PhD project Sami language education in schools can be regulated in different ways depending on in which country the school is located. A child on the Norwegian side of the border is part of the Norwegian school system and is subject to Norwegian educational policies. And likewise for a child on the Swedish side of the border being subject to Swedish educational policies.
In Sweden and Norway, Sami language education in schools is regulated by a national curriculum. My research focuses on these official, written documents, i.e., the formal curriculum. Analysing these documents does not tell us anything about what is taught in the classroom or what the children getting Sami language education learn. Instead, analysing the formal curriculum can tell us something about the ideological motivations behind it, and the state politics and existing norms that are reflected in it.
We can see around the world that formal education for Indigenous peoples has been and is still used to assimilate and suppress Indigenous peoples. We can, however, see a change in education policies the past decades. From policies meant to assimilate and suppress the Indigenous peoples, either by explicitly doing so or by ignoring their existence, towards policies aiming to revitalise Indigenous languages and cultures. This is also something that we can see in the context of Sami language education in Sweden and Norway.
So, we can see a move from education as means to assimilate and suppress Sami languages and cultures to Sami language education as an arena for language reclamation. In my doctoral project, I use critical discourse analysis to analyse the current curricula for Sami language education in primary school in Sweden and Norway. In this way, I can look at the underlying ideologies, state politics and norms being reflected in these documents. By comparing the two contexts, we can see the similarities and unique elements in each curriculum. The next step is looking at what we can learn from comparing curricula for Indigenous language education.
