ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a project in a teacher education programme at a university in Norway, in which teacher educators engaged in collective learning through a reading circle as a strategy for enhancing twenty-first-century skills. Establishing a connection between cultural diversity and sustainable futures, UNESCO highlights the importance of diversity related to perspectives on knowledge in their account of twenty-first-century skills, explicitly mentioning indigenous knowledges. The Norwegian education system is legally obliged to integrate indigenous Sámi perspectives at all levels, including teacher education. However, this obligation seems poorly operationalized in practice. Applying a collaborative autoethnographic methodology, the authors share how a reading circle centring on indigenous knowledges has nurtured deeper understanding and better integration of these in their own practices as teacher educators. The authors argue that there is a need for changes not only in understanding what is experienced as “other” but also of oneself, emphasizing self-reflexivity. A main finding from the project was that this self-reflexivity may require engaging in “slow pedagogy”. Thus, the chapter argues that in order to work “efficiently” with twenty-first-century skills, one might paradoxically need to resist the neoliberal pressures in education towards productivity and performance and engage in more unpredictable, collective learning processes.
