Hello everyone! I hope that you are doing well during this busy period at the start of the new year. The beginning of a new year often brings a mix of opportunities and challenges, and I hope you’re navigating it smoothly.

In this post I would like to share my newest publication in the Nordic Journal of Pedagogy and Critique (Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk). The title of my paper is Preparing for cultural and linguistic diversity in Norwegian compulsory schools: Student teachers’ encounters with multicultural education.

In this paper I critically analyse Norwegian teacher education programmes to understand how they prepare future teachers for work in multicultural schools. The findings derive from twelve individual interviews with Norwegian student teachers at four different universities.

The guiding research questions are:

• How do Norwegian student teachers adapt their pedagogical strategies to integrate children’s diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds into their education?
• How do the pedagogical strategies described by the student teachers align with the tenets of multicultural education and critical multiculturalism?

To summarise, the participants reported a deficiency in the support provided during their on-site training, which hindered their ability to effectively translate their visions into practice within their classrooms. They attributed these challenges to the insufficient focus on cultural and linguistic diversity within the teacher education programmes at their respective higher education institutions.

The paper is published open access.

I think multicultural education should be a bigger part of teacher education because we are going out into a multicultural society. Or at least here in Drammen, which is such a large multicultural city, it is very important to have a diversity-oriented perspective with you if you are going to be working at a school. And that means that you need, in a way, to confront the prejudices you may have formed from an early age or have heard others talk about. This means you need to have a deeper understanding of different cultures and ways of life. 

Nathan, pseudonym.

Benediktsson, A. I. (2025). Preparing for cultural and linguistic diversity in Norwegian compulsory schools: Student teachers’ encounters with multicultural education. Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk, 11(1), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.23865/ntpk.v11.6440