Student experience: sameness, difference, and (in)equality in Norwegian folk high school education

Abstract

This thesis explores how Norwegian students interact with sameness, difference and (in)equality in folk high school education. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic work living at a Christian Norwegian folk high school campus I call Grøndal, I explore how the school’s experiential and values-based learning strategies contributed to perceptions of equality in students’ local and global relationships. Usually attended after high school, folk high schools offer students “gap year” programs where they can engage with their interests through ungraded coursework while experiencing the social aspects of dormitory life. Funded in part by the state, most of these schools also offer short-term study trips to locations like Moldova, Kenya, or the Philippines that coincide with school-wide community projects that raise funds for NGOs in the locations the schools visit each year. These trips are designed to give students global perspectives while also problematizing the “sameness” Marianne Gullestad argues is a characteristic of Norwegian egalitarianism, by positioning good forms of difference as essential for true equality to flourish. By examining the varying registers of sameness and difference that emerged through the folk high school’s religious services, sleeping and eating arrangements, study trips, and fundraising initiatives, I suggest that the folk high school succeeded in shaping a social world where an equality beyond sameness was realized for students living there together. When students and staff left the folk high school and ventured into Norway or the world more broadly, however, the project of equality disintegrated as they confronted the social, political, and economic inequalities that existed between themselves and the people they met outside their relational, institutional, and national borders. By assessing how bad forms of difference relating to global poverty, colonization, and climate change were addressed during folk high school programming, I argue that these schools largely reflect the Norwegian state’s commitment to maintaining its status quo through its dependence on oil, wealth accumulation, and isolationist immigration policies. At the same time, I suggest that the folk high school’s embodied value-making strategies offer critical insights into the role experiential learning can play in education and explore how problems and possibilities that emerged in these pedagogical aims reflect similar tensions in academia for students seeking to develop equality in an inequitable world.