal with culture. According to Kroon (2015, p.168), to be successful, education in times of superdiversity should “develop a critical notion of culture in which culture is primarily seen as the way in which people give meaning to their world. This notion of culture should take into balanced consideration a country’s national culture or cultures [as well as] the cultures that are represented in superdiverse classrooms [and] it should focus on students developing cultural resources and repertoires that enable them to engage in ‘culturing,’ i.e., to participate in a variety of national and international cultural encounters in a globalized world.”

This new perspective on language and culture has its consequences for education. It poses a challenge for the one-size-fits-all traditional focus on a one-national-language/one-national-culture approach in mainstream as well as complementary schools. All contemporary educational institutions are fundamentally characterized by the linguistic and cultural diversity of their students. They therefore need to rethink the languages and cultures they teach, their teaching methodologies and their aims.

Policies from Above and from Below

Designing a language and culture curriculum requires making choices. The main choices to be made relate to the language and culture that will be taught as a subject and the language that will be used as a medium of instruction. Such choices can only be made based on a set of ideas or an ideology that guide the policymakers’ decisions.

Policies are developed and implemented in continuously changing contexts: choices that may be relevant at one point in time may become less relevant or obsolete sooner or later. Apart from the fact that such choices are always connected to a specific time and place, or chronotopic context, that potentially hampers their effectiveness in the long run (Kroon & Swanenberg, 2020), there is another potentially disturbing aspect, i.e. the top-down-bottom-up divide in policy making. From a bottom-up perspective, it would be the practitioners on the ground who, based on their experience, would select a specific language and culture to be taught and a specific language as a medium of instruction. Johnson (2013, p.10) characterizes such bottom-up solutions as micro-level, covert, implicit and de facto policies whereas he characterizes top-down policies as macro-level, overt, explicit and de jure policies. Although trying to find a solution to the same problem, bottom-up practices and top-down policies often appear to be very different from each other. As Spolsky (2004) already noted, language policy can take the shape of a top-down policy document but at the same time be reflected in people’s language practices and attitudes that do not necessarily coincide with decisions in language policy documents (see also Spotti et al., 2019). Classroom realities of language and culture teaching as shaped by teachers and students, can therefore be considered the meeting place of formal policies and norms from above and informal practices and norms from below.

Teachers’ Curriculum Practices

Language and culture teaching practices generally occur within a curricular framework. According to Goodlad et al. (1979), a curriculum can have different manifestations that result from sociopolitical and technical-professional processes of adoption and implementation. Conceptualizing these manifestations, Goodlad and colleagues distinguish five curriculum domains. The ideological curriculum is the curriculum that emerges from idealistic planning processes but is hardly ever put into practice in its original form. The formal curriculum is the curriculum that gained official approval by the state and school boards, is formally adopted by schools and teachers, and is affirmed and sanctioned in written documents such as curriculum guides. The perceived curriculum is a curriculum of the mind. According to Goodlad et al. (1979, pp.61–62), “[w]hat has been officially approved for instruction and learning is not necessarily what various interested persons and groups perceive in their minds to be the curriculum.” Apart from parents, the most important group here are of course the teachers and their perceptions. The operational curriculum is what teachers actually do, i.e. what “goes on hour after hour, day after day in school and classroom” (p. 63). The experiential curriculum finally, is the curriculum as it is experienced by the students based on what they think is happening in their classrooms.

The main issue here are the possible discrepancies that exist between these different curriculum domains and more specifically between the curriculum as a top-down document based on a certain ideology, and bottom-up teachers’ classroom practices and perceptions, leading to different “versions” (to borrow from Barnes et al., 1984) of the subject they teach.

Here the concept of ‘professional practical knowledge’ as introduced by Anderson-Levitt (1987) is relevant. According to Anderson-Levitt teachers seem to have a shared and not necessarily conscious knowledge on teaching, i.e. their “savoir faire or ‘know-how’: neither what they think nor what they do, but what they think as they are doing what they do. Knowledge, then, is a shorthand term for beliefs, values, expectations, mental-models and formulas for doing things which the teacher uses in interpreting and generating classroom events.” (p.173; italics in original).

In line with the above theoretical considerations, foregrounding the agency of language practitioners instead of language policies from above, in the following we will concentrate on teachers’ practical professional knowledge as emerging in their bottom-up practices in Chinese and Polish complementary classrooms and the versions of Chinese and Polish language and culture teaching that emerge from these practices.

Method and Context

In trying to establish the teachers’ versions of Polish and Chinese language and culture teaching, we take a sociolinguistic-ethnographic perspective. It consists of qualitative case studies in a Chinese and a Polish complementary school in the Netherlands. The data collection followed the traditional format of ethnographic fieldwork (Blommaert & Dong, 2020). It included classroom observations, field notes, in-depth interviews with the schools’ management, teachers and students, and document analysis. The fieldwork was done by Jinling Li for her PhD in 2010–2011 and Agnieszka Dreef for her MA in 2017–2018. The researchers being of Chinese and Polish origin respectively, were proficient in Chinese and Polish and had no problems in getting access to the schools and in building rapport with the participants. They were both also not really involved in the respective diaspora communities which enabled them to be a ‘connoisseur’ and keep a critical distance at the same time.

Chinese presence in the Netherlands started in the early twentieth century. The number of Chinese inhabitants of the Netherlands is estimated to be around 150,000 (Li, 2016, p.19). Until 1990 Hong Kong citizens were the largest group within the Chinese-Dutch community. As a result of political and economic changes however, the number of people coming from mainland China strongly increased to over 50%. This is reflected in the history of the Chinese school in Eindhoven that was established in 1978 and originally provided Cantonese lessons to a handful of children of Cantonese origin. The student composition now is ethnolinguistically very heterogeneous, including students of Hong Kong Cantonese, Wenzhounese, Guangdong, Fujianese and Malaysian Chinese background. Most students are born in the Netherlands, are proficient in Dutch and go to mainstream Dutch primary, secondary or higher education. At the time of the study, the school had around 300 students and 25 teachers who teach (as of 2016) only Mandarin in weekly Saturday morning classes from kindergarten to grade 12. In the study curriculum documents were studied and 120 hours of classroom observations and interviews with the head, three teachers and 17 students were recorded (see also Li & Kroon, 2020).

Polish migration to the Netherlands first boomed between 1900 and 1945 when up to 6000 Poles came to work in the mines in the province of Limburg. As of 1990 a new wave of Polish immigrants came as seasonal workers mainly, leading to some 120,000 inhabitants with a Polish migration background in 2017 (Dreef, 2018). The Polish school in Tilburg was established in 1994. Its classes take place every 2 weeks on Saturday morning. The school is attended by children from Polish-only and Polish-Dutch families. Consequently, students differ in terms of place of birth and period of residence in the Netherlands, leading to differences in their Polish language abilities and cultural familiarity. In the Polish school 29 hours of classroom observation were recorded as well as interviews with two management team members, four teachers and seven parents. Also, Polish governmental as well as school related curriculum documents were studied.

The data that will be used here mainly focus on the teachers’ professional practical knowledge as emerging from their classroom practices. These practices were analyzed through key incident analysis (Erickson, 1977, 1986; Kroon & Sturm, 2007). According to Erickson (1986), a key incident is key in “that the event chosen has the potential to make explicit a theoretical loading [and] brings to awareness latent, intuitive judgments […] about salient patterns in the data” (p.108). The essence of key incident analysis “is to describe key incidents […] as a concrete instance of the workings of abstract principles of social organization” in order to “see the generic in the particular, the universal in the concrete, the relation between the part and the whole” (Erickson, 1977, p.61). As such, a key incident “is a reconstruction of the tacit knowledge underlying an event” (Bezemer, 2003, p.33), which is presented in what Geertz (1973) called “thick description” by using and triangulating different data sources.

In a process of reading and rereading classroom transcripts and field notes and triangulating our Polish, Chinese and Dutch perceptions of language-and-culture related classroom events, we selected a number of potential key incidents for further analysis to understand what it means to teach Chinese and Polish language and culture in a complementary school environment. Data collection took place with informed consent of the schools’ management, teachers and parents and the selected key incidents were discussed with the (anonymized) teachers involved to also get their perspective on what happened in the classroom.

Canonical Texts in Heritage Language and Culture Teaching

Going through the data, mainly focusing on the operational curriculum, i.e. the teachers’ practices on the ground, we identified two classroom events that specifically deal with language and culture teaching as the core business of complementary education. In these events, the teachers try to improve their students’ heritage language proficiency through a classroom activity in reading comprehension using a traditional folk story in the Chinese case, and a classroom activity aimed at understanding and memorizing a canonical poem in the Polish case. In what follows we will analyze these events that we consider to be key incidents, providing a lens for understanding language and culture teaching in complementary schools in the Netherlands in times of globalization and superdiversity. In our analysis we will also include data from the ideological, formal, perceived and experiential curriculum by using curriculum documents, teaching materials, and interviews with teachers and parents.

‘The Song of a Little Brook’ in the Chinese School

Classroom observations in the Chinese school showed that in the lower grades the focus was on literacy acquisition through endless repetition of Chinese characters and pronunciation training. In the higher grades, the teacher and students also engaged in discussions on topics occurring in curriculum texts, ranging from traditional folk stories to aspects of contemporary Chinese and Dutch societies.

In November 2010 we observed a teacher-led discussion on a curriculum text in Mrs. Sun’s classroom with eight 17-to-20-year-old students. On the first day of the academic year, Mrs. Sun had made it clear that the students were required to only speak Chinese, i.e. Mandarin or Putonghua, in class and in the course of time she further encouraged them to do so. The students who had all native-like proficiency in Dutch, addressed the teacher in Chinese on most occasions but peer talk before, during and after classes was almost exclusively in Dutch.

The text that was discussed, The song of a little brook, is a well-known Chinese folk story taken from a textbook series called Zhongwen (Chinese) published by Jinan University in 1997 and made available to Chinese complementary schools abroad by the PRC’s educational authorities.Footnote 2 A glimpse of these teaching materials shows that many folk stories and national fairy tales are included aimed at contributing to the creation of a collaborative memory of Chinese history and culture. The text was published in 1959, the days of the Big Leap Forward campaign of the Chinese Communist Party, striving to transform China into a modern communist society trough industrialization and collectivization. According to Creese et al. (2009) folk stories are productively used as heritage texts in complementary education throughout the world to “endorse traditions, values and beliefs, and to invoke features of the collective memory of community” (p.363). They often have a clear ideological and political message and literacy education in this sense becomes an ideologically laden endeavor. This also applies to The song of a little brook that aims at producing and instilling traditional values, collectivity and community in the students.

The text tells the story of a personified little brook that never runs dry but moves through the landscape day and night without stopping, and cheerfully finds its way without ever taking a rest. The brook resists various challenges to take a rest or stop running. It becomes bigger and stronger as other brooks join in, turns into a little stream and ultimately a big river that flows into the sea. The story culminates in the coda “Never stop to take a rest, never stop running!” The growth of the little brook is a metaphor for the socialist revolution and construction of China, praising hard work and collective achievement. It aims at producing and instilling traditional values, collectivism and community in the students. And that exactly is what Mrs. Sun wants her class to get out of the text. Her opening question, how they feel about the text, however, leads to an unexpected reaction by student Tao (utterances in Dutch are in italics):

Mrs. Sun:

这样一篇文章，大家有什么感受? 涛 涛，你有什么感受? (Such a text, what do you think of it? Tao, how do you feel about this text?)

Tao:

我没有什么没感受。 (I don’t have any feeling.)

Mrs. Sun:

没有感受?没有 gevoel ?它这样一篇 文章讲的是什么意思?(No feeling? No feeling? Such a text, what does it tell us?)

Xin:

没意思。 (Nothing.)

Mrs. Sun:

没意思啊?他用，就用东西写成人 啊，拟人化，对吧? 拟人，然后写小 溪流呢， 他非常努力。从不休息，从 不停留，直奔大海。其实写得，其实 写得，跟人的一生差不多，是吧?你 自从你生下来到你死，经历地就跟他经历地差不多。懂吗? (Nothing? He personifies things, personification, right? He personifies the brook, the brook works very hard, never takes a rest, running straight to the sea. In fact, it is just like the life of people. From the moment you were born until you die, the experience of our life is just like the brook, understand?)

Tao:

不一定。 (Not necessarily.)

Upon the teacher’s question, the students claim to have no feelings at all about the text and assert that it doesn’t tell them anything. Mrs. Sun doesn’t give up and explains the context and moral implications of the text. But her point of view is contested.

Mrs. Sun:

不一定?他讲的要一生努力，直到你 闭眼睛的那一天，就这意思。不可以 停留, 懂吗? (Not necessarily? He tells us that people should always work hard until the day you die. Do not stop, understand?)

Tao:

Tao 我不那个 (I don’t.)

Mrs. Sun:

不 mee eens? Hehe… 不同意 我的意见，ok, 那你讲你的意见。

Ja, 你要什么样的生活?你想像荷兰 人一样，舒舒服服的?(Don’t agree? Hehe…. don’t agree with me, ok, then tell us about your opinions. Yes, what kind of life do you want? You just want to be like the Dutch, have a comfortable life?)

Tao:

你做你想做的事。 (You do what you want to do.)

Mrs. Sun:

(Smiling) 那小溪流也是做想做的 事，想去大海。他跟你意思不一样 吗? (The brook also does what he wants to do; he wants to go to the sea. Doesn’t he mean the same?)

Tao:

不一样。 (Not the same.)

Qiang:

但那个小溪流呢，一个朋友都没有， 走个不停，不能停下来去玩。 (But that brook, he doesn’t have a single friend. He flows without stopping. He can’t stop to play.)

Mrs. Sun:

谁说没有?他把大大小小的小溪流都 拢在一起，变成河，然后把河又拢成 江。他讲的是志同道合的朋友，懂不 懂? (Who says that he doesn’t? He meets various brooks and together they form a stream, and then various streams go together, they form a river. He talks about these friends who have the same interests, cherish the same ideals and follow the same path, do you understand?)

Qiang:

没有，只是他自己。 (No, he has only himself.)

Mrs. Sun:

怎么不一样?它想去大海。他的目标 很明确。他只是把它拟人化。看，看， 看， 他是能去大海。我们 不知道我们往哪儿走?

对，那就更难，那就对你来说更难，但是他有一点就是要不断努力， 不断 探求，不断探索。这才是你的一生, 对不对? (Not the same? He wants to go to the sea. The goal of his is very clear. He is just being personified. Look, look, look, it is going to the sea. But we don’t know where we are going. Yes, so it is even more difficult, even more difficult for you, but one point to be stressed is that you should always work hard, pursue and explore. This is how you should lead your life, right?)

Student Tao rejects the teacher’s interpretation of the story and the dispute is lifted to an intercultural conflict, with the teacher representing traditional Chinese values and the student constructing a Dutch attitude which is characterized by the teacher as not sufficiently ambitious, only aimed at having a comfortable life. The story, according to the teacher, illustrates how to lead your life, i.e. work hard, pursue and explore. This is questioned by student Qiang who says that in such a life there is no time for friendship or play. Finally, reacting on Mrs. Sun’s statement that “the Netherlands absolutely makes people lazy, makes people making no efforts” (我觉得荷 兰太让人不努力了), Tao once again clearly expresses his Dutch-Chinese perspective on the matter, saying that “Dutch people are more efficient than Chinese” (荷兰人比中 国人efficiënt. 中国人是没办法) and that different from the teacher’s ‘[his] way of thinking is Dutch’ (我的想法是荷兰人的想法). In that contemporary Dutch cultural framework, there is clearly no room for the message of a traditional Chinese folk story.

We can conclude that the classroom discussion culminates in Tao’s claim that “his way of thinking is Dutch”. The contestations and negotiations on the interpretation of the text reveal the different cultural frameworks the teacher and her students applied in making sense of this old Chinese folk story. While the teacher seemed to believe that teaching language and culture through a traditional folk story was a means of reproducing Chinese identity in the students’ minds, the imposition of such Chineseness was explicitly challenged by the students. They assertively considered themselves Dutch citizens fully participating in Dutch culture and society and rejected the deeper metaphorical meaning and moral lesson embedded in the story. In the discussion they however showed a thorough and confident understanding of China and Chinese culture in its historical context. Where the teacher sees the classroom as a site to introduce and reproduce traditional Chinese values to her students, the students contest her imposition and upscale traditional Chineseness into a new diasporic Chineseness that is enriched and complemented by their Dutchness. Tao and his classmates in other words are not merely displaced Chinese subjects but also Dutch youth, born in families with transcultural migration backgrounds, receiving their mainstream education in and through Dutch. As a result, they embrace some Chinese cultural and linguistic resources, and reject others.

‘The Polish Child’s Catechism’ in the Polish School

The Polish school’s curriculum is based on a Regulation of the Polish Ministry of National Education on the organization of education for Polish children temporarily residing abroad (Rozporządzenie, 2010). This Regulation aims at helping Polish children abroad to reintegrate in the Polish education system upon their return (Petri, 2010). As a complementary school established by Polish community members, the Polish school in Tilburg is not obliged to adhere to the Regulation; they however do so to ensure the “quality of teaching”, as a member of the management team said (Informal conversation Felicja, 4-11-2017).

The school’s curriculum does not define the medium of instruction. Mrs. Edyta, a member of the school’s management team and a teacher, however said that the school’s implicit policy is to use “Polish, Polish only” as a language of instruction and that this is “clearly communicated” to the teachers, because: “When one child starts to speak Dutch, others also start to speak [Dutch] and it is a danger […] it is necessary to remind a child that we are at a Polish School and we speak Polish here. If they don’t understand, they can approach a teacher and ask, but in general we speak Polish. It is simply a must.” (Interview Edyta, 24-4-2018).

Following the Regulation, the curriculum contains teaching objectives related to Polish language skills with elements of Polish history, geography and culture. An interesting combination of language and culture teaching appeared in a lesson of Mrs. Dorota on 28-10-2017 that we selected as a key incident (Dreef & Kroon, 2020). In that lesson the children, aged 6–8, had to learn the poem Katechizm polskiego dziecka (The Polish Child’s Catechism) also known as Kto ty jesteś? Polak mały (Who are you? A little Pole) written by Władysław Bełza (1847–1913) and published in 1900. Róg and Róg (2017, p.371) indicate that the poems of Bełza “can shape the national identity” of Polish children and that they are “to this day […] very popular, liked by children and, above all, still valid. They discuss the subject of the family, homeland, patriotism, pride of the nation. Therefore, they are close to the hearts of several generations of Poles.” According to the Regulation the poem is a compulsory curriculum text (Rozporządzenie, 2010, p.13183). It consists of a series of questions and answers about the identity of a young Pole.

The poem was introduced by Mrs. Dorota by asking the students whether they knew the poem Kto ty jesteś? Polak mały. One boy said he did and Mrs. Dorota asked him to tell it to the class. He starts but is unable to do it properly. Because the students are not paying attention, Mrs. Dorota addresses them as follows:

Mrs. Dorota::

Ale słuchamy. Teraz kolega nam mówi wierszyk, którego się musimy nauczyć. Nauczymy się wierszyka, ‘Katechizm polskiego dziecka’, tak Władysława Bełzy. Ja wam przeczytam na początku cały wierszyk i będziemy powtarzać. OK? (Listen. Now a friend tells us a poem that we need to learn. We will learn a poem, ‘Catechism of a Polish Child’, by Władysław Bełza. I will read the entire poem to you first and then we will repeat it. OK?)

Mrs. Dorota reads the poem out loud and the students repeat each line after her. There is no interaction involved. Then she concludes:

Mrs. Dorota::

Dobrze to jest cały wiersz, który napisał Władysława Bełza. To jest bardzo stary wiersz, którego uczyły się dzieci i nadal się uczą w polskich szkołach, tak. I my się też jego nauczymy. To jeszcze raz. (Well, this is the whole poem by Władysław Bełza. This is a very old poem that children have learned and are still learning in Polish schools, yes. And we will learn it too. Let’s do it one more time.)

And that is exactly what happens. Mrs. Dorota reads the 20 lines of the poem one more time, line by line, and the students repeat every line in unison. At the end Mrs. Dorota concludes:

Mrs. Dorota::

Pięknie. Dobrze będziemy powtarzać na każdych zajęciach aż się nauczymy na pamięć tego wierszyka, tak. (Beautiful. We will repeat it in every class until we learn the poem by heart, yes.)

The poem is used at primary schools in Poland to strengthen the national identity of Polish children. In the observed complementary school lesson however, the message of the poem is not transmitted to the students. Furthermore, the vocabulary – including Gdzie ty mieszkasz? Między swemi. (Where do you live? Among my own); Czym zdobyta? Krwią i blizną. (How was it won? With blood and scars); A w co wierzysz? W Polskę wierzę. (And in what do you believe? I believe in Poland); Coś jej winien? Oddać życie. (What do you owe her? To sacrifice my life) – and the national symbols (Czym ta ziemia? Mą Ojczyzną. (What is that land? My fatherland); Jaki znak twój? Orzeł biały. (What is your sign? A white eagle.) – are not explained to them. The class is only expected to repeat the poem after the teacher line by line. The only word that gets extra attention because it causes pronunciation problems is wdzięczne (grateful). For the rest, the only clarification the children receive is that they are going to learn the poem by heart because children in Poland do so too.

At the celebration of the 99th anniversary of Poland’s Independence Day (11 November 2017) the children recited part of the Polish Child’s Catechism for their parents in the school’s canteen while waving Polish flags. After the recitation, the parents applauded. Someone shouted: ‘Great, well done!’ (Observation, 11-11-2018).

When we interviewed her, Mrs. Dorota said that she realized teaching this poem at the Polish school in Tilburg is not as easy as it is in Poland. She noticed that it was not really accepted by all children. One student for example said that he “will not sacrifice his life for this country”. That made her think “because in Poland, when we learn this poem, everything is obvious to us but here, children cannot identify with the message of the poem.” (Interview Dorota, 14-4-2018).

As it turns out also not all parents appreciated the implicit instilling of Polish norms and values by learning the Polish Child’s Catechism by heart. Parent Gabriela for example said: “I registered my child at this school purely for linguistic reasons to improve my child’s language skills but here in this school there are a lot of […] activities that emphasize patriotism and homeland, tradition.” Gabriela’s main criticism relates to the fact that the poem was not properly introduced and explained to the children. She further doubts whether it was appropriate to teach this poem to rather young children. She is not completely against Polish history at school but, as she stated, “it didn’t feel right, such a poem for such children […] who don’t know the basic letters and cannot build a simple sentence yet” (Interview Gabriela, 20-2-2018). According to her, children should not learn a poem just because it is an obligatory poem taught in Poland. Parent Julia adds to this that she also feels that the poem “is very difficult [and] that there is too much, you know, patriotism. My child doesn’t feel Polish.” (Interview Julia, 19-3-2018).

Polish parents with a migration background want their children to learn some Polish to maintain the language for keeping contacts with their relatives in Poland but they clearly do not want their children to be exposed to examples of a rather nationalist Polish culture. Parent Lidia finally says: “[Teaching my child] Polish culture is my job.” (Interview Lidia, 4-4-2018) Lidia indicates that she is cultivating Polish traditions at home and there is no need to do this at school. Parent Julia on the other hand values the Polish school for cultivating Polish traditions because she herself would easily forget about such traditions. Nevertheless, also Julia criticizes the school for being too traditional, “ossified, one sided … I know it’s a Polish school, but I think that not everything must be only Polish.” (Interview Julia, 19-3-2018).

This key incident illustrates an attempt by the teacher to construct Polish identity through a canonical Polish poem. The poem however does not appeal to the students as they do not know what they are supposed to learn. The only explanation they get, is that they are obliged to memorize this poem just because this is also done in Poland. By simply teaching a poem that is compulsory in Polish schools, the teacher does not take into consideration that she is teaching in a multilingual and multicultural classroom in the Netherlands where students may not identify with the message of the poem or even not understand it. The key incident shows how the teacher, by making the students learn the poem by heart and reciting it for their parents at Poland’s Independence Day celebration, uses language as a vehicle for transmitting Polish identity or even nationalism and patriotism. It is this patriotic perspective that is criticized by the parents since they are very much aware of the inconvenience for their Polish-Dutch children who not necessarily feel Polish, to be taught Polish language intertwined with culture in complementary education.

Discussion and Conclusions

In the above, our focus was on Chinese and Polish teachers’ daily teaching practices, i.e. on their operational curriculum. We interpreted these practices taking into consideration the ideological and formal curriculum of both schools, including the Polish Child’s Catechism that Mrs. Dorota dealt with, and The Song of a little brook that Mrs. Sun dealt with. Both canonical texts reflect an ideological curriculum that is closely connected to the ideological position of educational institutions in Poland and the PRC, respectively celebrating national identity and patriotism and collectivism and other communist values.

In subscribing to these ideologies in their classrooms, the teachers, by trying to convince Chinese-Dutch students that the societal system of the PRC is better than the Dutch system and by making Polish-Dutch students memorize a patriotic poem, contribute to (re)establishing continuity between diasporic communities and their countries of origin. Or, in Mrs. Dorota’s words: “This is a very old poem that children have learned and are still learning in Polish schools, yes. And we will learn it too.” And in Mrs. Sun’s words: “We should have a goal, work hard in our life, make efforts, make progress, keep doing this, nonstop.”

The classroom behavior of the teachers and their interviews made it clear that there was no real difference between their perception of the language and culture curriculum and the way they put it into practice. Their professional practical knowledge showed full endorsement of the ideological perspective of their teaching. The students in the Chinese case and the parents in the Polish case on the contrary, turned out to be much less convinced of the ideological underpinnings of the operational and ideological curriculum in the schools the children were sent to in order to learn some Chinese or Polish. Their evaluations of the curriculum practices that they experienced, as clearly expressed by Chinese student Tao’s remark that “his way of thinking is Dutch” and Polish parent Julia’s statement that “her child doesn’t feel Polish”, are very much alike. They show that people in the diaspora are no longer necessarily adhering to the norms and values of their country of origin that heritage language and culture teaching by means of national canonical texts aims to convey.

The Chinese and Polish teachers’ professional practical knowledge shows similarities. First, in their teaching, they both adhere to the top-down official curricular focus on monolingualism regarding the language of instruction. Classroom instruction is consistently given in the heritage language and the students are stimulated to refrain from using Dutch. Second, in their teaching they both adhere to national or even patriotic ideologies and morals that prevail in their country of origin. Such tendencies are ubiquitous in the question-and-answer routine in the Polish Child’s Catechism and they are also clearly reflected in Mrs. Sun’s explanation of the essence of collectivity and community referring to the personified little brook.

Such elements of the teachers’ professional practical knowledge are however becoming more and more obsolete in a world that is characterized by globalization and superdiversity and in which Polish-Dutch and Chinese-Dutch students and parents voice their bottom-up perspectives. These voices from below (Kroon, 2013), in much the same way as Heller (1999) found for the French linguistic minority in Canada, present and argue for a new set of norms that allow them “to exploit the linguistic capital they do possess, and to downplay the importance of the cultural capital they do not” (p.14). Or, to once again quote Tao from the Chinese school in Eindhoven: “My way of thinking is Dutch.”

Our research into teachers’ perspectives and practices in teaching Polish and Chinese in complementary schools in the Netherlands needs as an inescapable complement research into the implicit and explicit language policy in immigrant families. Family Language Policy (FLP) is a strongly growing field of research. Curdt-Christiansen (2018:1) defines explicit FLP as “the deliberate and observable efforts made by adults and their conscious involvement and investment in providing linguistic conditions and context for language learning and literacy development”, and implicit and covert FLP as “the default language practices in a family as a consequence of ideological beliefs”. To get a broader picture of language maintenance efforts in immigrant communities we need to combine research at the level of families and schools.