Conference Agenda

Finland is increasingly a multilingual and multicultural society, but this is still only weakly reflected in higher education. People with migrant background are clearly underrepresented in Finnish higher education compared to the other Nordic countries (Airas et al., 2019). Societal polarization and ethnic and socio-economic segregation are growing challenges in Finnish society (Bernelius & Huilla, 2021; Rajavuori, 2024; Ndomo, 2024). Particularly in the fields of education and training, there is a strong demand for teachers to be native speakers, based on nationalist ideology (Autere & Länsisalmi, 2024). However, in the field of applied linguistics, the concept of “native speaker” has long and widely been problematized: language skills are always situational and partial and being 'native' is neither a guarantee nor a prerequisite for being a good teacher (see e.g., Mahboob, 2005). On the contrary, there is a vital need for multilingual and multicultural experts, particularly in education and teacher education. This is one way to dismantle inequality, and ethnic and socio-economic segregation.

This timely challenge is being addressed in this study which focuses on teacher education and examines how teacher educators orient toward incoming migrant background students. The University of Jyväskylä is the first university in Finland to introduce a dedicated admission pathway for students with a Finnish as a second language background to early childhood education and primary school teacher education, starting in autumn 2026. As a teacher education community, we have proactively prepared for these incoming students through implementing a professional development pilot as well as by systematically researching and reflecting on our own processes of change during the training. This research is connducted in collaboration with Häme University of Applied Sciences (HAMK) and Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences (JAMK), which have extensive experience in this field.

In this presentation, we present preliminary findings on how teacher educators critically examine the cultural assumptions and values embedded in educational structures, practices and materials, and how they develop their pedagogical and supervisory practices to meet the opportunities and challenges of linguistic and cultural diversity.

The recent research on higher education indicates that university staff lack sufficient competence in language- and culturally aware teaching practices and in guidance of building students’ self-confidence, expert identities, and academic literacy skills (Makrooni, 2022; Leskinen, 2024; Virtanen, 2024). Obviously, teacher educators are not sufficiently aware of the white normativity of education and racialising practices (Souto & Lappalainen, 2024). Also, the ability to operate in multilingual and multicultural interactional contexts (Layne & Theng, 2022) and to jointly explore diverse ways of knowing, knowledge construction, and worldviews together with students needs to be developed (Ennser-Kananen et al., 2024). Clearly, the increasing diversity of students requires rethinking teacher education programs.

In recent years, racism in Norway has received increasing attention, with a number of studies and reports demonstrating how it manifests in various forms across different areas of society. Personal narratives and lived experiences of racism in public debate have emphasized that racism is a topical, contested and challenging issue in Norwegian public discourse (e.g., Døving, 2022). This is reflected in educational contexts where racism is understood as both sensitive, emotional and controversial (Sibeko & Eriksen, 2022). This entails a recognition of how racism as a topic tends to invoke strong emotions and polarized opinions (Faye, 2024, p. 2). Disagreement on how to define and identify expressions of racism as a phenomenon in present day Norway, constitutes a major reason for why the topic is challenging to discuss (Sibeko & Eriksen, 2022, p. 34). For instance, some studies suggest that many students view racism as an exceptional phenomenon associated with historical events such as apartheid or the Holocaust, or as a trait of morally and socially deviant individuals (see Hagen, 2021; Røthing, 2017). This suggests that students lack the conceptual tools and analytical frameworks to critically assess and reflect on racism as a contemporary and structural phenomenon.

Research on antiracist work in schools have advocated teaching practices that highlight structural perspectives on racism (c.f. Arneback & Jämte, 2022; Eriksen, 2021). Consequently, different pedagogical approaches, such as safe space, pedagogies of discomfort and brave space, have been suggested, with the purpose of sensitizing students to racism as a structural phenomenon, while simultaneously considering the sensitive nature of the topic (Flensner & von der Lippe, 2019). While the former emphasizes the need to create pedagogical spaces that protect the emotional safety of participants, the latter two concepts accentuate how experiences with discomfort and engagements in challenging conversations may act to produce important spaces for learning (Arao & Clemens, 2013). Inspired by these approaches, this paper explores how an inductive case-based teaching approach (see Lycke, 2016; Prince & Felder, 2007) can equip students with the analytical tools necessary to comprehend the various manifestations of racism within historical and contemporary contexts.

In this paper we present preliminary findings from a study of teaching sessions where four groups of students in higher education are presented with and discuss cases illustrating racism, othering and/or exclusion. The empirical material consists of transcripts, field notes and student evaluations from these teaching sessions. The paper explores which understandings of racism the students apply when discussing the cases, how they draw on each other’s understanding and how they deal with disagreements in the conversational process.

In our data collection, and in continued work with the empirical material, we view discomfort as a potential pedagogical resource in anti-racist education, while remaining attentive to who might experience it and not. A key concern has been, and is, to avoid portraying students with experiences with racism as illustrative examples or implicitly expect them to share personal experiences. Therefore, we have and continuously seek to establish conditions resembling what Arao & Clemens (2013) refer to as 'brave spaces' rather than 'safe spaces': spaces in which discomfort and disagreement are anticipated, but with clear boundaries regarding harm, personal exposure, and who may end up bearing the costs of others' learning.

Pressures on universities worldwide that are displacing spaces and practices of solidarity from the ‘within’ to the ‘outside’ of academic institutions, are increasing worldwide, most notably in countries such as Hungary (Dönmez & Duman, 2021; Cantat et al 2021; Cook et al. 2023), Turkey (Safta-Zecheria, 2021) and the United States of America (see Burton et al, forthcoming), among many other contexts. However, in European and Latin American contexts, higher education inclusion is still still mostly seen as a desirable policy horizon (in relation to the sustainable development goal 4) that universities and education policy makers should strive towards. However, what exactly is meant by academic inclusion is still a matter of debate, as is the implementation of an inclusion agenda in the context of recurring and extensive austerity measures that affect educational budgets. In this paper, we explore the tensions between two modalities of understanding inclusion in higher education: intercultural universities (hereafter IU; Dietz, 2009; Dietz et al., 2025; Mateos-Cortés & Dietz, 2025) as specific for an approach promoted in Latin America and most specifically Mexico from the beginning of the 2000s, and Universal Design of Learning (heareafter UDL) in Higher Education that has been promoted as an inclusion framework in a similar timeframe mostly in English speaking contexts (see Quirke et al 2023). Whereas UDL (see CAST, 2025) is built on principles of universalism, operationalizing learning contexts in a structured way promoting the creation in learning contexts of multiple ways of engagement, representation and action and expression thus seeking to incorporate difference as a resource in learning. Although questions of identity, language, symbols and knowledge circulation, as well as interaction, expression and communication are addressed, the answers given to the questions are rather basic – inclusion is performed by attending to the process of learning rather than attending to what is learned and where. While UDL is not an equity (or social justice) framework per se (Rao et al, 2023), it nevertheless seeks to address the needs of both sensorially, physically, culturally, linguistically and otherwise diverse learners, conceived of as individuals, in a shared framework and has been long associated with the tradition of the social model of disability (see Shakespeare, 2017) . At the same time, intercultural universities cater mostly to indigenous and/or highly marginalized students, perceived and treated as historically excluded communities (Mateos-Cortes, 2017), and are based on an ecology of knowledge approach (de Sousa Santos, 2024) that inscribes knowledge and its circulation differently. In this context, investigating how these different approaches work in practice to facilitate inclusion and how these processes of inclusion travel within the biographies of graduating students beyond the university and in relation to their communities is of paramount importance for crafting a social justice-informed culturally, disability and socio-materially sensitive vocabulary for opening up and transforming the university.