My Nordic Identity Project

The idea of the project is to invigorate the "Nordic" identity through meetings, social media and delivery of student-generated videos and guidelines on how to use this material in the classroom. In the local environment we hope to use these videos and the physical meetings to strengthen the ties between the adult learning centres and the local societies. On the regional level we hope that the novel material in the Nordic languages will restart the linguistic and cultural dimensions of identity across the national boundaries.

Through the four seminars, students from our four countries have met, discussed, and reflected
on life in a Nordic country, and they have challenges each other's perspectives on identities and
lives. While working in transnational groups students have constantly come up with comments
of surprise at being able to understand each other across countries or personal reflections on
their own lives.

Unfortunately,  due to the Corona virus the interrelations with the local communities have been challenged
throughout the project period. As a result of Corona, the first seminar was set up a virtual seminar. We needed to solve the problem of creating a seminar online and through this process we have come up with a

Setting up a virtual seminar

In this guide, we sum up our experiences with organizing the seminars and in particular the virtual seminar that took place in Roskilde (Denmark).  Our Nordplus-project also included the adult education institutions in Helsinki (Finland), Kramfors (Sweden) and Oslo (Norway).

The intention of our project is to focus on Nordic culture and identity and especially to work with elements of the Nordic cultures that newcomers notice and maybe even take into their own perspectives and identities. The aim is also to bring students to seminars in other Nordic countries and to give them a chance of noticing the similarities and differences between the Nordic countries.

However, due to the Corona lockdown in the four countries in the spring of 2021, we had to convert the first seminar in the project into a virtual one. Of course, this was not without challenges, but we ended up with a successful seminar that included teachers and students from all four schools. We hope that you will benefit from the experiences related to organizing a virtual international seminar that we have gathered over a long working process.

Throughout the project we have been working together on Microsoft Teams where we set up a team for our collaboration. We have used this team for sharing materials and for our meetings that were intensified in frequency, as we got closer to the seminar. The last 4 weeks before the seminar, we had weekly meetings. For the Roskilde virtual seminar, which was on a Friday, we had two meetings in the final week in order to settle the final details.

For this seminar, we set up another team for teachers and students to meet in.

Click here to find the final version of the virtual programme with notes on the problems encountered. Each of the schools made a version specifically for their own students based on this common programme. On the project website, you also find these local versions of the programme (https://my-nordic-identity.webnode.se/).

In the programme outline below we have added our reflections/comments on form and content as a guide to what you might want to consider if you are to set up a virtual international seminar yourself.

Good luck – and have fun.