The necessity to include multicultural education policies and practices in schools and teacher education has been widely recognised both in Finland and internationally. However, terms such as 'multiculturalism' and 'multicultural education' have contested and vague meanings in educational discourse. This paper investigates discourses on multicultural education from critical multicultural education and postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The focus is on the teacher education policies of all the eight primary teacher education programmes in Finland. Discourse theory analysis revealed six diverging discourses within a framework of conservative, liberal and critical multicultural education. The results show that it should not be taken for granted that policies including multicultural education contribute to social justice in education and teacher education. Consequently, policy-makers need to question the rhetoric regarding multiculturalism and to focus on how inequality is reproduced and upheld in discourses in teacher education and schools, and how this can be challenged.

Schools represent a central meeting place where societal inequalities are reproduced and questions of social justice become important. This study focuses on categorisations related to race, nationality, and gender in interactions in Finnish teaching environments, as well as teacher reflections on these situations. We discuss the implications of the categorisations on social justice and the role of the teacher in these situations. We conducted video observations of a sixth-grade teacher in a Finnish primary school. The study employs both critical multicultural education approaches and Conversation Analysis. Results show that the pupils use categories race, nationality, and gender in ways that limit the agency and positioning of some of the pupils. The extensive and intersecting categorisation in teaching situations makes it demanding for teachers to address and challenge unequal norms attached to the categories. Results also indicate that teachers need an understanding of othering and normativity in order to allow spontaneous critical discussion and problematising categorisations that pupils use. Also, the results highlight the importance of involving pupils in the process of questioning norms that do not provide all pupils with the same agency or sense of belonging.

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This study, building on previous studies stressing the bond between positive sense of ethnic identity and school belonging, puts at its center the very process of ethnic identity construction. Thus, identity is viewed as co-constructed, within a social-constructionist perspective on learning. The study is two-folded. It starts out by describing how participants in a Finland-Swedish preschool setting orient to ethnic identity in everyday interactions. Video recordings are analyzed using conversation analysis, a relatively recent approach to the exploration of how ethnicity is accomplished in interaction. It shows that the different ethnic backgrounds of the children were considerably more prominent in the informal self-initiated interactions between themselves than in situations where adults were present. The children mainly used ethnicity as a resource to investigate themselves in relation to others to negotiate status and construct in-and out-groups. The second part focuses on how to create a more inclusive school-setting by more actively supporting students' ethnic identity construction. It discusses the experiences from a teacher-researcher collaboration, where the way children constructed ethnic identity in the first part of the study was taken as the starting-point for the development of new practices. The study suggests the ongoing ethnic identity construction in everyday educational settings to be a fertile area for further research. We need to know more about how these processes can be supported in a manner that is sensitive to the students' needs to decide for themselves whether, and how, they wish to orient to their own ethnic backgrounds.

She is a member of the Nordic center of excellence Justice through Education in the Nordic countries (JustEd). She has a teacher background. Her PhD research is a discourse analytic study of how school textbooks in history, social studies and geography portray Westerners and non-Westerners. Besides studying the discourse of West, Mikander's research interests include social science education, values in education, the concept of critical thinking as well as education about globalization and global inequality. Her publications include Globalization as Continuing Colonialism-Critical Global Citizenship Education in an Unequal World (2016), Democracy and Human Rights: A Critical Look at the Concept of Western Values in Finnish School Textbooks (2015) and together with Gunilla Holm: Constructing threats and a need for control: textbook descriptions of a growing, moving world population (2014).