Educating Norwegian Preservice Teachers: Promoting Equality in School

• In Event: 30.080 - Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 30.080-10 - Promoting Teacher Candidates' Cultural Awareness and Understanding of Diversity

Abstract

This paper presents results from a National Survey among Student Teachers and Mentor Teachers in Norway on questions related to teaching in multicultural and multilingual classrooms.
Norwegian classrooms have become more diverse, but there is not much Norwegian research on how Initial Teacher Education deals with this.
Our main findings are that both student teachers and mentor teachers report mid-level knowledge; student teachers report little knowledge of rules and rights for minority language pupils. Both report low scores on how to assess language ability and the possibility for cooperating with mother-tongue teachers.
Our study provides insights on how to better prepare student teacher for equity and socially just teaching.

Authors

• Wenche Elisabeth Thomassen, University of Stavanger, Norway

• Elaine Munthe, University of Stavanger