This paper addresses teacher educators’ constructions of ‘cultural diversity’, and thus illuminates how they position themselves in relation to their constructions. The demographic realty of today’s Western societies is in transition. Thus, the relationship between teachers’ and students’ cultural-, ethnical- and racial- background has been given increased attention. As most teachers are white and experience identification with most of the majority’s values of society, coloured and minority students in urban areas, and elsewhere, share a different everyday experience. Closely linked to these divergent experiences is not only what student teachers enrolled into teacher education programmes learn about the minoritised (Adair, 2008) everyday experience throughout their education, but also what knowledge and experience their teacher educators bestow. In Norway, a range of policy documents and primary school teacher curriculum documents recognise that society is transforming and thus becomes increasingly demographically diverse (e.g. Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2009, 2010). The new national primary school teacher education curriculum of 2010 introduced a new and expanded pedagogy subject and promised the maintenance of nine perspectives throughout the education. Of these perspectives is the multicultural perspective. This perspective, combined with the new introduction of a professional pedagogy subject, raises questions with regards to how ‘the multicultural’ and‘cultural diversity’ is understood by teacher educators teaching at Norwegian primary teacher education programmes. In this paper, I thus ask the following research question: How do teacher educators, teaching the new pedagogy subject talk about, and hence construct, ‘cultural diversity’?
I draw on theoretical perspectives from critical whiteness theory and critical multicultural theory in combination with critical discourse analysis. Particularly relevant are the concepts normalising/neutralising (e.g. Frankenberg, 1993) and othering (cf. Said, 2003), binaries (Van Dijk, 2006) and metaphors (L. Cameron et al., 2009; M. Cameron, 2012). These are important perspectives in that as teacher educators talk about and hence construct ‘cultural diversity’ they, through their understanding of the world, simultaneously portrait their own positionality in the world. Moreover, they are important because teacher educators (in the West) are holders of a trifold power: they are members of the white majority, they are positioned within institutions and they are experts on teachers that teach student teachers the profession of teaching.
