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.
While the Finnish education system has been celebrated for promoting equality, recent reports point to problems concerning racism within Finnish schools. Kristín Loftsdóttir suggests looking at racism from three angles: everyday racism, prior immobility, and structural racism. This chapter draws on this idea, showing how racism is present in Finnish school textbooks in history, social science and geography. Many textbooks seem to deviate from the curricular core values of equality by portraying the West as superior to the rest of the world. This is visible in different ways. While old racist or colonial words are removed from textbooks, the perspective may still only promote a Western worldview. Changes in textbooks might stay on a superficial level, rather than reaching the epistemological perspective. History textbook passages about colonial times might include images of racist caricatures to express the explicit racism of this era. Similar caricatures are being removed from consumer products, and we might ask whether they belong to history teaching, particularly if they do not encourage a discussion about continued racism. Using textbooks with racist content requires that teachers are aware of racism. The teacher needs to know how to lead critical reflection, while keeping the classroom safe from racist remarks. During a pandemic, when students are alone with textbooks, there is a particular concern about the democratic task of educating for anti-racism. This is especially important in a world largely influenced by a media discourse that makes certain racist opinions unremarked or seen as a matter of common sense.
She is a member of the Nordic center of excellence Justice through Education in the Nordic countries (JustEd). She has a teacher background. Her PhD research is a discourse analytic study of how school textbooks in history, social studies and geography portray Westerners and non-Westerners. Besides studying the discourse of West, Mikander's research interests include social science education, values in education, the concept of critical thinking as well as education about globalization and global inequality. Her publications include Globalization as Continuing Colonialism-Critical Global Citizenship Education in an Unequal World (2016), Democracy and Human Rights: A Critical Look at the Concept of Western Values in Finnish School Textbooks (2015) and together with Gunilla Holm: Constructing threats and a need for control: textbook descriptions of a growing, moving world population (2014).
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