School is a natural place for cultural meetings. Young people’s understanding of diversity as a positive resource is dependent on the qualities on these meetings. Intercultural education is a term which is used in connection with teaching processes or interactions linked to an extended understanding through self-awareness and meetings based on good quality between teacher and pupil. The focus is on what people all over the world have in common more than what differs (Lahdenperä, 1995, 2000, 2004). Bilingual teachers will, because of their diverse background, have the possibility to extend the perspective on these cultural meetings. Galindo (1996) and Merrifield (2000) have shown how teachers with minority background can turn their multicultural background in the field of practice to account and thus have an extra competence that could be useful in a multicultural connection. There are few minority teachers in Norway. The Government makes a bid on recruiting more students with minority background to the Teacher Training Education. In 2005 only 4% of the Norwegian Teacher Training students had minority background (KD, 2007). There could be several reasons for that. Anyway, in school we have a little group minority teachers who are teaching minority children their native language or they are teaching different subjects on the mother tongue. Many of these teachers have their teacher education or other academic education from their home countries. These teachers work in different schools during a school-week. That involves a turbulent working situation with few meeting points between them and the rest of the teacher-staff in schools (Lund, 2003; Mousavi, 2005; Hauge, 2007). Examinations have shown that these teachers often experience that they do not have the feeling of belonging to a staff, they do not experience accept, they experience lack of time for cooperation with other teachers, or they experience that they get the main responsibility for the minority pupils also in fields where they are not qualified enough (Lund, 2003; Mousavi, 2005; Santoro & Reid, 2006). Three years ago eight University colleges in Norway started a cooperation project making a teacher education for these groups of teachers. This education gives the qualification to teach different subjects in the Norwegian school. And the bilingual teachers will have the opportunity to teach both minority children by using their mother tongue and Norwegian children by using a Norwegian language. The Government sanctioned this tree-year long education (HiST ALT, 2006). The education had a special focus on fitting in earlier education. The education gives an intercultural competence and at the same time the students get to know the Norwegian school-system, learn the Norwegian language better and learn more about how the Norwegian society functions, and last but not least ground values for a multicultural and including school (hino, 2004.no). The students get the possibility to have qualified teaching and didactic education in their own mother tongue and get the possibility to study at least two other school subjects. This makes it possible for bilingual teachers also to teach Norwegian pupils. This education is a part of the bid for qualifying more minority teachers (KD, 2007). At the same time, it is not enough for these teachers to just have new education. To succeed they also need a relevant job in school. Because many bilingual teachers are doing this education and soon will graduate, I would like to find out weather the Norwegian teachers are prepared to have these group of colleagues in school. In 2005-2006 I did a study to find how Norwegian teachers understood the multicultural dimension in school and especially with focus on having a bilingual colleague.

I wanted to reach as many teachers as possible with the study. Therefore I decided to use questionnaires (Grønmo, 2004; Hellevik, 2002). The purpose was not to give clear alternatives or to show a casual connection, but to get an extended understanding of the Norwegian teacher’s thoughts and reflections. I mainly chose open questions to get the most spontaneous reactions (Hellevik, 2002). Because of that I chose to put the questions into a thought connection like: “You will soon get a bilingual teacher as a colleague. How do you think this person could be a resource for the school?” I wanted to get the answers from teachers working on different places in the whole country. My experience with teaching bilingual students, had given me the information about where it might be possible for the students to ask for jobs in the future. I got the answers from sixty two teachers from six different schools. Forty seven had experiences with bilingual teachers or they worked in schools with minority children. The rest did not have this experience at all. During the analyses I looked for key words, similarities or words which could give meaning to preliminary categories which could put the material into a system or a pattern. This I hoped would give me some better understanding. In the interest of simplicity I made a fixed pattern where I put quotations under different categories. I found a variation and more contents in the answers from the Norwegian teachers who had experienced a multicultural situation than in the answers from those who had not this experience. This gave me ground for further systematisation of the viewpoint of bilingual teachers as a colleague.

None of the teachers in my study gives any negative information about having a bilingual colleague. But there are differences in answers between teachers working in schools with minority pupils / minority teachers and those who do not work in such schools. The teachers working in schools without minorities have fewer descriptions about how they will like to have a bilingual colleague. They are engaged in telling that bilingual teachers have ”something” to tell or to contribute ”something”, but what this ”something” contains, is not concrete apart from containing an other language or another cultural background. None of them has gone thoroughly into describing what a bilingual teacher could do towards each pupil or towards the school as an organisation. What the bilingual teacher could do as a teacher or connected to a special subject except of “showing something from own culture” is not described. The responses are not clear in addition to how the bilingual teachers could affect the school situation or have an affect on the intercultural behaviour in the school. They think the bilingual teacher might have some interesting cultural information which could be interesting for the school. The teachers having an intercultural experience mainly put the effort on tree field: the bilingual teacher as 1) an intercultural “conscious maker” for the school, 2) as a model for building the identity for the minority pupils and 3) as a person building a bridge of understanding between minority and majority in school. All the teachers had the same opinion connected to the challenges bilingual teachers might meet in school. It was interesting to notice that it was easier for teachers without intercultural experiences to describe possible problems than positive experiences for the bilingual teachers. Several teachers underlined the challenge connected to cooperating. I understand the feedback from all the Norwegian teachers directly connected to the bilingual teacher’s language and communication in different situations and to developing knowledge. A socio-cultural paradigm underlines the developing of different types of tools which makes various activities possible. (Säljö, 2001, 2006; Vygotsky, 1978; Wittek 2004). These tools are guides for the human and social developing in different directions dependent on the cultural and historical periods of living. A bilingual teacher will from the beginning use different tools as a Norwegian teacher in their occupational behaviour. The Norwegian school is based on the ideology of equality and a national cultural inheritance (Baune, 2007; UFD, 2006). Bilingual teachers and other minority teachers may challenge this tradition and could be seen as critical and easily gets mistrusted. At the same time it is natural to think that these teachers are the first to make the minority’s culture and values visible. They will have the possibility to support the minority’s self-esteem and feeling of belonging. This inquiry shows that some Native Norwegian teachers means, that the bilingual teachers will not be good enough for teaching in the Norwegian school system. Connected to this it is important to discuss the standard of Norwegian as a teaching language and what sort of communication competence we need for teaching in a Norwegian school. The Norwegian school is used to be described as an including and multicultural school (UNESCO, 1994; KD, 2007; UFD, 2003) and the school has at the same time long traditions for equality. A political effort to employ more bilingual teachers in the school system is important, in connection with values as including and diversity and for the purpose of making effort on a higher intercultural consciousness and social practises. This makes it necessary to make a new focus in connection with the practise of appointing authorities in school. More bilingual teachers in school, as a part of the staff, makes it clear that it is the institution, not the pupils that takes the responsibility for the intercultural perspective of the school (Hauge, 2007).This takes for granted that bilingual teachers are able to consciously reflect on language, school, culture diversity and social understanding in Norway and build a bridge of understanding between languages and traditions. If this is reality, making space for bilingual teachers in school could be a step further into the aim of a modern multicultural school.