Rethinking Education in Light of Global Challenges

Scandinavian Perspectives on Culture, Society, and the Anthropocene

Karen Bjerg Petersen, Kerstin von Brömssen, Gro Hellesdatter Jacobsen, Jesper Garsdal, Michael Paulsen, Oleg Koefoed, Karen Bjerg Petersen, Kerstin von Brömssen, Gro Hellesdatter Jacobsen, Jesper Garsdal, Michael Paulsen, Oleg Koefoed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Rethinking Education in Light of Global Challenges discusses challenges to education in Scandinavian welfare states due to global trends like migration, neoliberal strategies, and the exploitation of nature. This anthology comprises case studies, theoretical articles, and reflective studies, grouped under the headings of Culture, Society, and the Anthropocene.

This book directly addresses three interrelated global events and their implications for education as seen from Scandinavian perspectives: migration flows, increased cultural diversity, and (post)nationalism; the erosion of the welfare state and the global rise of neoliberalism; and the Anthropocene and environmental challenges arising in the wake of the global exploitation of natural ecosystems. In case studies, theoretical articles, and reflective studies, researchers from Nordic countries explore how education, education policy, and educational thinking in these countries are affected by these global trends, bringing to the fore the different roles education can play in addressing the various issues and different ways of reimagining education.

This authoritative volume will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of sociology of education, migration and education, environmental education, and educational politics.

Part I

Culture

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217213-2

1 Multicultural education, learnification, and Bildung in a Nordic perspective

Gro Hellesdatter Jacobsen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217213-3

Introduction

In recent years, a focus on tests and concepts aimed at effective learning has become widespread in Danish schools, as represented by a comprehensive school reform in 2014, leading to significantly longer school days and an increased focus on learning outcomes. As the official political agreement on the school reform noted, it was seen as “crucial for all students to get the opportunity to unfold their potential fully and for Denmark to be able to compete successfully on the increasingly international market” (Agreement, 2013). The thinking behind the school reform, along with the dissemination of concepts such as visible learning (Hattie, 2012), which were imposed on schools through the municipalities and Ministry of Education, was met with increasing criticism from researchers and teachers, who felt that this was in conflict with their professionalism and understanding of education. Their self-understanding was related to concepts derived from continental educational thinking, such as Bildung and pedagogics (Danish: dannelse; pædagogik), and concerned with normative discussions about community and democracy rather than with how to turn children into effective and employable persons ready for further education and the labour market.

Hence, there has been a lively and heated debate among teachers, teacher educators, and researchers regarding how to balance between the goals of efficiency and ideals of Bildung. However, whether the proponents of Bildung include social and ethnic inequalities in their considerations of what constitutes good education remains an open question. The aim of this chapter is to discuss whether Bildung-oriented education or pedagogics may be rethought in a contemporary Nordic context in light of the challenges that global economic competition and transnational migration pose for contemporary education.

The ideal of education in the Nordic welfare states is often formulated as an inclusive “school for all” (Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006), which is in accordance with the UN sustainability goal of ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education (United Nations, 2015). However, when teachers today do their best to ensure quality education for all, they encounter conflicting positions in the field of education debate and research. In the following, such positions and concepts will be discussed, namely multicultural education, school effectiveness, and Bildung. Apparently, these positions are rarely connected in either research or practice-oriented literature aimed at teachers. However, each of these positions contains aspects relevant to the challenges that teachers face when striving to ensure quality education for all. By sketching an overview of these positions, including some of their interrelations and pitfalls, I hope to provide greater clarity, which may be useful in navigating the current education debate.

Hence, the implications of Bildung-oriented versus school-effectiveness-oriented responses to challenges related to education in multicultural settings will be discussed. The point of departure is the relative absence of debate on multicultural education in the Nordic countries, especially in Denmark, during the last decades. The assumption is that to the extent a debate on multiculturalist education is absent, this is not only caused by monoculturalist and nationalist policies but is also related to the rise of a learnification discourse, leaving out normative issues, which were once the centre of Nordic education debates.

Approach

In approaching the relationship between the different positions, I am inspired by Foucault’s notion of problematisation as a take on how various responses arise given a single set of difficulties (Rabinow, 1984). I thus assume that the general problem education is facing today is ensuring quality education for all. This is even highlighted in the UN’s sustainable development goals, and thus, there is probably a general consensus regarding this issue. However, in everyday practice in schools in the Nordic countries, different responses are possible. The concept of problematisation allows us to take a closer look at how different answers to a central problem are seen as acceptable and by whom. Thus, problematisation has a dual meaning, being both the object and the goal of a critical investigation (Lemke, 2011). A critical analysis inspired by problematisation may thus present some “key points, lines of force, constrictions and blockages” (Foucault, 2007, p. 3). In this case, it will be studied how different positions in education debate and research propose answers to the problem of ensuring quality education for all.

Accordingly, the discussions in the chapter draw on readings from the debate literature, practice-oriented literature, and research literature, mainly from the Danish context but also involving other Nordic countries. Furthermore, the chapter is inspired by the findings of empirical studies (Jacobsen, 2012), as well as preliminary results from an on-going research project on migrant children in schools.¹ While the current focus on school effectiveness often encounters resistance and criticism in Nordic school debates and calls for more Bildung-oriented approaches, professionals at schools with many socioeconomically underprivileged students of diverse cultural backgrounds seem open-minded toward discourses on the effectiveness of learning. Hence, school principals explained that instead of taking a traditional Nordic approach, with focus on children’s play and “free” learning processes that are not explicitly structured by adults, they place an emphasis on more explicit, goal-oriented teaching methods to improve children’s language skills and school performance (Jacobsen, 2012). It is thus relevant to ask why approaches based on school effectiveness seem to appeal more to educators of socioeconomically underprivileged students from culturally diverse backgrounds than other approaches, such as Bildung or multicultural education.

Ensuring quality education for all?

A central feature of the overall problem of ensuring quality education for all is the social and ethnic inequalities of school systems. Also, in the Nordic countries, this challenge has been intensified over the past decades. As for the former – social inequality – increasing international competition makes education be viewed as crucial to a nation state’s ability to prosper. Concurrently, in today’s labour market, the individual’s formal education has become crucial to her opportunity for employment and self-sufficiency. While the reproduction of social inequalities has always been a trait of the education system (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), tackling inequalities may be even more crucial today. As for the latter – ethnic inequality – this challenge too seems more prominent today. In the Nordic countries, cultural diversity in schools stemming from international migration has been seen as challenging in recent decades. The relatively poor academic performance of some bilingual students is viewed as worrying and a societal risk factor in the aforementioned competition discourse. Simultaneously, this concern about school outcomes interferes, in complex ways, with concerns that are more directly related to increased cultural diversity and the re-actualisation of nationalist conceptions.

Thus, it can be assumed that a sustainable education policy and approach to pedagogical work must include groups such as ethnic minorities and the socioeconomically underprivileged, who are particular objects of concern and problematisation. Consequently, general solutions to challenges in education that are “colour blind” or ignorant of class differences risk neglecting ethnic and social inequalities in education.

Conversely, specialised approaches directed at racialised and underprivileged children should also be considered carefully. Whether such approaches imply a strong focus on learning (as in school efficiency-oriented concepts) or cultural differences (as in some forms of multicultural pedagogy, which should especially cater to minority children), they risk a side effect of othering and dehumanisation to the extent that these children, as targets for special efforts, will be seen as deviant from the norm. However, this does not preclude the existence of constructive features in multicultural education. Still, the questions of how and whether such insights may be considered in a more general, Bildung-oriented approach and thus made relevant to all children in a globalised and culturally diverse society require consideration.

Terms and concepts of multicultural education, learnification, and Bildung

Before moving on to the discussion sections of the chapter, I will briefly explain how I use the terms, as well as present reflections on their translation between the Nordic languages and German on the one hand and English on the other. When I apply the positions and concepts of multicultural education, learnification, and Bildung, I do not aspire to use them in an exhaustive sense that takes into account the internal variety and complexity of the positions; rather, I focus on their mutual relationships, applying an analytical perspective reflecting on the positions offered to teachers who work in contemporary schools under conditions of increased diversity and the challenges of inequality. Thus, while the overall categorisation of positions obviously does not do justice to their internal complexity, it is assumed that much practice-oriented literature on how to ensure a school for all can be divided into one of these categories.

The first position, multicultural education, is used as a headline for the field, addressing how to approach cultural diversity among students in school and in society. A prominent theorist with this position is James Banks (2009). The second position is centred on improving school effectiveness and often implies universalised, transnational concepts, such as visible learning (Hattie, 2012). Gert Biesta is a prominent critic of this tendency toward learnification (Biesta, 2009), with its excessive focus on “what works” (Biesta, 2010). The third position, associated with Bildung-oriented approaches and theories, is related to the Scandinavian concepts of dannelse (Norwegian and Danish) and bildning (Swedish). Representatives of this position are to be found among continental and Nordic Bildung thinkers in the tradition of such classical thinkers as Rousseau and Kant, as well as current thinkers, such as Benner (2005) and Gustavsson (2017).

Furthermore, there are also specific considerations attached to writing about German and Nordic educational thinking in English, as well as theoretical and conceptual communication between the Nordic, Continental, and Anglo-Saxon fields of education. Hence, the very concept of Bildung cannot be translated into English. As Varkøy (2010) points out, the fact “that the German term Bildung has no direct counterpart in English has certain consequences for international educational discourse” (Varkøy, 2010, p. 86), implying that some aspects of Bildung-oriented thinking may be difficult to grasp in discussions in English. Varkøy (2010) and Kristensen (2017a) note that the Nordic discourse on education increasingly lacks a distinction between Bildung (dannelse) and education (uddannelse) because education seems to become a general concept covering a range of ideas and concepts that are distinct and different in the Scandinavian languages.

Apart from Bildung, the concept of pedagogics (pædagogik) seems to be slipping out of the language used in describing teachers’ practice (Komischke-Konnerup, 2018b; Jacobsen & Komischke-Konnerup, 2019). In light of the prevailing transnational, often Anglo-Saxon-oriented discourse, it is obvious that the concept of Bildung may be seen as being able to “help resist a worrying tendency towards instrumentalism in modern educational politics and pedagogical thinking (at least in Scandinavian countries)” (Varkøy, 2010, pp. 85–86). Simila...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I     Culture
• PART II     Society
• PART III     The Anthropocene
• Index