Read time: approximately 15 minutes

This week

• Monday, 17 November & Tuesday, 18 November Jeremy and I were in Paris, France!
• Wednesday, 19 November facilitated a teacher workshop at Halden VGS to do our third teacher session on offering feedback to students on their writing
• Thursday, 20 November back to the office for Norwegian class and to do some workshop prep
• Friday, 21 November took the wrong bus to work! Ended up back at the house, which worked out because I ended up needing to pick up a car for our road trip to Sweden!
• Saturday, 22 November one of our Fulbright university hosts hosted a Thanksgiving celebration with her family and American friends she’s known since college! We made two of my favorites: cranberry sauce (with cranberries from the Timnath Costco!) and what we call Grell beans, a delicious quick pickle green bean 

This week I’ve started working on my midterm report for Fulbright Norway, due December 01. I’ve been reflecting on my research and teaching here and there, sometimes on this blog and sometimes with friends, and I wanted to put them together here as I build my midterm report. 

What I have had the good fortune to be able to do and/or learn in Norway

• Teach the same lesson over and over and over, which means I get a lot of practice teaching the same lesson, and have figured out what works, what doesn’t, what kinds of questions to ask. It’s been fun to hear the different responses students have to the same workshops. It’s also just really fun to work with secondary students again. 
• Teach a range of students, from 6th graders, to undergraduate and masters students becoming teachers, to experienced teachers. This has been amazing! I am very fortunate to be able to teach the range of learners that I have so far this year. The hugs from the 6th graders has to be one of my favorite memories so far. 
• Co-design workshops for secondary students, teachers-in-training, and teachers. This part is pretty amazing too. I’ve written about this before somewhere on this blog, but it’s kind of my favorite when a teacher says they want to book me, but for something that we co-design. I listen as they tell me about their course, the learning objectives, the interests of the students, and then I intersect that with my teaching and research interests and we go from there. 
• Teach teachers content knowledge for a workshop I also teach secondary students. This was so cool. I wrote about this briefly last week. I got to teach teachers content knowledge for my most requested workshop for secondary students. It has helped me to think about what kind of content knowledge might I help preservice teachers understand and how might we use that content knowledge together with pedagogical content knowledge to support preservice teachers’ learning to teach. I want to spend more time on this when I get back to the States! It’s also been really cool to be able to teach secondary students again, and it will be worth exploring what kind of content knowledge I am bringing in to support my teaching of teachers. It might actually be really interesting to create a graphic of the kinds of pedagogical content knowledge needed to teach different concepts in the classes I teach at Colorado State University, my home institution. It might also be useful to teach secondary students to help me better understand what kind of content knowledge is required of a teacher. Or work very closely with a secondary teacher to develop ideas of what knowledge of content, students, and teaching (pedagogical content knowledge) are needed for teaching different concepts. 
• Work with a group of teachers in a series of workshops on their professional learning. We just wrapped this week a three-session workshop on offering feedback to students. The teachers were awesome learners who were willing to talk about their practices and learn more and try new things. They’ve already booked me for a five-session workshop next term on assessment design. I am pumped! I wish I did more of this in the States where I worked with a group of current secondary teachers on their professional learning interests. A teacher I partner with regularly expressed interest in this; I’d like to follow up on this upon my return.
• Travel to different parts of Norway. It’s been great to be able to travel and explore new places, especially because I’ve been running a lot. But I think my favorite part about this has been developing my courage to try new things and be comfortable in new places. 
• Read and watch content that teaches me about historic and contemporary Norwegian language, culture, and life. I have been reading and watching so much stuff about Norway and learning so much about Norway. I love learning!

What I have been frustrated by, which I explain more about below. 

• Feel like shallow engagement with my questions about how cultural systems are reflected in educational systems and what that means for teaching and teacher preparation
• Short time periods with learners!

In my Fulbright Rover application, I wrote that I wanted to explore the relationship between cultural systems and educational systems. Every country’s educational system is a reflection of their cultural system. In the United States, for example, our educational system is grounded on ideas of assimilation: that schooling could be a place where students learned what it meant to be a worker and to be “American.” This was especially codified around Civil War times when more parents were going to work in factories and were thus leaving to teachers not just their (white) children’s academic education, but their moral education as well. During this same time period, more and more immigrants were coming over from Eastern Europe and they had to be assimilated. Duh. Can’t have them bringing their own cultures to the States. The US was also trying to separate itself culturally from England, after having separated from them economically and politically in the last century. All of these different pressures and desires built an educational system where students were trained to be the same: whether for factory work and/or so that they could become one singular kind of American. For Indigenous peoples, this time period was especially violent and traumatic as children continued to be forcibly removed from homes and sent to Indian Boarding Schools. 

So what does it mean for our educational system in the United States if its foundations are built on a) preparing factory workers and b) settler colonialism white supremacy and capitalism? It means we get the educational system we have today, that continues to prepare students for “career and college readiness,” as defined by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and to assimilate students into whiteness (and other kinds of sameness like cisheteronormativity and patriarchal ideas). When teachers help students achieve academic success in school, they are helping students learn the discipline so that they can go on to future study and work; students who go to school are more likely to earn more money over time than students who don’t. But the problem is that in order for students to be successful in school, more often than not they have to assimilate into whiteness. They are counseled—explicitly or implicitly—to subordinate their home and cultural knowledges so that they can do well in school, because school doesn’t value their multiple languages and cultures and ways of being and knowing. I write about this in my research so I’m not going to belabor this point here, because you can look up my stuff :), but I want to simply acknowledge that our schooling and our cultural beliefs and systems are linked. 

Okay, zoom to Norway. I didn’t really know a lot about Norway’s cultural or educational system before I moved here, save that there was a social welfare state that paid for most of a student’s education. That’s cool, I thought. A country that understands the value of an educated citizenry!

During orientation, especially in our Rover orientation, we learned about the concept of Janteloven and I’m still not quite sure how this idea shapes the culture of Norway. There are some teachers and students I have talked to who specifically mention these cultural practices by name. In the series workshop with the Halden VGS teachers, they told me that peers offering feedback to each other wouldn’t work because students are more inclined to make sure they don’t upset each other, that they don’t want to make the others feel badly about their work, how they can’t position themselves as “better” than each other or knowing more than each other. But when I was with university students, they seemed really excited to offer and receive feedback from each other. Some students have asked me what Janteloven is when I mention it, but perhaps it’s one of those cultural things you can’t really articulate because you’re in it. Like when the fish asks the other fish what is water. 

The way I think about Janteloven in terms of how an educational system reflects a cultural system is the value of everyone being the same. Ideally, people are treated as equals, which allows participation in a social welfare state that helps everyone, because we are equals. But, as I’ve mentioned in a few posts before, not everyone is the same in Norway. And people don’t treat everyone as if they were the same, even if it might be a cultural value. In the last 40 or so years, Norway has opened its borders to many immigrant and refugee families. Recently, families are welcome from Ukraine, countries in Africa, and countries in Asia; I meet many students who are Muslim. When I walk into many Norwegian classrooms, I walk into some of the most racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse classrooms I have ever been in. It’s so fun to have such a diversity of thought and perspective in the classroom. And while Janteloven might mean that they are all supposed to be treated as equals, they’re not. The students sense that they are not treated like their white Norwegian peers. A couple of weeks ago, a student who immigrated from the Congo when he was 9, and who has been in the country for 6 years, told me he doesn’t feel Norwegian. A student from Kosovo told me the same. And another from Palestine. These students don’t feel Norwegian because, they told me, they’re not treated as Norwegian. I wasn’t able to follow up with what they meant, but that’s what they said. A week before that, a student wrote in her exit ticket that she has felt prejudiced against because she is a woman, from Asia, and is Muslim, and that she is glad that a teacher (she meant me) was finally talking about this. The students know they are not the same, despite being told explicitly and/or implicitly in cultural laws, that they are the same. 

So how might this shape teacher preparation, I want to know! But I haven’t found many teachers who want to talk with me about this. You don’t have to have been a secondary teacher to be a teacher educator at the university where I have my office, so I don’t ask them what it’s like to work with secondary students who don’t feel like they belong. The other teacher educators at my university are very focused on theoretical orientations to teaching anyway, so talking to them about working with actual secondary students doesn’t often go very far. When the secondary teachers at the schools where I do the workshop most related to this idea express interest in these ideas, I perk up and ask if they want to do a workshop to learn more, or if they want to continue exploring this idea, but no one takes me up on it. Sometimes I feel like teachers have just invited me in so they can check off a diversity box. Perhaps that’s not being fair. There’s a lot to do in teaching, and they’ve already given up their time to have me in. But I sort of feel let down a bit when they say the conversation and ideas are interesting, but then don’t want to continue the conversation.

This was why I was so excited about the teacher workshop I wrote about in last week’s post. These teachers wanted to learn more content knowledge about how systems of oppression persist! This was so exciting! Some wanted to explore what these ideas from the States mean for a Norwegian context. I want to know too! How might an exploration of our cultural systems and how they shape our educational system shape teaching and teacher preparation in Norway?! I’m so curious! On the one hand, how might the culture of Janteloven shape teacher preparation and teaching in Norway? On the other, how might increased immigration and refugee populations in Norway intersect with the idea of Janteloven and what happens in the classroom? How might this shape teacher preparation? I haven’t yet found many teachers who are interested in exploring these questions, but there’s still six or seven (lol sorry I couldn’t help myself) months left! There is one workshop I’m facilitating in a teacher-in-training class next semester that might touch on these ideas. I’ll have to feel that out with the teacher and perhaps something might transpire!

Another moment of frustration has been the short time period with learners. I wrote in my Fulbright application that it is important for me to listen to learners and then work with where they are at and ask them questions to get them to understand with more complexity and nuance the ideas we’re working with. In my application, I used the metaphor of a prism to help illustrate my ideas: “I ask learners to hold up familiar practices—like what dialect of American English we privilege in the classroom—as if they were prisms, turning and examining them from various angles to let in different points of light. This new way of viewing sparks questions about what we see, and also offers opportunities to explore why and how we see those things. Importantly, it also allows us the space to build justice-oriented alternatives.” What I’ve realized even more acutely in the last four months is that this takes time. More time than a 45-minute or 90-minute workshop allows me. I’ve really been challenged to build something with students rather than just telling them about their world. Many of the students tell me in their exit tickets that they have learned, but there are a few who just seem to become more entrenched in their views because I just don’t have the time to develop a relationship, better understand their perspectives, and bring them into more complexity and thoughtfulness about their ideas. 

This has really made me think about the purpose of the workshops I conduct. Is the idea to convince them to change their minds about racist or homophobic or whatever else problematic idea/s they hold? Is it to simply introduce them to different ideas, to chip away at their problematic ideas? But what if there’s no follow up? No continued conversation? But that’s not something I can control. It is to acknowledge that these ideas exist, which is really useful for the many many students I’ve met who say thank you for talking about these ideas? Maybe the purpose is just way simpler: to teach them new vocabulary and have them learn a little bit more about the US. Maybe I’m asking too much of my Systems of Oppression workshop. Maybe I need to scale it down. I have another workshop about remixing art works in ways that speak back to systems of oppression and in this one, we look at 3-4 paintings, depending on time, and we talk about what we see and what the artist is doing to clap back. I have to give varying amounts of historical background, depending on what students know about Manifest Destiny and American Romantic Paintings of the Hudson Valley School era and Indigenous Peoples in the US. But teachers have commented that this is a powerful workshop too, and might be doing a different kind of perspective-opening work than the Systems workshop.

I’ve given a Monsters workshop a few times now too and I designed that one like I did the Art Remix workshop: show a few images of monsters and then talk about what kind of commentary the monsters offer on our world. I’ve asked students to explore Trolls (a very Norwegian kind of monster) and Godzilla and dig into what these monsters might be communicating to us about our worlds and who we are as people. The students and teachers come away amazed that these figures could represent anything more than what they initially thought. So maybe it’s something about redesigning the systems workshop to do more with less? This is something I’d like to consider over break, now that I think about it.

There is a lot more to learn over the remaining weeks of this term and next term. And even, it seems, when I get back to the States. Looking forward to continued learning!