A Transatlantic Approach to Teaching and Learning about Norwegian Migration to the United States

Abstract

133 t e a c h i n g a n d l e a r n i n g A Transatlantic Approach to Teaching and Learning about Norwegian Migration to the United States Jens Johan Hyvik and Kyle Ward During the spring semester of 2019 a group of students at Minnesota State University , Mankato (MSU), and the University of South-­ Eastern Norway (USN)1 took a course entitled Norwegian Migration to the United States, co-­ taught by Kyle Ward (MSU) and Jens Johan Hyvik (USN). The course was part of a project funded by Diku (the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education) under the partnership program for North America. The purpose of this grant was to enable the institutions to offer co-­taught courses that students from both universities could enroll in, as well as offer the students a unique educational experience by including Norwegian and American students in the same 134 teaching and learning course. All of this would be done while still allowing students to continue their regular coursework at their home institutions. In this article, we will discuss the experiences we had creating this course, as well as how the students experienced the course based on their evaluations. In sum: despite needing to overcome several logistical hurdles, the students and professors came away with positive teaching and learning experiences. The hybrid nature of the course, including perhaps most importantly study time in each country , enhanced U.S. and Norwegian students’ knowledge of the history of Norwegian migration as well as contributed to their better understanding of Norwegian and American politics and culture more generally. The Origins of the Course To begin, it is necessary to discuss the origins of the course and its eventual organization . The first contacts that led to the cooperation between the history departments at MSU and USN were made in 2016 when a delegation from USN (Nils Ivar Agøy, Herleik Baklid, and Jens Johan Hyvik) visited the history faculty at MSU. One of the main reasons the delegation from USN reached out to the faculty at MSU is because these two institutions already had an institutional agreement that allowed for some exchange programs between the two schools. From the start of our meetings in 2016, it seemed like there was a good institutional “match” between MSU and USN, both on an institutional level and an academic level in the respective history departments. MSU and the newly merged USN have approxi­ mately the same size student populations and they share a number of similar majors that prepare students for professional jobs. Both MSU and USN’s history departments offer history majors, in addition to having a strong focus on teacher education. MSU offers a large social studies education program, as well as a master ’s program in history, and USN offers a graduate Master of Teacher Education program, or “lektorprogam,” in history. In 2017 the Norwegian Center for Internationalization of Education, SiU (now Diku) published a call for projects under the Partnership Program with North America. Together MSU and USN developed a project we called the Partnership 135 a transatlantic approach Program in History. Jens Johan Hyvik was the project manager and coordinator from USN and Kyle Ward served as the coordinator from MSU. The project consisted of two activities: 1. Develop a course about Norwegian emigration to the United States to be co-­ taught by professors from the two universities and include two study-­ abroad trips, one to the United States and one to Norway. 2. Run a pilot program where student-­ teacher candidates from MSU could have a field experience teaching in a Norwegian school and Norwegian students who wanted to go to Minnesota could similarly gain classroom experience. To meet the demands of the teacher exchange, Nøtterøy High School and Mankato West High School were included in the project as Network Partners. While the focus of this article is the development of the Norwegian Migration to the United States course, it is worth mentioning that the student-­ teacher exchange has been far more successful than we originally expected. Our hope was to send one student each way, but by the end of...