Read time: approximately 12 minutes

This week

• Sunday, 19 April took the train from Halden to Trondheim! Took about 10 hours total, and it was beautiful. I had heard that this train and the one from Oslo to Bergen were beautiful. And now I have taken both!
• Monday, 20 April defining justice workshop with teachers-in-training at NTNU
• Tuesday, 21 April went to a lecture at NTNU by Dr. Limarys Caraballo, who used to work with one of my Rover mates at CUNY Queens College and who has been a mentor for me through NCTE
• Wednesday, 22 April Limarys, my Rover mate David, and I flew to Bergen! We were invited to be on a panel at Høgskulen på Vestlandet (HVL), which we titled “Exploring agency, positionality, and authenticity in educational research and praxis”
• Thursday, 23 April same crew (Limarys, David, and I) had a meet-and-greet with fellow researchers at HVL where we exchanged ideas about teacher preparation in our US and Norwegian contexts and what we might be able to share and use from each other’s experiences. Then Limarys, David, and I went on a fjord cruise! Because we were in Bergen, the gateway to the fjords. And Lisa, David’s wife, said we had to. We gladly did and are ever thankful she found the tour and then hovered over us while we booked it.
• Friday, 24 April I went to Gimle Skole in Bergen to teach two Art Remix workshops to two classes of 9th graders. Fulbrighter Emily observed me in the second class! I don’t have any future requests for this workshop, so this might have been the last time I ran it. After school, two teachers from Stend VGS picked me up and we went for a hike up Fløyen and had fika at the top! Then they dropped me off at the airport. Flew to Oslo and went to Rover David’s house to join his family and Limarys for Shabbat dinner. I thought I was going to catch the last train back to Halden but we stayed up so late I missed it! 
• Saturday, 25 April took the train back to Halden. Rest and catch up. 

What a week! Probably among my top five Roving experiences this year. Such an eventful week that I am posting a little late!

On Tuesday morning I was co-working virtually with a friend and she asked me how the Monday workshop had gone with the teachers-in-training at NTNU. I hadn’t looked at their exit tickets yet, but felt a little discouraged. The instructors at NTNU, who we had lunch with before class and then got a beer with after class, had shared with us some of their frustrations with preparing teachers. Granted, it’s getting toward the end of the semester and everyone is under high stress, including students. But their conversations and what they shared about teacher preparation reminded me that everywhere I’ve gone there are complications to preparing teachers to teach. There is no one perfect system we are all trying to get to. My discouragement, though, stemmed from my perception that because I am a visitor to Norway, I can’t exert very much of my own agency to help make changes into the system or to communicate to some people I work with how to recognize the ways the educational system doesn’t work and who it’s not serving. 

And then I looked at the students’ exit tickets from our workshop on Monday and started getting pretty excited, reminding myself that just because students didn’t “look like” they were getting it that didn’t mean that they weren’t getting it. Even after two decades of teaching I have to remind myself of this. They were understanding the concepts of justice we had gone over and that I had invited them to think through with me. This was exciting. 

And then I got an email from a teacher I have been working with all year at Halden VGS. She’s fantastic. She wants to help students learn about different ways the world can be improved and talks with them about systemic racism and income inequality. She and her students read Concrete Rose and James this year. They’re waiting for books, but she’s hoping they’ll get to read Compound Fracture this year too. I had asked if she wanted to participate in a feature in Communicare, the practitioner journal published out of the Fremmedspråksenteret (where I have a desk). She had emailed me her responses because she wanted to run them by me before she sent them to the editor. She wrote about how our work together had shaped her desire and capacity to read with students the books I recommended that talked about these social issues that other teachers typically shied away from.

And then I worked on the article that my Rover mates David, Kristin, and I are also writing for Communicare on our experiences teaching about difference this year. Each year, the person in my role as the Østfold Rover is invited to contribute to the journal and I invited David and Kristin to do so with me because of our shared interest and experiences teaching about difference in Norway. 

It was slightly ridiculous to think that I wasn’t using my agency. This knowledge also reminded me that it is in community that change can happen. I really need to read Boggs’ actual words (I have a grad school professor who would be really upset with me right now for not citing Boggs herself), but in Emergent Strategy, brown notes what Boggs said: that focusing on “critical connections” that are an “inch wide mile deep” is valuable; not all justice movements have to have “critical mass” that are “mile wide inch deep” (p. 20). If you’ve been following along this year (thanks!), you know how important community is to me. This week affirmed that I have been cultivating community this whole time. 

A few more examples of community created and/or cultivated this week.

My trips to Trondheim and Bergen this week were sparked by Dr. Limarys Caraballo’s visit to Norway. She’s on sabbatical this semester, and her friend and colleague and Rover mate David said, come to Norway. Give a talk. I love this kind of thinking. David consulted me early in the year (when we discovered that we both know Limarys!), but I didn’t know anyone at Hiøf who might be interested in what Limarys had to say (this was in my where is everyone phase). After sitting together on an American Studies panel in the fall, though, David met Dr. Eir-Anne Edgar who works in teacher preparation at NTNU. They started scheming and organized for Limarys to come to Trondheim. I reached out to Eir-Anne and asked if there were colleagues who might be interested in my workshops for teachers-in-training and/or teacher educators. She connected me with a teacher educator colleague. 

At the same time, the researchers at Høgskulen på Vestlandet (HVL) wanted me to come back to continue the conversation we started in February about teaching about difference in US and Norwegian contexts. They would even pay for my transportation and lodging! Knowing Limarys would be in town and that David would be traveling too, I asked how they felt about a three-researcher / teacher educator panel. They loved the idea. We developed a panel and also met informally with other teacher educators / researchers about teacher preparation in Norway and in comparative contexts between the US and Norway. And because I had found some people at Hiøf who also do this work, I have been able to connect teacher educators and researchers at NTNU (Trondheim), HVL (Bergen), and Hiøf (Halden). When one of the Fulbright administrators told me one of the reasons they selected me as the Østfold Rover is because I value building and sustaining community, I wonder if they envisioned this. David and Limarys have already invited me to New York next fall to keep the community going.

But it wasn’t just a work community that we built this week, as gratifying as that felt. When we had our Fulbright conference in Stavanger, I had told our contact teacher at Stend VGS that I was coming back to Bergen. I wanted to go back to their school! But my schedule was just too packed. But she emailed me anyway and said, totally okay you can’t come to our school, but how about a hike. A hike! This is exactly the request I make to others in Colorado! And now she was asking me to do it here, in Norway! What a dream! I had booked a pretty late flight Friday evening so I asked if they might be available Friday after school. And they were! We hiked up Fløyen and it was so nice and so fun. As soon as I got in the car when they picked me up they said, “girls trip!” And we were off! We got to talk about a lot of things on the hike and when we enjoyed fika at the top. We talked about television shows, Norwegian history, an old military warning system, flowers and lichen, Spice Girls, our hobbies! I don’t remember all the topics, but I remember how the ladies made me feel: like I was their friend, someone who they wanted to hang out with. This was very special. And it made me want to incorporate an after-work Friday hike when I get back to Colorado!

We also got to spend time with the Trondheim and Bergen Rovers this week! Nina invited us to her 15-person university housing suite in Trondheim and her Norway bestie, fellow Fulbrighter Erin, met us there. Nina cooked supper for us and we learned more about each other. What a delightful way to spend an evening.

In Bergen, we went out for drinks (where else but Henrik’s) with Fulbrighters Emily and Mark. One of the Fulbright husbands joined us. Again, don’t remember what we talked about, but we had a great time. A couple folks had to head to bed, but the rest of us got noodles at Banzha. I love noodles. Mark had some great questions for us about when is the best time in life to make a permanent move abroad and we laughed and chatted throughout the night.

The next day two more Bergen Fulbrighters joined us and we went back to Penguin. The food is delicious and it’s fun just to catch up, to hear how others’ lives are going.

Throughout all these moments, David and Limarys and I got to spend the week together. Limarys and I figured out that we have known each other, and of each other, for a long time, through our connections at NCTE. But this was the first time we have really gotten to be with each other, as researchers and teachers and travelers. She is one of the most brilliant people I know. It was magical to spend so much time just watching her brain work. David has become my Rover bestie. There, I said it. It was fun to learn more about him through a friend who knows of his NYC life and to present with him too. And, last month, he organized for me to come out to CUNY Queens College in the fall. He jokes, but it’s true, he’s helping to bust me out of my gilded cage in Østfold. And his wife Lisa making us book a fjord tour and “be tourists in Norway” instead of just researchers all the time? Those pictures of the wind utterly knocking us me on my ass on said fjord tour? Our wild hair and maniacal smiles? Unforgettable.

And, what connections wouldn’t be complete without connecting with those we might never see again? The boat captain on the fjord tour came to sit with us and chat. I didn’t see him sit with anyone else. At first I thought we were in trouble. Is he going to make it into the blog, David asked?

We made friends too with Elise, at our hotel in Bergen. She was a charismatic waitress who managed to feed us a robust lunch when we were initially told that the kitchen was closed. I might be able to get you bread, butter, and cheese. Does that sound okay? she asked. Yes! Sounds wonderful. A minute later she came back: what about a side salad too? Yes! Perfect. A minute later she came back: and how about some free chocolate mousse for dessert? Yes! Amazing! She eventually served us grilled cheese sandwiches with a special sauce, nice side salad, and our free chocolate mousse with sour berries. It was really good! She even offered us extra dessert! While waiting for our food, we learned she had just returned from Milan, where she was celebrating her 20th birthday, and where she learned to love Aperol Spritz. Lol youth. The next morning we saw her at breakfast. God morn! I said to her. Hvordan gor det (how are you doing)? I asked. Wonderful! she said. We were really busy in the morning, but it’s calmed down now. Would you like me to make you a cappuccino? Two, one for your friend? Can you do three? I asked. Sure thing, she said. They were delicious. She even made foam milk hearts, and then a troll for David. 

What a week. I tell the teachers I teach that our work is about cathedral ending. It’s arrogant to think that others have been working to eradicate our societies of social problems for hundreds of years and we think we’re going to solve all the problems in a generation? We build cathedrals. Cathedral builders, by design, were only a blip in the world of the cathedral. But important blips. When we join the work of cathedral building, we take a look at what has come before us and try to figure out how to add to that work. When we are ready to leave our work, we make it so that the next person coming behind us can continue what we continued. We build cathedrals together.