Truth-telling pedagogies in Norwegian teacher education: beyond closing the knowledge gap

Norway likes to think of itself as a country without a colonial history. It was the first nation to ratify ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous rights, it established a Sámi Parliament in 1989, and it has codified consultation procedures concerning land use. Yet a new study argues that this self-image of exceptional innocence is precisely what blocks meaningful reconciliation with the Sámi, the Indigenous people of Sápmi, and that Norwegian teacher education sits at the heart of the problem. The research, published in Frontiers in Education, examines how truth-telling pedagogies can be conceptualized in the Norwegian-Sámi context in the wake of the country’s 2023 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and it delivers a pointed critique of the idea that reconciliation can be achieved simply by filling a knowledge gap.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission delivered its report to the Norwegian parliament, the Stortinget, in 2023. The roughly 700-page document documented the history and consequences of Norwegianization, the state-led assimilation policies directed at the Sámi as well as the Forest Finns and Kven/Norwegian Finns, officially in place between roughly 1850 and 1960. The commission collected 766 personal stories from people affected by the policies, and it concluded that while assimilationist measures were formally discontinued during the 1960s, the societal processes that led to Norwegianization did not stop. Yet the concept of colonialism was nearly absent from the report, appearing mainly in a textbox explaining that the term is controversial and must be applied with caution. For the study’s authors, Kristin Gregers Eriksen of the University of South-Eastern Norway, Camilla Eline Andersen of the University of Inland Norway, and Hege Merethe Somby of Sámi University of Applied Sciences, this omission is telling. It re-establishes what they call sanctioned ignorance, an actively produced and sustained absence of colonial history within institutions, rather than a mere accident of oversight.

The stakes of that ignorance are not abstract. The study highlights the case of reindeer-herding Sámi Arvid Jåma, whose testimony to the commission described how international conventions on Indigenous rights proved worthless in practice when wind turbine interests argued in court that his community was too few and its land too small to be protected. Nearly two years before the commission’s report was launched, the Norwegian Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that large-scale wind turbines erected in Jåma’s reindeer-herding area in Fosen violated Sámi herders’ right to cultural practice under Article 27 of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The state had made no efforts to act on the ruling. The authors describe such dynamics as green colonialism, where dispossession of Sámi lands is justified in the name of the green transition and ideas of societal progress and the greater good. What is at stake, they argue, is not merely disagreement over facts but competing claims to truth rooted in fundamentally different knowledge systems and worldviews.

The commission proposed reconciliation initiatives grouped into five pillars: knowledge and dissemination, language, culture, prevention of conflicts, and implementation of regulations. A parliamentary committee then proposed 17 recommendations for following up, most of which focused on language, heritage, and education. Recommendations concerning ongoing land use conflicts, the pressured situation for reindeer herding, and material or economic redress fell silent in parliamentary processing. The authors draw on Rauna Kuokkanen’s concept of a settler-colonial logic of culturalization, a form of governance in which Indigenous claims are depoliticized and reframed as matters of culture while questions of land, consent, and political authority are deflected or deferred. Within this logic, education becomes a key site where reconciliation is culturalized, as historical injustice is addressed through knowledge and awareness initiatives while deeper questions of Sámi self-determination remain marginal.

This is where teacher education enters the picture. Sámi history, culture, and society are mandatory components of the national curriculum for all students, and substantial knowledge of Sámi issues across subjects is a core requirement in teacher education at all levels in Norway. Yet research documents a persistent gap between policy intentions and practical realities: lack of economic prioritization, low teacher competence, and outdated teaching materials and methods hamper implementation. A large-scale survey from 2022 revealed that almost half the Norwegian population reported learning nothing about Sámi cultures in school, while a third reported little or no knowledge. In studies of majority teachers’ perceived preparedness to teach Sámi knowledges, none explicitly mentioned coloniality or racism, and teacher students are often surprised when presented with descriptions of Norway as a colonial state. The concept of colonialism is absent from curriculum plans for both school and teacher education.

The authors argue that framing the problem as a knowledge gap is itself misleading and, more provocatively, colonial in its logic. The commission’s report documents how Sámi knowledge of Norwegianization and its consequences has always been present, in people’s lived experiences, family histories, and in Sámi academia, where questions of coloniality and decolonization have a far longer history than in the Norwegian mainstream. The absent curriculum is not simply the result of missing information but is, implicitly or explicitly, willed. Drawing on Barbara Applebaum’s work on willful ignorance, the authors suggest that the absence of Sámi knowledges in mainstream teacher education represents affectively embedded sanctioned ignorance, what the majority needs not to know in order to sustain national self-understandings of innocence and exceptionalism. This is not only a cognitive issue but involves political emotions tied to self-understanding and to what one affectively needs not to know.

To move beyond this impasse, the authors propose a conceptual framework for truth-telling pedagogies built on four interrelated layers: relational, epistemological, ontological, and affective-existential. The relational layer constructs a learning space grounded not in the absence of tension but in shared vulnerability, care, trust, and an ethical commitment to remain with discomfort rather than withdraw from it. The epistemological layer involves building a shared contextual knowledge base about injustices, including not only historical information about colonization and Norwegianization but also explicit engagement with the arguments, logics, and structures that sustain coloniality. The ontological layer requires acknowledging that there are multiple, coexisting ways of being, knowing, and relating to land, language, and community, moving beyond inclusion of Sámi perspectives as content toward recognizing Sámi onto-epistemologies as fundamentally distinct and equally valid to dominant frameworks that often go unnamed. The affective-existential layer, at the core of the framework, implicates the learner’s sense of self, responsibility, and relationality, involving emotional labor, ethical reflection, and the reconfiguration of one’s position within ongoing colonial relations.

The framework draws heavily on the authors’ collective teaching and research experiences, and their collaborative work is ethically embedded in verddevuohta, a North-Sámi term for guest-friendship referring to a Sámi ethos of reciprocity emphasizing interdependent relationships of mutual respect, exchange, and collective responsibility. Their previous studies among Norwegian teacher educators found that transformative engagement with Sámi knowledges depended on the sense that vulnerability was shared collectively, and that colleagues worked in solidarity while sitting with the risks and challenges of difficult knowledges. Aesthetic learning processes such as explorative work with materials, drama, and role-play created spaces in which hierarchical roles were softened and emotions were legitimized. Existential encounters with Sámi knowledge bearers, particularly through storytelling and the experience of being invited in, proved especially significant. As one teacher educator reflected in a previous study, it was the feeling of being invited in by the story, even as an outsider, of being given permission to take part by the author and her community.

A key insight of the framework is that discomfort cannot be forced but must be nurtured as an emotional capacity within learners. Drawing on Gannaway’s work on truth-telling in the Australian context, the authors describe discomfort as a portal to transformative possibilities, where carefully prepared openings allow learners to be emotionally and collectively supported to engage with difficult knowledge. When experienced as coercive or overwhelming, discomfort may result in resistance or withdrawal. Transformation depends on creating conditions in which learners are drawn toward difficult knowledge rather than forced into it, with desire functioning as an affective pull motivated by curiosity, relationality, and ethical commitment. The authors also distinguish between dialogue and conversation, arguing that while deliberative dialogical models often aim at consensus and resolution, conversation remains open-ended, relational, and grounded in the immediacy of encounter, making it particularly suited to truth-telling where the goal is not agreement but ethical responsiveness.

The authors are candid about the risks of their own proposal. Education’s role in reconciliation can be overestimated, reducing truth-telling to practices of culturalization that reproduce and depoliticize colonial relations. Repairing relations between the Sámi and the Norwegian state are deeply political questions requiring thorough engagement with economic and material questions of justice, and teacher education cannot deliver reconciliation. Neoliberal pressures of production, efficiency, and measurable cognitive learning outcomes make it risky and difficult for teacher educators to facilitate the relational and affective learning processes the framework requires, and lack of economic prioritization and recognition of Sámi knowledge bearers’ contributions remain major structural challenges. Yet the authors maintain that educational spaces can cultivate the affective, ethical, and political capacities needed to engage with the unresolved and contested questions that reconciliation continues to raise, and that anti-colonial hope need not culminate in guilt or despair but can nurture desires, relationships, and commitments oriented toward alternative futures. These pedagogical possibilities retain their transformative potential only insofar as they remain connected to broader struggles over power, land, rights, and self-determination, rather than becoming substitutes for them.

Subject of Research: Truth-telling pedagogies in Norwegian-Sámi teacher education

Article Title: Conceptualizing truth-telling pedagogies in the Norwegian—Sámi context: beyond “closing the knowledge gap” in teacher education

Article References: Eriksen, K. G., Andersen, C. E., & Somby, H. M. (2026). Conceptualizing truth-telling pedagogies in the Norwegian—Sámi context: beyond “closing the knowledge gap” in teacher education. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1909684. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1909684

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1909684

Keywords: Sámi, teacher education, truth and reconciliation, coloniality, Indigenous knowledges, Norway, Conceptualizing, truth-telling, pedagogies, Norwegian, context, beyond