8 - Schooling for Tolerance: Dealing with Conflict and Controversy

Summary

After the killings in Norway on 22 July 2011 as well as other terrorist attacks around the world, we wanted to scrutinize how cultural values and norms in an area as potentially problematic as Groruddalen become objects of consensus. We were particularly interested in how schools function as mediating institutions in multicultural societies. Chapter 8 xplores concerns about how tensions and conflicts, especially between different ethnic or racial groups, are articulated and mediated in school where a vision of the collective social whole is contrasted with notions of the other and the different. In Norway teachers are not necessarily afraid of taking up and discussing controversial issues. In Groruddalen, we might expect some of these social tensions to become more pronounced, simply because schools contain a broader mix of cultural and religious groups. The chapter examines a role-play sequence at school where the purpose was to engage with controversial issues (such as gay rights and euthanasia) from different ideological positions. In general, then, these questions about identity politics, religious values, and the learning of tolerance develop from our concern with how bildung has been recalibrated in contemporary Norwegian education.