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Over the last several decades intercultural education has played a key role in many educational policies and practices, both across the Nordic countries and internationally. In this article we examine current conceptual discourses on intercultural education with an emphasis on developments in the Nordic research context. The analysis shows how the concept of intercultural education and its focus on "culture" has been criticised in the Nordic countries and internationally for the pitfalls of essentialism and relativism. This criticism is linked to a perceived lack of focus on power issues in education, which undermines the development of a social justiceorientated intercultural education. However, the analysis within the Nordic research context shows signs of re-conceptualisations, which includes a widening of the field and the emergence of new and more critically-orientated approaches.

This article examines how students' cultural identities are discursively constructed in the Finnish and Swedish national curricula for the compulsory school. The aim is to illuminate the manifold discourses on cultural identity which prevail within Nordic educational policy. The study employs a critical multicultural education and postcolonial perspective with a particular focus on essentialist and non-essentialist views of identity in the curricular discourses. Through discourse analysis, key terms such as 'cultural identity' and 'multicultural identity' as well as different aspects of cultural identities such as language, gender and religion are investigated. The results show diverging discourses, with distinct differences in their explicitness and implicitness in the two countries. A clear effort to see all students as having multi-layered and multicultural identities is evident in the Finnish curricular discourse whereas a more essentializing discourse emerges in the Swedish curriculum. We conclude with a discussion on the importance of addressing policy discourses on students' cultural identities in order to ensure non-essentialist and socially just teaching and educational practice.