Guests and hosts: What hospitality may reveal in the heritage language classroom

This paper engages with the notion of hospitality (Herzfeld, 1987; Pitt-Rivers, 1963) in order to analyze and understand the practice of receiving visitors in two Farsi mother tongue classrooms in Copenhagen. We focus on visits by students' friends. Although uninvited by the principal teacher, he treated the visitors as guests and provided them with exercises and attention. We argue that the relational models of hospitality and of education do not unproblematically meet in or map onto the same situation. At the same time hospitality shed light on general challenges of mother tongue education, for instance that it needs to attend to different and potentially conflicting agendas in order to exist. Data come from a longitudinal fieldwork, and we use Linguistic Ethnography as our methodological approach.