'We're really lucky': Co-creating 'us' and the 'Other' in school booktalk

This article addresses how 'Otherness' is co-construed in booktalk in a Swedish school. The data consist of video-recorded teacher-led booktalk sessions, involving small groups of pupils in grades 4-7. Seven of the eight books discussed were, at least partly, set in settings foreign to the pupils. We found that a basic teacher device for constructing the 'Other', was to implicitly or explicitly compare a group of others with the participant children themselves, 'us Swedish children', accomplishing 'Otherness' by foregrounding differences, setting up a series of implicit or explicit contrasts between 'them' and 'us'. Such contrasts concerned: literacy and language skills (Extracts I and 2), ways of 'sticking together' (Extracts 3 and 4), as well as contrasts in terms of the distribution of material educational resources and work demands on children (Extracts 5-8). Moreover, the last extracts also illustrate how pupils co-construct the teachers' implicit or explicit underlying moral agendas.