This project develops a new course for Intercultural Competence (IC) to better prepare teacher education (TE) students for their modern Norwegian workplace—a multilingual classroom with an increasingly diverse pupil population.
We respond to a growing need for greater teacher IC in Norwegian schools, where workforce competence is falling behind social and pedagogical changes, and we do so in close collaboration with a full range of local actors and partners: teacher educators (the university), workplaces (schools, in particular those providing education to minority language pupils), and local community members (minority and majority language pupils & parents, TE students, municipal offices, and minority-assisting NGOs).
This collaborative approach allows us to design training in direct response to the local needs and demands from our study region of Northern Norway, while our self-reflexive methodology and flexible operational materials will furnish a model that is transferable to other pre-service TE programmes across Norway, as well as those serving working teachers at various levels from primary to adult education.
