The latter conflates with Statistics Norway’s (SSB) separate categorization of this demographic under ‘Asia, Afrika, Latin-Amerika, Oseania unntatt Australia og New Zealand, og Europa utenom EU28/EØS’, thus highlighting the need for research that acknowledges, is sensitive and engages robustly with some of the reasons for the performance gap between majority and minority-background pupils in Norwegian schools.
Areas of Research
While ‘diversity’ and ‘multicultural education’ are terms that can overlap with ‘minorities and education’, a sharper focus on ‘minorities and education’ is necessary to engage with this growing segment of the Norwegian demographic and a corollary of educationally related challenges they encounter. The corollary of challenges include, but are not limited to, family backgrounds (low cultural capital), intolerance (e.g. racism, Islamophobia) and culturally/religiously-anchored gender discrimination. The research group will also extend its scope to include minorities with disabilities and specific challenges they encounter in school. This type of research will lay foundation for researchers to examine educational equity for learners with diverse skills in school. While diversity in race, culture and language differences increasingly characterizes schools globally, classrooms are also characterized by skills diversity (especially among students with minority backgrounds). The differences in skills diversity (physical, social and academic differences) among learners are sometimes wide to the extent that typical school curricula, teaching and learning approaches are neither appropriate nor effective for some children.
How do we conduct our research?
Members of our research group draw on a broad range of methodological approaches, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods designs.
Partners and networks
The research group works with colleagues in Africa (e.g., Ghana, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia) and Asia (e.g., India, Brunei Darussalam), as members have conducted research and liaised with academics in these countries.
