Pre-project completed

It has been some extremely inspiring 8 months as we have researched for and prepared a pan-Nordic survey about bildung. The goal is to find out how educators across the Nordics, from kindergarten to university, and from formal to non-formal educaction experience and work with bildung. Thus we have had four goals with the pre-project:

• To find out to what extent educators may find a full survey important
• To find out how they perceive and define bildung
• To find out how important they find bildung
• To explore to what extent they find that they have time and resources to promote bildung in their work.

After talking to educators, union representatives, researchers, and administrators in education across the Nordics, the pre-project result is clear: A better understanding of the role of bildung in education and among educators will be very much appreciated! There is a general sense that bildung is crucial and that we need to create more awareness about it, also among educators.

A surprising, and therefore very interesting, result of our pre-project is that we may be using the words dannelse, sivistys, mentun, danning, and bildning in slightly different ways, so we will need to map the meaning of the five words as they are being used in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish respectively.

Our main conclusion is thus that we need two surveys:

1. A smaller survey with 40-50 hand picked respondents in each of the five countries where we explore the specific perception or meaning of the following five terms (and their equivalent in each language):
   • Uddannelse / utbildning / education
   • Dannelse / bildning / bildung
   • Almendannelse / allmänbildning / allround bildung
   • Folkeoplysning / folkbildning / nonformal lifelong learning
   • Personlig udvikling / personlig utveckling / personal development
2. A more extensive survey where we engage with a survey company and collaborate with a university and explore what we set out to explore among educators across the Nordics:
   • How they perceive and define bildung?
   • How important do they think bildung is?
   • To what extent do they find that they have time and resources to promote bildung in their work.

We would like to thank the Nordic Council of Minsters who have financed this pre-project.

Now we hope that we can find funding for the surveys as well.