Patterns of racialised discourses in Norwegian teacher education policy: Whiteness as a pedagogy of amnesia in the national curriculum

Abstract

This article adds to new ways of understanding the institutionalisation of Whiteness as subtle workings of race and racism within education policy. It presents a critical discourse analysis of how Whiteness works through the use and meaning making of the term ‘cultural diversity’ in six Norwegian teacher education policy and curriculum documents. These documents are positioned as promoters of social justice. This article, however, aims to contest this position. Framed under the theoretical perspectives of critical Whiteness studies, discourse analysis and Goldberg’s theorisation of racialised discourse, the findings indicate that Whiteness is embedded in the usage of the term ‘cultural diversity’, manifested in discursive patterns of (1) three hierarchically arranged pupil group categories, (2) descriptions that place the pupil group categories as either superior Norwegian or as inferior non-Norwegian, and (3) the role of student teachers as ‘political actors of assimilation’. I argue that despite these educational documents being explicitly positioned as promoters of social justice, they are nonetheless both a product and producers of racialised discourses of Othering and exclusion – a result of the Norwegian ‘imagined sameness’ ideal and a socially accepted ‘pedagogy of amnesia’ that blinds itself to the current workings of the imperial and colonial legacy of race and racism.