Det livstolkingsplurale norske klasserommet

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about how teacher education may approach the challenges from an increasingly culturally diverse society. Lied’s field of interest and research is the culturally diverse classroom populated by children and students with a plurality of beliefs and religious and philosophical backgrounds. She therefore places the paper’s main research question in this frame of context and asks: how can teacher education deal with challenges and opportunities from the religiously and philosophically pluralistic Norwegian classroom? Lied pursues the question by asking the following subsidiary ones: How does religious and philosophical pluralism manifest itself in elementary school and in teacher education? How may students’ participation in research contribute to increasing their understanding the demands the pluralistic classroom puts on its teachers? Lied develops answers to the preceding questions by, at first, giving a short outline of the diverse situation in the field of religion and beliefs in elementary school for which teacher education prepares its students. She does this briefly by presenting how plurality manifests itself in the teaching of religion and philosophy in Norwegian public elementary schools as well as in pupils’ utterances made during lessons on these topics. She then sketches the presence of plurality in the national curriculum of this subject in teacher education and in texts written by teacher students. After a short presentation of two projects in which teacher students (with different cultural and national backgrounds) took part as co-researchers, Lied discusses how students’ participation in research may be one part of the answer to how teacher education may approach challenges and opportunities from the pluralistic Norwegian classroom.