Conference Agenda

Since the 1950s, the Danish public school has been a central institution of the Danish welfare state explicitly linked to the development of welfare and democracy through the formation of future citizens - today, with declared goals of pursuing “freedom of thought, equality, and democracy” (BUVM 2024). In the same historical period as ideas of democracy and equity gained centrality in Danish school policy, the Danish state executed an extensive modernization project that instituted racially based systems (Petterson 2012), forced displacements of Inuit children (Hermann 2021) and forced population control (Graugaard et al. 2025) amounting to what has been characterized as a silenced genocide (Graugaard et al. 2023). While research on these colonial trajectories is growing the majority of the Danish population remains largely unaware of Greenland's history with Denmark (STUK 2019).

In June 2022 the governments of Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat initiated a historical investigation of the “post-colonial” relationship from the period after World War II until today, acknowledging the need to shed further light on the consequences (Naalakkersuisut & Statsministeriet 2022). Responding to the well-documented contemporary prejudice, discrimination and racism towards Kalaallit in Danish society (UN 2023; DIHR 2023) the Danish government has recently highlighted the importance of including the North Atlantic and the Danish Commonwealth (Rigsfællesskabet) as a mandatory topic in school curriculum (Regeringen 2025).

Based on the insights of existing research, I argue that such curriculum-political initiatives must be rooted in a critical awareness about the institutional knowledge that historically has been available and how this knowledge might shape contemporary concepts and self-perceptions.

The connection between Danish discrimination and prejudice towards Kalaallit on the one hand and the well-documented lack of knowledge about Kalaallit Nunaat and the Danish/Greenlandic relation on the other, has been made in multiple reports (UVM 2019, DIHR 2023, DUF 2024). However, understanding prejudice and discrimination towards Kalaallit as a matter of not-knowing, I argue, runs the risk of overlooking the type of knowledge that informed these practices to begin with. Taking as point of departure that social patterns of human action cannot be separated from knowledge, and that knowledge does not appear in a vacuum but is socially, culturally and historically situated, the question of discriminatory tendencies within a population, can be understood not just as a lack of knowledge, but rather, as a presence of certain type of shared knowledge that informs collective patterns of thinking about Kalaallit Nunaat.

This form of collective knowledge might be understood considering scholarly contributions highlighting that the colonial injustices of the Danish welfare state, especially in regard to Kalaallit Nunaat, are often denied, contested or presented as benevolent and well-intended (Graugaard 2022; Lofsdottór & Jensen 2016; Boassen et al. 2022). In this paper I investigate this through the concept of implicit collective memory (Erll 2022); an often unconscious, but none the less powerful, cultural remembering-imagining system, passed from generation to generation, through narrative schemata and patterns of framing that informs perceptions and actions of the present. Since collective implicit memory is often considered a long-term effect of an active memory culture and its key processes, such as remediation, canonization and institutionalization, I investigate how the social injustices of the Danish welfare state’s modernization program might have been incorporated in the collective memory in the same historical period as they were carried out. Based on a concept of schooling as a state process that concentrates, unifies and universalizes values (Bourdieu and 2006) the research question underpinning this paper is: How have the social policies of the Danish ‘modernization’ project in Kalaallit Nunaat historically been narrated in Danish school books from 1950-1989?

Science education globally demands us as teachers and researchers to move beyond traditional science teacher identities where disciplinary and pedagogical domains of knowledge seem fragmented. Both globally (Benzce et al., 2020) and in the context of this study, Chile (Marzabal & Vanegas, 2021) evidence indicates that a traditional view of science still predominates the teaching profession. Furthermore, current injustices such as environmental and social inequalities, together with the oppressions and instabilities created by wars, have shown the necessity for science and science education to move towards critical and interdisciplinary perspectives that favour the development of transformative practices for social justice in other words, practices that develop critical thinking and agency (Guerrero et al., 2024). For science education, this would be required to overcome fragmented identities that also tend to hierarchize science over pedagogical dimensions of identity (Torres-Olave & Dillon, 2022) as well as science in relation to other knowledge domains.

In response to those challenges, a science education with a focus on socioscientific issues (SSI) could develop transformative practices by helping to promote students' critical thinking and socially responsible action (Guerrero et al., 2024). In this context, critical pedagogues (e.g. hooks, 2022) and scholars in science education (e.g. globally Rushton & Reiss, 2021) and the context of this study have proposed teacher collaboration as a relevant aspect that favours the transformation of teaching practices and traditional science identities, in the context of Chile, Torres-Olave & Dillon's (2022) research on two Chilean physics teachers who work in schools and universities as teacher educators and at the same time participate in a community of practice reports that teachers value the collective space for reflection to cultivate hope and develop hybrid identities capable of reading disciplinary and institutional cultures to cross boundaries and cultivate both individual and collective agency necessary to address social transformations. Therefore, the research question is how does teacher collaboration, focusing on territorial socio-scientific issues for critical science teaching, contribute to the science teacher's identity?

Science Teacher Identity

Studies of science teacher identity have become highly relevant because they provide a complex and rich analytical lens for understanding science teachers' learning and professional development (Avraamidou, 2014; Rush & Reiss, 2021) as well as their sense of recognition. However, there is insufficient research on science teacher identity in non-anglophones contexts, let alone understanding how teacher collaboration contributes to science teacher identity (Rushton & Reiss, 2021).

Building from that scholarship, this study understands science teacher identity from a sociocultural perspective and defines it as a latent, dynamic, fluid, and multifaceted set of attributes that define the personal and professional dimensions of the teacher. These attributes undergo constant processes of reconfiguration through reflexive and dialogical negotiations of the internal self with other individuals, materialities, territories, and sociocultural dynamics. For such reconfiguration, the personal, social, and collective dimensions are essential to consider.

Teaching Collaboration

Grounding on bell Hooks' critical pedagogy (hooks, 1994; 2003), this study defines "collaboration" as a relationship of solidarity the construction of professional knowledge across multiple perspectives. This implies that each person openly acknowledges their point of view and does not diminish the knower or their knowledge to create new knowledge that is situated, more complete, and valid. Therefore, collaboration here values difference and diversity, engaging sincerely through dialogue to build mutual understanding and transcend one-dimensional ways of thinking, being, and living. This promotes nuanced awareness of intersecting matrices of oppression within the collaborative space. Dialogue thus becomes a tool for critical reflection beyond immediate social interaction.

Preparation classes for newly arrived students have become a stable feature of the German school system and other European contexts shaped by migration. Although often framed as temporary support structures facilitating inclusion, these classes represent a historically persistent form of institutional separation (Karakayali et al. 2017). They operate according to a distinct “Sonderlogik” that suspends the norms of the regular school system while simultaneously claiming to prepare students for it (Stichweh 2009). This contribution builds on the assumption that such arrangements are not merely pragmatic responses to migration but part of a longer genealogy of segregating educational solutions that have repeatedly been justified through discourses of support, transition, and exception.

The paper focuses on a specific and under-researched dimension of this institutional order: the systematic involvement of teacher education students in preparation classes. In many contexts, students take on substantial teaching responsibilities during their studies, often without full professional qualification and under precarious employment conditions. This practice introduces a second “Sonderlogik” into the institutional arrangement: students, themselves positioned outside the regular professional system, are assigned to an educational setting that is likewise positioned outside the normative structures of schooling.

Against this background, the central research questions are:
(1) How are preparation classes institutionally constructed and legitimised as exceptional spaces within the school system?
(2) How do teacher education students interpret, negotiate, and normalise their role within these settings?
(3) What does the coupling of preparation classes and student labour reveal about the institutional production and stabilisation of educational inequality?

The objective of the study is to analyse preparation classes as institutional border zones in which social justice, professional norms, and epistemic hierarchies are renegotiated. Rather than approaching student involvement primarily as a question of individual professionalisation or competence development, the paper examines how professionalisation itself is institutionally reorganised under conditions of migration-related segregation and resource scarcity (Gomolla 2022; Cicourel & Kitsuse 1963).

The theoretical framework combines perspectives from social justice and intercultural education with institutional and profession-theoretical approaches. Drawing on critical migration and education research, preparation classes are conceptualised as sites of epistemic differentiation in which certain forms of knowledge, language practices, and pedagogical expectations are systematically devalued or deferred (Jording 2022). Profession-theoretical concepts of antinomies and boundary work are used to analyse how students’ practices simultaneously stabilise and unsettle professional norms (Helsper 2016). This framework allows for tracing continuities between historical forms of educational separation and contemporary arrangements shaped by neoliberal governance, teacher shortages, and migration regimes.

By linking institutional analysis with actors’ perspectives, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on how social justice is negotiated through everyday practices, and how seemingly inclusive reforms may reproduce structural inequalities over time.