This paper addresses tensions between a centralised curriculum and its enactment in the context of northern Norway. The region is characterised by diversity, lower levels of educational attainment and higher drop-out rates from secondary education than other regions of Norway, but unemployment is low. Limited educational provision makes it necessary for many young people in rural areas to leave home to attend secondary school. Large geographical distances make it difficult to commute on a daily basis. Historically, this area has been the most culturally diverse in Norway, as the domicile of the Sámi Indigenous people and the national minority, the Kven, and the Norwegian ethnic groups. Today, this Arctic region is characterised by the encounter with three ethnicities, and traditional industries such as fishing, farming and herding, combined with modern industry and knowledge-intensive enterprises. The region experiences high emigration but also has a relatively high international population due to employment in fisheries and refugee settlement policy. Despite this multi-ethnic and geographically diverse society, schools are still struggling with a universalistic curriculum that inadequately takes account of pupil diversity and fails to address geographical differences. When diversity of ethnic groups and places are not taken account of by the curriculum, the education system can be experienced as alienating and foreign. This leads to a generalising of universal oriented career paths overlooking and devaluating the existence of diversity can be overlooked and devaluated. In an education system that neither has the multiethnic society embedded, nor are given in the hometown of the adolescents, the education system is exogenous and can appear foreign. This represents a contrast to core values of the Nordic education model highlighting equality, inclusion and all-embracing social community (Lundahl, 2016). Critical discussions of the foundational relational structure of pedagogy and the curriculum are important to discover and open up “Invisible Fences” (Gullestad 2002), in order to create social justice for a diverse variety of rural youth, knowledges and career paths. This paper is structured as follows: 1) we draw on autoethnographic methodology to use our own experiences as researchers to describe, understand and analyse the phenomenon of education in northern Norway; 2) we use public statistics and a literature review to demonstrate the diversity of northern Norway; 3) we present a possible way forward by constructing education as a relational practice, and argue that curricula should take account of the inherent uncertainty, diversity and beautiful risk of educational relations.

Adams, P. (2024). Pedagogy and positioning theory: relationships and the formation of context. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-21. Antikainen, A (2006). In Search of the Nordic Model in Education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational research. 50, 3, 229-243 Biesta, G. J. (2015). Beautiful risk of education. Routledge. Friesen, N., & Kenklies, K. (2022). Continental pedagogy & curriculum. International encyclopedia of education, 7, 245-255. Gullestad, M (2002). Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Nationalism and Racism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(1) 45-63. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00098 Houssaye, J., (1988). Théorie et pratiques de l’éducation scolaire I: Le triangle pédagogique. Peter Lang. Lundahl, L. (2016). Equality, Inclusion and Marketization of Nordic Education: Introductory Notes. Research in Comparative & International Education, 11(1), 3-12.