Theme: Tracing intercultural education in Nordic contexts" (Developing a comparative perspective).

The preconference followed the announced agenda and the discussions relating to the network were continued in the networking lunchsession Saturday. This paper reports from both sessions.

General remarks. All countries apart from Iceland had experience with regional and national minorities and we all share new and old experiences with the settlement of new ethnic minorities (labour migrants, refugees and their families).

The presentations from the different Nordic countries gave very important and interesting information on how the intercultural/multicultural perspective in education is dealt with in the different countries: a) historical perspectives on national minorities, b)inter-Nordic relations and inter-Nordic periods of domination/oppression, c) relations to newer immigrant populations (economic and political forms), and raised interesting comparative discussions and the possible implications for developed and developing research positions.

Some of the major points and questions from the discussion are presented below.

1. In all countries we have research units and individual researchers in education who are active in this field, and also a number of research programmes and persons who do not have intercultural/multicultural education as their main objective but are confronted with ethnic complexity and diversity in their educational research. This raises the question of how to define the field of multicultural/intercultural educational research and a number of questions of how to organise, communicate and present research within/without the field of intercultural education and how to relate to other educational research fields. (Are we ghetto-ized in educational research (as a part of the social structure) with our object of research, which is also partly subject to processes of ghetto formation (in other parts of the social structure)?
   
   

2. The researchers' presentations from the different countries revealed that multicultural/intercultural education has and has had a difficult time in all countries when it comes to legislation and the construction of curricula in the different domains and institutions.

   The research field had experienced different forms of positive response, development and recognition at different times (second language, mothertongue education, intercultural comparative education), but also periods of resistance and regression - but very different from country to country. All countries could report that local initiatives in education (best practice-studies and minor developmental projects) were frequent.

   There was a general consensus about the need to initiate comparative research in the field, and Gunilla Holm (Fi) promised to look up possible ways of funding in the wake of a discussion about the network's former applications to NORFA (which were not accepted).

   
   
3. The discussion about the continued development of the network included a discussion about how to organize next year's session - which also should be a part of the networks reporting to NERA by the 1st of July 2008.

Normally there are 7 sessions of 1½ hrs or 90mns each.

We decided that we would try to organise the sessions in the following way:

1. Two sessions about theory - arranged as symposia
2. Symposia about research documentation
3. The sessions include each three presentations of 20 mns and are followed by 30mns discussion.
4. We should encourage people to present their ph.d.-thesis.
5. Try to arrange common session with other networks, e.g. network for post structuralism.

A common theme for next year's network discussion was proposed: Methods and Ethics in intercultural research.

(updated September 1, 2008)