Scrutinizing the Nordic Dimension in Education: Myths, Realities, and Integration Efforts

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium explores the Nordic dimension in education and what unites and divides the five small Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden)(Andersen et al., 2007; Krejsler, 2024).
Each of the Nordic countries appreciates the critical mass that similar – but not identical – school and education systems and values offer; that ideas can be developed in a Nordic forum before going ‘international’ in an educational world where Anglo-American standards, procedures and norms prevail (Krejsler & Moos, 2021).
The symposium explores the myths and realities in education of a Nordic dimension that range from an imagined national-romantic community of a 19th-century kind to the Post-WW2 pragmatic collaborations connected to developing Nordic Social-Democratic Welfare States (Hilson, 2008; Telhaug et al., 2006; Tjeldvoll, 1998)

Sub Unit

• International Aligned Organizations / Nordic Educational Research Association - NERA

Chair

• John Benedicto Krejsler, Aarhus University

Papers

• Metaspace – A Conceptual Tool to Explore the Nordic - John Benedicto Krejsler, Aarhus University

• The Nordic interactive and comparative spaces within the arena of education - Valgerdur S. Bjarnadóttir, University of Iceland; Jontorfi Jonasson, University of Iceland

• Commercialising the 'Nordic Model': Education export rhetoric in Finland and Sweden - Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido, University of Helsinki; Linda Rönnberg, University of Umeå

• Positions of newly arrived students in Nordic education policies and practices - Gunilla Holm, University of Helsinki; Annette Rasmussen, Aalborg University; Marianne Dovemark, University of Gothenburg; Jenni Helakorpi, University of Helsinki

Discussant

• Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin - Madison