This paper reviews discourses on multicultural education and the concept of intercultural competencies in the European and Nordic country of Finland. We focus on their present uses and perceptions by decision-makers, researchers, and also student teachers. Some prognosis for the future is made based on a short case study from art teacher education in this context. The case study represents an approach that replaces an understanding of intercultural competencies only grounded in knowledge with an approach grounded in criticality. In this way, the article represents an attempt to evaluate how intercultural competencies can and should be reconceptualised in global scholarship today. Policies on Multicultural Education in Finland Intercultural Competences Renewing the Competencies Perceptions of Intercultural Competencies Creating Glocal Meanings in Finnish Art Education Conclusion Notes ReferencesVol. 14, No. 3

In art education we need methods for studying works of art and visual culture interculturally because there are many multicultural art classes and little consensus as to how to interpret art in different cultures. In this article my central aim was to apply the intertextual method that I developed in my doctoral thesis for Western art education to explore whether the method would also work from a non‐Western point of view. My hypothesis was that it is possible to find local and global differences that arise from selected texts and study them interculturally. As postmodernism calls attention to marginal areas, I applied my method to a form of visual culture that is not well known in the European art education context, the Japanese kamishibai which can be translated as Japanese paper theatre. Based on the results, my study will propose a method for understanding visual culture and the multiple relations ‐ local and global ‐ between different cultures. Japanese paper theatre also offers an interesting potential for using visual and verbal stories in the theory and practice of art education.

This multidisciplinary article presents a methodology, a research project and selected outcomes from an environmental art education course for teacher students. The course is part of an art education minor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Teacher Education. The students were asked to construct their place through an intertextual art method that provided them the means to study their place open‐endedly as a space of plural cultural meanings. Applying the results from their intertextual process, they reconstructed their place artistically. The end product was a personal work of art that included traces of their chosen places, and created a new meaning for it. The outcome is a visual space of compacted meanings from different places. Places contain history and memories important to identity construction. The results show that the intertextual reading extends the students’ concept of place as a space for relational and plural cultural meanings. Foucault's concept of heterotopia, as it applies to otherness of places and spaces, was used alongside the intertextual art method.

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