This article explores decolonial pockets among Tornedalian teachers and principals by scrutinising the pre-requisites for school staff to integrate Tornedalen’s minority culture and practise the Meänkieli language in ordinary teaching and learning. It also investigates the challenges and opportunities aligned with such en-deavours. The data collection is based on qualitative focus-group and individual interviews with teachers, principals and pupils at upper secondary schools in two Tornedalian municipalities, in Northern Sweden. The findings reveal a practice in which teachers’ and principals’ Tornedalian cultural background is either more or less prominent, depending on the occasion. Particularly in the classroom context, teachers are obliged to mute and put aside their minority language, Meänkieli. Thus, they transform their behaviour and adopt a Swedish manner of conduct in their contacts with pupils. Consequently, teachers’ Tornedalian cul-tural identity becomes less prominent. Simultaneously, Swedish school culture takes precedence, and its authority controls what can be seen as proper educational subjects as well as the classroom’s social interactions. The analysis, guided by decolonising perspectives, reveals that minority language and cultural practices are mainly alive and active in the unofficial settings of the schools. These manifestations of resistance against the Swedish language and Swedish culture’s dominance of school practices, which remain alive in these decolonial pockets, is not organised and not part of official school practice. However, the conversations with school staff and pupils revealed that the competence, desire and strategies exist to ignite a pedagogy more inclusive of minority perspectives that can facilitate the transfer of Tornedalian minority knowledge and perspectives to pupils. This could empower decolonial Meänkieli practices and revitalise Tornedalian culture among young Tornedalians.

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The purpose of this research overview is to understand the main contemporary research objects that characterizes the research field of school leadership in Sweden. Published literature within the field between 2014 and 2018 together with a mapping of research interests from 99 university teachers in the state funded education programme for principals, form the understandings of the field. The results indicate that the field is constituted by the interests of foremost understanding governance, policy, inspection and school leaders work and pedagogical leadership. A need of systems thinking, investigations of skills and competences, and lack of critical research are examples that calls for new directions in future studies within the field.

This article is based on an interview study with young and adult Tornedalians, a relatively unknown minority group in the northern part of Sweden. It scrutinizes the informants experiences of identifying with, and navigating within, a minority position in relation to the majority society’s discursive ideas and conceptions about them as national minority group. Through decolonial perspectives focusing on race and place, the analysis illuminates how societal prejudices construct the region of Tornedalen as uncivilized, and where Tornedalians are considered to embody a ”problematic” racialised position. At the same time, however, the informants express practices of both colonial awareness and decolonial resistance. In this way, the customs, culture, political power, and norms related to urbanisation of the Swedish majority society are questioned and challenged from a Finno-Ugric minority standpoint, with emphasis on nature values and knowledges linked to a rural lifestyle.