Call: Teaching American Studies in Norway Working Group (TAS), a Community of Practice
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Mission: The Teaching American Studies in Norway Working Group (TAS) connects educators across sectors to advance innovative, interdisciplinary, and research-informed approaches to teaching American studies in local, regional, and global contexts.
Rationale: Educators work across a range of disciplines, including English language learning, literature, history, political science, philosophy, social studies, media studies and cultural studies to examine the United States from comparative, international, and transnational perspectives. Yet there is not a dedicated space where ideas can be exchanged about how American Studies is taught in Nordic educational contexts.
We aim to create a collaborative community for educators who teach about the US across all levels of education. Affiliated with ASANOR, this group will serve as a forum for sharing pedagogical approaches, developing teaching resources, discussing curricular challenges, and fostering collaborative research.
Aiming for discipilinary and intergenerational inclusion, the working group welcomes participants from universities, upper secondary schools (VGS), lower secondary schools, and primary schools, international schools, and Fulbright Roving Scholars. By bringing together educators from different sectors, we seek to strengthen and expand dialogue across educational levels with an aim in building sustainable and meaningful collaborations between teachers, researchers, and ultim ately, students.
We encourage approaches that situate the US within broader global, comparative, and transnational frameworks while also engaging with contemporary debates about democracy, culture, identity, race, gender, class, migration, Indigenous histories, settler colonialism, foreign policy, climate change, and the environment. The working group will provide opportunities to: exchange teaching ideas and classroom practices; develop and share teaching resources; discuss curricula; organize workshops, seminars, and conference panels; initiate collaborative pedagogical and disciplinary research; and strengthen the teaching of American Studies across educational sectors.
Possible points of inquiry:
How do Norwegian curricula shape what students learn (and do not learn) about the US?
What does American Studies contribute to teaching and learning English, history, social studies, and teacher education?
How do current events in the US affect classrooms in Norway?
What knowledge about the US do students bring into the classroom and how does this impact instruction?
How can we think creatively and critically about teaching American Studies from a Nordic perspective?
How do we teach the US without reproducing American exceptionalism?
How do teachers’ working conditions in Norwegian schools and higher education (informed by political frameworks as well as institutional conditions) impact what and how we teach American Studies?
Current TAS steering committee members:
Eir-Anne Edgar, NTNU
Stefan Rabitsch, UiO
Astrid Haas, UiB
Colin Haines, Oslo Met
Jessica Allen Hanssen, Nord University
Stephen D. Dougherty, UiA