NERA 2022 Day 3

 The third day of NERA 2022 consisted solely of plenaries. The first one was the second sociologist plenary speaker at this conference;: Guy Standing: "The Precariat: Recovering the Soul of Education". He claimed that we are living in a period of constant uncertainty, with "unknown unknowns". (Already, I guessed that I would need Hans Rosling here on my shoulder to keep a balance.) He blamed "neo-liberal" capitalism for leading to a new class structure, where both economic goods and security are concentrated among those who possess assets. The "salariat" (those with secure salaries) are shrinking. The precariat is growing. He defined the precariat with three dimensions: 1) a status of unsecure labor, they don't have a occupational narrative (which in Skovsmose's words would be part of their foreground), they have an education above the level demanded of the jobs they are getting (while the education demanded to get a job is increasing). The precariat do not know what is needed to change their situations. 2) The precariat gets wages but not the extras that the salariat gets (such as paid holidays, health care...) and are "systematically exploited by debt". (It would be fun to do a discourse analysis of how he talks... It feels like he is pointing to important issues in a language that is so out-there that it gets in the way of the message.) 3) They are systematically losing rights of citizenship - not seeing political parties that can address their position. 

 

Three factions of the precariat: 1) those not having much education, and feel that the present is worse than the past - voting for Trump, Urban, Putin...) 2) the nostalgics, have no current time, mostly don't vote at all. 3) the progressives, who have been promised a future if they do their studies, coming out of college with debt and jobs that will lead nowhere. These are looking for a new sense of the future. 

 

Finally, he got to the role of education (which happens to be the theme of this conference). He claims there has been a commodification of education, which used to be viewed as a common good. He rallied against relevance, employability, human capital, arguing that education is not about that. He claimed that education is failing to teach history, to prepare for democracy and so on. (Really?!)

 

The lack of nuance in this lecture is astounding. He talks about a "disease" and the importance of curing it, but curing a disease usually depends on an understanding of the disease, not just slogans. If his "diagnosis" is right, we might just as well just close down the entire educational system and start again, as nothing good gets out of it at the moment. (To his credit, in one of his last sentences, he recognized that his picture is less accurate in some countries than in others.) I miss Hans Rosling.

 

To summarize, I did enjoy parts of Standing's discussion of the precariate - I see that the growth of short-terms jobs is a problem in the rich world. But his discussion of education was painted with an enormously broad brush. Moreover, such plenaries tend to occur regularly in education conferences. It is a bit surprising that organizers do not invite people who can say something a bit new about education, rather than some sociologist who can only offer an often-repeated, caricatured image of education policy. 

 

The third plenary was by Dennis A Francis, talking about "Precarious bodies, affect and education". This was yet another sociologist. They started by story-telling about an incident in a Durban classroom, with sexuality education, homophobia, CIS-normativity interweaved. Vulnerability is not an individual characteristic, but a result of societal factors. COVID-19 shows how the rich and the poorer world are interdependent, but not more than there is a huge vaccine inequality. (That is, even when vaccinating everyone is of interest to the rich world, it is not enough to actually provide vaccines.) Even COVID-19 has not been an equalizer.

 

Images from the war in Ukraine is shown in African newspapers, as was the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack - supporting the long-standing impression that lives of white European are more valuable and news-worthy than lives in other parts of the world. How can anti-oppressive education respond to injustice and precariousness to those both in proximity and at a distance? How can educators be actors in addressing precarity, inequality and social action?

 

They noted that there has been an explosion of reported hate crimes due to homophobic or transphobic hate crime in the UK and the US. The pandemic has been bad in this regard. Transgender women of color are especially hard hit. The same can be seen in South Africa. They also gave examples of schools explicitly condoning homophobia and forbidding the support of pride.

 

They argued that education has to understand the mechanism of inequality, and that all people are grievable. We need a critical analysis of precariousness and oppression. We need to disrupt the hyper-individualisation of education. "You are because we are" (Ubuntu). (I feel a need to stress to our students that their task is not to study and get their individual qualifications, but to work together so that the group learns as much as possible.) Maybe knowledge is not the answer - rather questioning "How did I learn racism?", "Where did my attitudes towards LGBT come from?".

 

(Why do I appreciate this talk so much more than the previous one? Francis also paints a dire picture of the situation. However, it is filled with concrete data and examples, and the intersectional references makes it more nuanced.)

 

This marked the end of the NERA 2022 conference on my part. There was a plenary panel as well as a closing ceremony left, but I did not feel a need for more intellectual input at the time, wanting rather to spend some quality time with my notes from the conference to summarize a little.

 

Conferences are about content and people. In terms of content, I have of course attended a lot of presentations, and some of them have included interesting food for thought which I will take with me. In terms of people, I have spent most of the "free time" with people I already knew, strengthening existing relationships. Most of the scheduled time has been spent in various networks, where discussions go on for three or four minutes before the next presentation meets. The format of CERME, for instance, in which you spend most of the day for several days in a room with a limited number of people, is much more conductive to establishing contacts that may lead to friendships, collaborations, research stays and so on. But I must also admit that I'm not of the strategic kind - I do not draw up a list of people I want to get in touch with beforehand, and then seek them out. There are probably quite a lot of people I should have tried to meet in that way. For instance, I could have read up on Jón Ingvar Kjaran's work, approached him in the conference and tried to make him interested in collaborating on something LGBTQ-related in the future (as I know his name as an important figure in the field). But that is so far out of my comfort zone that I'll just add this to the already long list of opportunities missed...

 

On the fringe of the conference, however, I have had meetings with Icelandic colleagues in mathematics education, so I do have some bright moments. 

 

As to NERA 2022 as a conference, I think it has delivered on its promises - for me, it has not been any major flaws when comparing to the programme posted. I do have some issues with the organization of the conference, though. I think the plenaries should provide new perspectives for many participants, and that they should be earlier in the conference, making it possible to refer back to them in discussions throughout the conference. I also think the networks should be strengthened and people being encouraged to stick to a network.

 

Finally, some random reflections at the end of the conference: 

• "Reading a paper" is, these days, not meant to be taken literally.
• Some people seem to think that not using Powerpoint is a wonderfully creative practice and a subversion of the norm. It is, rather, a practice of exclusion when the oral presentation is partly inaudible. When a presentation is given in a monotonous voice, a Powerpoint presentation can give welcome ideas of what are the headings and key points of the presentation.
• "As mentioned above" has a wonderfully surreal quality when uttered in an oral presentation -  especially when we are on the top floor of the building.
• Braun & Clarke is often mentioned, but more rarely used. (As Braun & Clarke are the first to point out.)
• For people asking questions: the fact that you have fallen in love with a particular theoretical viewpoint, does not mean that it is a weakness when others do not use it. 

NERA 2022 Day 2

 The second (and second to last) day of NERA was made into a full network session day, with no less than four 90-minute network sessions (each with a number of smaller talks) and no plenaries. The first one started at the unusual time of 8 AM. (I am happy that I was not talking at this time, as it would be difficult to get breakfast (starting at 7 AM), have half an hour's walk and then be there in good time to get things ready on the computer.)

 

I attended network 4's session first. Network 4 is "Justice through Education" (as may be apparent already, the networks' themes are rather overlapping, which helps to explain why people do not stick to one network throughout the conference).

 

"Revealing the invisible: studies of Whiteness in the Nordic Educational Research" by Maïmouna Jagne-Soreau, Gunilla Holm and Jenni Helakorpi was the first talk. She started by discussing the concept of whiteness, which is a social construction related to power positions and privileges. She also said a few words about critical whiteness theory and critical race theory, as well as the difference between racialization and racification. The research, however, is a qualitative study of Nordic publications (so far 36) and their use of "white" and "whiteness". (She noted her problem that researchers may write about this without using these words, of course.) She found four stages (?): 

• white supremacy and nationalists; research on neo-nazi youth etc.
• from colorblindness to problematizing color-evasiveness; concluding that whiteness should be studied.
• critical whiteness beyond colorblindness: for instance critical whiteness theory as a critical framework when analyzing.
• doing whiteness in the classroom: Habel (2012), about being a black teacher in a white classroom. Also discussions of tolerance, whiteness as performative, positionality.

She concluded by, among other things, noting that whiteness is almost uniquely observed through negative manifestations, which was rather interesting.

 

There was also a rather interesting discussion starting with the question about whether the authors of the studied papers are white or non-white, whereafter it was pointed out that it is not sufficient to look at a person's skin colour to see whether they are white or not in this understanding. People may have white skin but still not being included in the "white". Therefore, it is impossible from the articles themselves to see whether there is a majority of "white" authors or not.

 

"“I wasn’t Black until I came to Iceland”: Perspectives from middle-class parents of color with children in Icelandic schools" (Berglind Rós Magnúsdóttir and Elizabeth B Lay) followed. She started by telling about a recent increase in the percentage of immigrants in Iceland (after having been at 100 % a little more than 1000 years ago, it has steadily declined until just a few years ago, I guess). In educational research, there has been a focus on the vulnerable position of immigrants. She stated that she used an intersectional approach, with ideas from Bourdieu, critical race theory and the interplay between the two. 

While this is an ongoing project, she presented some preliminary results, but most did not directly concern the parent-school-relationship.

 

"What Racism? A Content Analysis of The Norwegian Curriculum" (Sara Blikstad Nyegaard). She wanted to study whether racism is prioritized in the making of policy documents, and in particular in the new curriculum LK20. She has studied the subjects Norwegian, Social Science and KRLE as well as the general part of LK20. She looked for four approaches: intercultural (a focus on representation and respect), relational (relation building etc), democratic (citizenship, democracy) and norm-critical approaches to antiracism. The relational approach is the one that is most frequent in the curriculum, while intercultural appraoches are mostly seen in connection with particular minorities. However, racism is not a concept used in the curriculum, and racism seem to be seen as an individual problem, not an inherent part of our system and democracy. (Seeing racism as the opposite of democracy is rather troubling, as there are of course plenty of examples of democracies having racist policies and practices.)

 

In the discussion, there were questions of whether the non-mention of racism can in itself being seen as institutionalized racism. (To me, that is perhaps going a bit far - it all depends on the context. If - hypothetically - everyone knows that racism is important based on the general formulation in the law and regulations, it may not be necessary to mention it explicitly in all the parts of the curriculum that can be related to it. Or even worse: it may be that teachers read racism into every sentence which could equally well be interpreted to concern homophobia etc.)

 

After a quick break, I was back to Network 19, where there were four talks in 90 minutes:

 

"The third space: Teaching collaboration as a pivot for knowledge development and coherence in teacher education" by (Åshild Vassend Holm and Marianne Martinsen) was the first talk. Her context is teacher education and school-teacher education partnership, in particular partner schools (lærerutdanningsskoler). She stressed the importance of "third space", being "equal" and "shared" goals. Other key concepts were "boundary crossing". There was a case study - a pilot - done in the 7th semester at the teacher education at Hamar, in PE studies. One of the activities was to have a professional conversation about a scientific paper. (I wonder what the definition of "equal" is, as they seem to have as an ideal that the student, the teacher mentor and the teacher educator are "equal" in the discussion about a scientific paper, even though scientific papers are, in my mind, clearly on the teacher educators' "home turf", inviting the other participants to the teacher educators' space.) The preliminary results are that it helps, but that it is time consuming. (And it is often a problem to know whether it is scalable.)

 

"Preparing student teachers to teach in diverse classrooms: A comparative case study of two teacher education programmes" (Britt Oda Fosse) She presented a paper that is already published in Acta Didactica, comparing two teacher education programs, one in Norway and one in Greece. Two central concepts are differentiated instruction (DI) and intercultural education (IE). (It does seem to me that intercultural education is more focused on one particular kind of diversity (cultural diversity), while differentiated instruction is often connected to another kind of diversity, mostly connected to ability or performance. And that many other kinds of diversity are not included?) Among findings was that special needs pupils were more prominent in the minds of Norwegian students, while Greece have more special schools making it less prominent in "ordinary" students. Greek students were more interested in immigrants and their knowledge of Greek. Greek TEP seemed more occupied with assimilation into Greek culture.

 

"Based on realities and meeting challenges. Teacher students’ master projects in collaboration with the field of practice" (Lennart Jølle, Leiv Inge Aa and Randi Solheim). Students' master project themes were developed (in this pilot with just 16 students) through discussions between students, practice teachers and teacher educators. Students master's projects were anchored in field practice based on teaching methods (literary conversation in this case), on pupils' backgrounds and group characteristics (language and linguistic diversity) and on curriculum/teaching projects (on L1 writing and life skills). Students, in groups of 4, had their individual projects around a common theme, with different foci. It was stressed that the collaboration did change the roles, making it easier to see each other as teacher educators.

 

"Crossing Boundaries within Work-integrated Teacher Education" (Sandra Jederud). (At this time, I had to give my hands a break, so no notes from the last talk. Sorry.)

 

After lunch, I attended Network 4 again, for a symposium on "Diverse Diversity; contradictions and challenges in education". There were supposed to be three presentations. In addition, there was a discussant (Gunilla Holm), that could not attend the conference and had to be a discussant on Skype, which is, of course, far from ideal (the usual time spent on technical problems as well as low sound quality which in effect is an exclutionary practice towards people without perfect hearing).

 

"To be a participant but still not belong" (Hermína Gunnþórsdóttir) was based on a paper published in Icelandic (and with an extended abstract in English), studying students (4 boys and 4 girls) of foreign origin in Icelandic compulsory schools (grades 6-10, in fact) in a rural village. While students treasured their native language (which was used with parents/grandparents and friends), it was absent in school. The students had good relations to teachers, but still hesitated to ask for help when they failed to understand tasks. They felt "invisible" in school, there was very little interest in the countries students came from. Students also found it difficult to get Icelandic friends. (I must say that some of the findings are unsurprisingly equal to research findings about LGBT students - it is easy to be "included", but to be invisible at the same time.)

 

"Participating in Parental Support Programs to Enhance Integration in Norway" (Therese Halvorsen). Parental support is actually manditory for parents coming to Norway as refugees. There are 8 commonly used programmes, and it is proven to be able to strengthen the relationship between parent and child (but this was not in a refugee context, if I understood correctly). This study was large-scale, with (so far) 100 families (360 families needed in the end), but of course not with any final results yet.

 

"“I am Sámi, but I am not a Sámi”: Young Sámi pupils articulations of ethnicity and identity. Preliminary Findings from Interviews with Families" (Anna-Maria Stenseth), sadly, was cancelled as she was not able to attend the conference. (I must admit that it was her presentation that made me choose to attend this symposium.)

 

Finally, there was the obvious highlight of the conference - my presentation... :-) It seemed that many hundred participants had not noticed this, as a minority of delegates had found their way to TS-201, where my talk was held. (Again, I'm writing this before the presentation, to show my amazing predictive capabilities.) I talked (in Network 14, on Multi Cultural Educational Research) on representation of diversity in Norwegian mathematics exams from the 1962 until today, based on a project by Aina Fossum and myself. There were also three more presentation in that session:

 

"Fiction's contribution to multicultural teacher education" (Camilla Häbler and Kari Spernes) was based on using four novels (for instance Tante Ulrikkes vei) in a course on multicultural education in Halden. Each student read one of the novels, discussed it in light of the academic content of the course and presented the books to each other. The novels give another way of meeting people and understanding and becoming aware. (It is interesting that in a survey of all textbooks in a selection of subjects in Norway, LGBT issues were most prominent in Norwegian (L1) and English (L2) textbooks - Smestad (2019?)) Students became aware that their ways of expressing diversity may contribute to othering.

 

"Education for the Other in examination essays in teacher education." (Guðrún Jónsdóttir and Eva M. Dyrnes), using norm-critical approaches and narrative approaches. 110 reflection notes (each 2000-3000 words) is the material. Students take into account many different pupils in their notes. However, upon further analysis, diversity seems to be used to display competence. It does seem to become a vehicle for the students in the exam, and diversity is still a "problem" with the pupils, and the solution is within the student, not a critical perspective on the system.

 

"Middle school students’ learning in programming" (Susanne Kjällander, Anna Åkerfeldt, Linda Mannila and Fredrik Heintz). It was a bit of a change to hear a talk on programming after all the diversity. They do multiple-lesson observations, following schools for three years, to study how teachers teach programming and - as the title suggests - how students learn programming. This presentation, though, were based on a limited part of the data. She showed examples from grades 4, 5 and 6, both when teachers themselves taught, and when teachers had gotten som volunteer (working as a programmer) to come in and teach. They looked for both affordances and signs of learning. (I won't summarize this here...)

 

Sorry if the notes from day 2 are too brief. It is hard to take in so many presentations in one day, and to try to find the core of each (as I understand it) before the next speaker follows. But if the notes are not useful to you, at least they may be useful for me when trying to remember a particular talk at the conference...

NERA 2022 Day 1

 After getting through the queues of the registration (why don't people start arriving at 8:30 for the registration, so that the queues are gone by the time I drop by at 9:45 :-) ) I was ready for the opening ceremony of NERA 2022.

861 people have registered for the conference this year, which is a new record, apparently. I hope there will be a similar number in Oslo next year. Although the scenery around Oslo is not as impressive as the scenery around Reykjavik, we do have some major new additions to the must-sees, such as the new Munch museum and the new National Museum of Arts (opening some weeks from now).

 

As mentioned in my Day 0 blog entry, NERA is not one of my favorite conferences, both because of the themes (not very much on mathematics education, for instance) and because of its format (around 700 talks divided into lots of "networks") which seems to encourage jumping from room to room, with less chance of building groups with ongoing discussions. But still, the individual presentations may still be of great interest and make me aware of researchers and perspectives that I will wish to keep in touch with.

 

The opening ceremony included the usual mix of greetings and cultural performances, avoiding both the ridiculous and the longwinded, boring stuff that any conference-participant must surely have endured at times. (Bill Clinton's welcome speech at ICME in Tokyo (!) in 2000 is one example I remember, but there are so many more...) Here, reasonably short speeches were combined with jazz, which is always welcome...

 

As always, my notes from conferences tries to catch key points of the talks I hear. Of course, there will be misunderstandings and confusions on my part, as well as lots of omissions. If any of what I write is of interest, the obvious next step is to check the original writings of the presenter in question.

 

The first keynote address at the conference was "Education, togetherness and robust community in precarious times", given by sociologist Unn-Doris K. Bæck. ("Precarious times" is the keyword of the conference, as always a sufficiently unclear theme is needed for everyone to fit in. Although I'm not, of course, claiming that our times are not precarious - as any time.) Bæck has been especially interested in what she called "spacial" dimensions - how geographical contexts lead to inequality, as well as gender, ethnicity, socio-economic factors and so on. She started with the question how social integration can be maintained, and stressed the importance of the concept "community" (or "fellesskap", "gemenskap"), and the fact that the education system can of course contribute to community. The building of a national school system was a part of creating a strong nation state, and the multiculturalism of Northern Norway was unhelpful in that respect. The Norwegianisation process, with boarding schools, banning of languages and so on, tried to homogenize the population. Later, education was seen as "the great equalizer". Today, education in Norway is still supposed to create a "shared frame of reference" and to prepare people for taking part in the community. 

 

On the other hand, schools of course also contributes to exclusion. It is well-known that there are regional differences at all levels in Norway. (In the talks, she did not mention if these analyses were using socio-economic background as a control variable.) She went on to discuss an interview study in which students discussed their reflections on educational plans and on their experiences, presented in Bæck (2019). Among other factors, many students in rural settings had to move to go to upper secondary school, having to get to know new people while being away from their previous support network. As they also commuted home, reducing the opportunities to have part-time work and to take part in social events at both their home and at the school contexts. 

 

(Of course, we do see relevant intersectionality issues here. It may be the children from lowest social-economic backgrounds that have most need of part-time jobs and who have to quit school to make ends meet. Queer people may of course benefit from new surroundings, but also risk being isolated and bullied in the new place. Bæck did not go into this in her talk.)

 

Bæck noted that there are mechanisms (such as decentralizetion reforms or "neo-liberal" educational policies) that changed the contexts and thereby the outcomes/experiences of students. One interesting paradox is that decentralisation of power (ending earmarks for small schools) made local authorities make decisions to close local schools. (Personally, I find this reasonable.) She also mentioned how national tests and exams of course may interfere with teaching based on local context. She called on all researchers to speak out about the any dangers they might see in their research.

 

After lunch (and a move from Hilton hotel to the campus), there were presentations in so-called "Network sessions". I chose two symposiums in Network 19 ("Teacher's work and teacher education").The first symposium was "Examining the knowledge base of teacher education: An international comparison in relation to epistemic in/justice and teacher agency". There were three presentations: 

 

"Dominant knowledge and silenced ‘noise’ in teacher education in a Danish context?" (Dion Rüsselbaek Hansen): He argued for engaging with attitudes, knowledge and political issues in teacher education instead of "putting them to one side". He used examples from Denmark, for instance that politicians take inspiration from Michelin restaurants in how schools should work. It is easy to critizise such rhetoric, since students are not food materials and do not behave as such. Hansen also referred to Biesta in this regard. Also, international tests are still used a lot in the political discussions. 

 

(I do agree with Hansen that it is important to take on difficult issues in teacher education. It is so easy to avoid the issues and to keep focus on what we know will be important for good education. For instance, my institution's teacher education programme has been critizised for not discussing assessment and tests enough - there has perhaps been a tendency to ignore this and instead work a lot on investigative mathematics teaching, for instance.)

 

He also stressed all the contradictions and challenges for teachers, for instance working on special education without seeing any children as "special", to provide security even though education is basically risky, and so on.

 

"An ‘Ethic of Innocence’: The Fragile Contours of Teacher Education in Canada" (Anne M Phelan): She took as a starting point the finding of unmarked graves of children in schools for indigenous children in Canada. Such schools (which had its parallells in a lot of countries). She problemitized teacher education's "love of knowledge". Knowledge is seen as good. How might teacher educators work against coloniality, for instance. Renzi's "the ethic of innocence" is a deliberate "not-knowing", not claiming that this is good. Using the word "innocence" instead of "ignorance" on purpose. She gave the example of "Lars and the Real Girl", in which Lars owns a doll that he treats as a real girl, and where townspeople treat the doll as a human being, helping Lars in the long run. She referred to several Canadian researchers who have worked in ways that can be related to "ethic of innocence". One example concerned "forgetting", another is to use pupils' biography to trouble the connection between background and identity.

 

(To me, this is interesting but also deeply problematic. As teachers, we do have a responsibility to make informed choices of what is the best action to take. We can pretend not to know, but can we really be "innocent" in a concrete way without endangering the children? And while we can "forget" important information about our children, do we (in an ethical sense) have the option of actually forgetting (even if we could)? But perhaps I misunderstand - I can agree that it is important to acknowledge that there are many things we cannot know and that these things may be more important than what we do know. In that case, I think the term "choice not to know" is misleading.)

 

"Immunitas and Teacher Knowledge" (Dion Rüsselbaek Hansen reading Matthew Clarke and Ruth Unsworth's paper): The paper discussed governance of education, with increasing stress on standards for teacher competences. After terrorist attacks, schools have also been seen as part of counter-terrorism work, by promoting democratic values and so on, sometimes called "fundamental British values". For some reason, the researchers behind this paper chose the word "immunitas" to discuss such things. At the same time, the description of "best practice" is seen by the authors as "immunization" of the teachers against teachers' lack of knowledge. (In some cases, I feel that researchers are choosing to read things in the worst way possible. Also, there is nothing new in giving teachers ideas of what seems to be the best practice - in Norway, for instance, already curricula a hundred years ago had quite detailed guidelines on how to teach the different subjects. So the so-called "standardization" is not something new, and history suggests that it will not work - teachers do tend to read regulations as suggestions, as is probably also a good idea.) 

 

The discussant had some important questions, asking whether some of these suggestions present new straightjackets for teachers, or if they are really giving more freedom and openness for teachers.

 

The next symposium was arranged by Birgitte Lund Nielsen and myself, chaired by myself. I therefore had no time to make such notes during that symposium. It was wonderful, however. (This note is, I admit, written before the symposium.)

NERA 2022 Day 0

NERA is the Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA). They publish Nordic Studies of Educational Research and arrange an annual conference (also called NERA). The conference is mostly pedagogical/sociological, so it doesn't really fit my interests perfectly, but at times I am involved in projects which leads me to the conference. The present NERA conference, in Iceland, is my second NERA conference.

Of course, I combined the conference with a few days off work, so before the conference started I had experienced geysirs, public baths with thermal water, wonderful waterfalls, the historic Thingvellir, fascinating cliffs, the National Museum and so on, in addition to some more on-task work.

My contributions this year is to chair a symposium on Wednesday and contribute to that, in addition to having another talk on Thursday. I will try to do some blogging during the conference.