So where should we begin? Could you tell me a bit about yourself?
Well, I'm British. I came to Norway for the first time as an Erasmus student in 1999. The University of Oslo had an exchange programme with my university in Durham. After I finished my bachelor's degree, I continued my education in Britain, whilst living in Norway. I was a research consultant in the University of Oslo, and I mopped floors for a year whilst I was learning Norwegian. And now I have two half Norwegian children and I'm living in Fredrikstad.
Cultural skills and courses for teachers
So why, according to you, should the exchange students come to Østfold University College?
Well I mean, they shouldn't. They should go on any exchange programme. Our one is particularly good, of course, but the advantage of doing any exchange programme is that you meet people from another country, people who think differently. You not only get language skills, but cultural skills. You will experience being part of an international group of people, and the international parties are always better than the national parties. It doesn't matter whether you're in England or in Norway. But of course, afterwards it gives you an international network as well. So, for example, in a few weeks I’m going on a conference and I’m going to give a presentation. But I will also be visiting a friend of mine who was an Erasmus student at the same time as me.
“Education is about sabotaging people’s pre-existing conceptions about the world, by giving them experiences.”
Tell me a bit about the program called Nordic Citizenship Education. It looks completely fascinating.
Yeah, it really is. It is called Nordic citizenship education, but it isn’t because we think that Nordic education has the answer. Although a lot of people come to the Nordic countries because they think it's great. But we use it as an example of what we can do. What we can analyse. In fall we teach "One school for all" – including exceptional children and Aesthetics in Nordic education and society. And in the spring semester, there is one of the most interesting and exciting modules I do, which is called Staging citizenship – art and democracy. Where the drama teacher and I get together and we talk about theatre and politics. We try out theatrical techniques and we visit a Peace March together and we talk about how we educate future citizens to be creative. Then there is the Open Air Wisdom and Deep Ecology where we go out in the woods and mountains, and talk about teaching children in the context of the environmental catastrophe. We teach children to live in and to behave towards nature in a way that is not destructive.
Recreating traditions
Why teach critical thinking?
We need politically aware pupils. Pupils who can speak out and transform society to save us from the problems we create for ourselves. They can only do that if they think new things rather than continuing a tradition. I always get frustrated when people talk about traditional modes of learning. The tradition is an extremely rich thing. I'm a historian of ideas so when I talk about tradition, I talk about a 2500 year smorgasbord of ideas. But traditions are only healthy and fruitful to the extent that they recreate themselves. There is a lot of educational research about how to treat children. But when we are using techniques that we know are going to work in particular ways, we are undermining democracy. We need unpredictable children. Obviously unpredictable children are a problem for the teacher. Because you never know what they're going to do. But predictable children are the end of politics or the end of democracy. One of my great inspirations is Hannah Arendt and she would say, that would be the end of humanity. So, in all four modules in the Nordic Citizenship program we are trying to understand what education looks like when it is trying to develop unpredictable children.
“Obviously unpredictable children are a problem for the teacher. Because you never know what they're going to do. But predictable children are the end of politics or the end of democracy.”
Of my one of my big sources of inspiration is Hannah Arendt. Another is Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher, and Achille Mbembe from West Africa, and bell hooks from the US. In the past year we’ve been putting more literature on the reading list. So we had Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World on the reading list and some Kafka. We’ve had Antigone by Sophocles and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. We think literature is an extremely important source of wisdom for teachers.
What are the students’ feedback after they are done with the course?
We do we keep in touch with our students, and we do love to hear back from them. Some of them say it's changed my life. It tends to be lots of superlatives. Some of them say it was the most amazing year I've ever had in education. And obviously we can't take credit for that as teachers. It’s the environment, it's the people they've met. It's the experiences they have. Education is about sabotaging people’s pre-existing conceptions about the world by giving them experiences.
Research and action
Can you tell me about your recent research?
I've just handed in an article, speaking of racism where we took an overview of the perceived status in terms of whether somebody is a person of colour of the various authors of our reading lists, and that was an eye opener for me. I mean, it was an eye opener when we started doing the research two or three years ago. It was just after the Black Lives Matter marches after the murder of George Floyd. And I asked myself: what do we have to do. I looked through my reading lists and there was so little melanin. So white. And that's one of those processes that takes a really long time, and we have only just started that work. We've just handed in an article purely because there was a lot of denial out there. People saying, I don't think that's actually a problem. Where we just said OK, we haven't got any solutions, but we can all agree this is a problem. I think it was over 35 000 pages and around 100 of them were identified as written by a person of colour. So, we are not making enough effort. My course reading lists have changed a lot over the past few years, and that has been a joy. If your reading list are narrow, whether in terms of class, race, or gender, you're cutting off about half the wisdom of sapiens for example by only studying men. The thinking of people like bell hooks and Achille Mbembe is really a gift to the world.