Lærer- og elevmangfold i det livstolkingsplurale norske klasserommet – utfordringer og muligheter for lærerutdanningen

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about how teachereducation may approach the challenges from an increasingly culturallydiverse society. Lied’s field of interest and research is the culturallydiverse classroom populated by children and students witha plurality of beliefs and religious and philosophical backgrounds.She therefore places the paper’s main research question in this frameof context and asks: how can teacher education deal with challengesand opportunities from the religiously and philosophically pluralisticNorwegian classroom? Lied pursues the question by askingthe following subsidiary ones: How does religious and philosophicalpluralism manifest itself in elementary school and in teacher education?How may students’ participation in research contribute to increasingtheir understanding the demands the pluralistic classroomputs on its teachers?Lied develops answers to the preceding questions by, at first, givinga short outline of the diverse situation in the field of religion andbeliefs in elementary school for which teacher education prepares itsstudents. She does this briefly by presenting how plurality manifestsitself in the teaching of religion and philosophy in Norwegianpublic elementary schools as well as in pupils’ utterances madeduring lessons on these topics. She then sketches the presence ofplurality in the national curriculum of this subject in teacher educationand in texts written by teacher students. After a short presentationof two projects in which teacher students (with different culturaland national backgrounds) took part as co-researchers, Lieddiscusses how students’ participation in research may be one part ofthe answer to how teacher education may approach challenges andopportunities from the pluralistic Norwegian classroom