Conference Agenda

In the contemporary global educational landscape, diversifying the teaching workforce is recognized as a fundamental pillar for promoting social justice and equity (Mullen, 2021). Teacher diversity has been widely studied, yet a significant gap remains in understanding the “induction” phase—the critical transition from training to practice—when it unfolds within contexts of ethno-national conflict and structural power imbalances (Ingersoll & Strong, 2012; McNamara & Basit, 2004). This study examines the induction of Arab-Palestinian teachers into Hebrew-speaking Jewish-majority state schools in Israel. The central research question is: How do power relations shape the induction experiences of minority teachers in majority schools, and how do they influence their professional learning, sense of belonging, and pedagogical agency?

The research moves beyond traditional technical or psychological views of induction (Feiman-Nemser, 2001; Ingersoll & Strong, 2012), conceptualizing it as a political and organizational process through a triple-layered analytical lens. At the macro level, we draw on “banal nationalism” (Billig, 1995) and work on language ideologies to examine how majority-dominated schools are framed as “neutral” spaces while minority teachers are marked as “others”; professional identity is constructed through negotiation with dominant ideologies that dictate linguistic and cultural legitimacy (Melo-Pfeifer, 2018). At the meso level, we utilize the framework of “inequality regimes” to analyze schools as workplaces characterized by intersectional hierarchies (Acker, 2006; Hanselman et al., 2022; Quinn & Ferree, 2019). Organizational belonging for minority teachers is often “conditional”, mediated by institutional silences regarding power dynamics in mentoring relationships (McNamara & Basit, 2004). At the micro level, we examine induction as an interactional process entailing intensive emotional labor and the management of micro-aggressions (Horner et al., 2020; Kariou et al., 2021). Conceptions of the “good teacher” are often linked to racialized professionalism, whereby educators must regulate their emotions and linguistic repertoires to align with majority norms.

This study proposes the Power-Aware Induction model, which foregrounds induction as a site where structural inequalities and professional learning intersect. It addresses a universal challenge faced by educational systems across Europe and globally: the integration of minority teachers into majority-led institutions. The model offers a comparative framework for analyzing how educational policies and school-level “inequality regimes” can either mitigate or exacerbate structural barriers during the early career stage (Hanselman et al., 2022; McNamara & Basit, 2004). It contributes to international discourse on Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017) by demonstrating how minority teachers can transform their cultural capital into a pedagogical asset and enact “quiet” or “everyday” agency within constrained spaces (Yosso, 2005).

Across Europe, the protection of national minorities is anchored in the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1998), which emphasises the right of minorities to maintain and develop their culture, language, and identity, as well as the responsibility of states to promote knowledge about national minorities in education. Situating the paper within this international framework, we critically discuss how to advance education about and for the Forest Finnish national minority in mainstream education in Norway. Drawing on in-depth interviews with ten Forest Finnish teachers, the study explores their experiences and perspectives on teaching Forest Finnish topics in schools. In the analysis, we distinguish between learning about, from, to, and for (Andreassen & Olsen, 2020; Engebretson, 2009; Kumashiro, 2000), examining what knowledge teachers believe students should acquire about the Forest Finns, what attitudes and actions they consider this knowledge should foster, and how such teaching can benefit the national minority. The research question guiding the paper is: What knowledge, attitudes, and actions do Forest Finnish teachers consider essential in teaching about the Forest Finns, and how do they understand the role of such teaching for the national minority?

The paper derives from a larger study funded by the Norwegian Research Council: “Sustaining National Minorities in Education: Kven/Norwegian Finnish and Forest Finnish Experiences and Needs in Mainstream Schools (NAMED)”. The background for both the project and the paper is the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2023) documentation of the devastating consequences of harsh assimilatory policies towards the Indigenous Sámi people and national minorities such as Kvens/Norwegian Finns and Forest Finns in Norway. Today, being on of Norway’s five national minorities, the Commission (2023) notes that Forest Finns still face discrimination and prejudice in their everyday lives, including in school. According to the Commission, this discrimination is partly due to a lack of knowledge about national minorities, influencing Forest Finns’ sense of belonging, self-esteem and safety, and continuing an invisibility and silence around their national minority group in mainstream education (p. 442).

Previous research on the Forest Finns in education has primarily focused on textbook analyses, identifying a hierarchy among national minorities in Norwegian textbooks, with the Forest Finns among those receiving the least attention (Midtbøen et al., 2014). Furthermore, textbook analyses suggest that content related to the Forest Finns is mainly associated with their historical immigration from Finland to Norway, and slash-and-burn agriculture, even though this form of agriculture has not been practiced by Forest Finns for several centuries (Andreassen & Olsen, 2020). Consequently, teachers who are required to teach about national minorities, including the Forest Finns, in their classrooms (Ministry of Education, 2017) have an urgent need for more knowledge about how to represent and teach about and for the Forest Finns as a national minority in diverse classrooms.

Inspired by Andreassen and Olsen’s (2020) work on education for Indigenous peoples and national minorities, the paper draws on a theoretical framework based on four distinct yet partly overlapping educational aims: learning about, learning from, learning to, and learning for (see also Engebretson, 2009; Kumashiro, 2000; Skrefsrud, 2022). As Andreassen and Olsen (2020) emphasize, critical and constructive reflection on such aims can help make visible some of the paradoxes, dilemmas, and possibilities inherent in education where perspectives on the history, culture, and social life of national minorities are integrated into and developed as part of mainstream pedagogical practice.

With increasing international recognition of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and rights, many settler-colonial countries over past decades have not only enacted laws and policies to safeguard the rights of Indigenous communities, but also sought to transform schools in substantive ways, aiming to dismantle enduring oppression, discrimination and microaggression. In line with these global development trends, Taiwan government has undertaken key legislative initiatives, including the enactment of the Education Act for Indigenous Peoples in 1998 and the Indigenous Languages Development Act in 2017. Furthermore, more than one hundred Indigenous schools have been established (IEIW, 2025), alongside recent efforts to the recognition and construction of Indigenous knowledge systems (Council of Indigenous Peoples, 2020).

While these developments signal movements towards Indigenous educational sovereignty, the actual implementation of Indigenous education remain contested. Scholars have sharply criticized the instrumentalization of Indigeneity (Rowen, 2019) and the symbolic policies implementation by non-Indigenous groups (i.e., the Han Chinese) (Nesterova, 2023) in Taiwan. Others have argued that Indigenous education within the public education system prioritizes enhancing national competitiveness over advancing Indigenous educational justice (Chen, 2012; Nesterova, 2019). This symbolic enactment of Indigenous policies without substantive change suggests that non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples continue to be shaped by coloniality, with scholars further pointing to the ongoing processes of internal colonization (Lien, 2013; Yeh, 2019). Transforming the current schooling system therefore requires Indigenous teachers to recognize the realities shaped by the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013) and to engage in praxis to dismantle the oppressive structures (Somby & Olsen, 2022; Shirley, 2017).

A review of research on Indigenous teachers in Taiwan indicates that much of the existing literature has focused either on Indigenous teachers’ life histories or on their educational practices. Due to the separation between what Indigenous teachers experience and how they enact their practices, critical questions central to teachers’ transformative praxis remain insufficiently addressed, e.g., what motivates certain teachers to engage in actions that challenge structural constraints on Indigenous education for the benefit of Indigenous communities, and what hinders others from doing so? How can more Indigenous teachers be empowered to participate in transformative praxis? Many studies have attempted to explain teachers’ engagement in Indigenous education by emphasizing strong ethnic identity, often assuming that identity naturally triggers transformative action (e.g., Chou, 2020; Yang, 2018). However, identity alone is insufficient to sustain transformative practices (Chang, 2015).

For understanding Indigenous teachers’ engagement in transformative praxis, Freire’s theory of conscientization may shed light on how teachers’ understandings of their lived realities inform their educational practices. According to Freire (1970/2000), when individuals critically perceive reality and expose the structural, institutional, and cultural logics that sustain systems of oppression, they move beyond mythical explanations toward causal reasoning. Through this process, individuals acquire the capacity to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. However, Freire appears to assume a relatively smooth transition from reflexive understanding to transformative actions whereas in practice this process is often messy, contradictory, and uneven.

In order to clarify how teachers’ transformative actions relate to their reflexive understandings of realities, this study aims to:

1. Explore Indigenous teachers’ reflexive understanding of their situated realities,
2. Understand how Indigenous teachers seek to transform their perceived realities, and
3. Analyze how do Indigenous teachers’ reflexive understandings translate into actions that transform educational landscape.

By examining Indigenous teachers’ conscientization in Taiwan, this study contributes to global dialogues on decolonizing education by illuminating how critical consciousness is negotiated in East Asian settler-colonial educational contexts.