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...