While Finland and Sweden are internationally known for having education systems promoting equity and equality, recent societal and political changes linked to increased immigration have created new challenges in efforts to support diversity in these contexts.  Concepts such as multilingual education and intercultural education commonly aim to promote equality in education and are well established in the Nordic educational field. However, these concepts have been subject to constant re-conceptualizations and shown to be vague both in theoretical and practical use. The present study aims at clarifying the conceptual frameworks in the two countries, with a focus on the discourses on multilingual education in the respective national curricula. This study represents one part of the larger research project, MINTED (Multilingual and Intercultural Education in Sweden and Finland), investigating national policies, teacher training and teaching practice.

The comprehensive school curricula from Finland (2014) and Sweden (2011), together with other selected relevant policy documents, were analyzed using discourse analysis.  In the Finnish curricula there is an explicit discourse of a pluralist-oriented education, which places multilingual education and social justice issues at the forefront. While language is key in the Swedish curricula, multilingual and intercultural education are not explicitly covered, but may be gleaned from the focus on human rights and democracy. Thus, the analyzed education policies create different implementational and ideological spaces for multilingual education. These spaces are key to our possibilities as educators to promote linguistic diversity and social justice in the schools of today’s global societies. Therefore, the next step in the MINTED project will be an ethnographic study of classroom practices, investigating how teachers re-contextualize current national policies in diverse education settings.