1 Introduction

Greenland [Kalaallit Nunaat] is the world’s largest island, with an area of 2.5 million square kilometres, 80% of which is covered by the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere. It has been populated for more than 4000 years by different cultures migrating from what is now Canada. The majority of the current population – the Thule culture – are descendants of the latest migration, which took place about a 1000 years ago. The migration of the Thule happened at about the same time as the Norse arrived in Greenland, coming from Iceland and settling in the green fjords of south-west Greenland.

Greenland has a colonial past (Gam, 1968; Goldbach & Winther-Jensen, 1988) but is today an autonomous and self-governing area in the Commonwealth of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland with a separate parliament and government. In 1979, Greenland was granted home rule status, and in 2009, after a referendum, Greenland attained self-rule status.

There are currently around 56,000 inhabitants living in 18 towns and 53 settlements scattered along the coastline from Siorapaluk in the farthest north to Narsajimit in the south to Ittoqortoormiit on the east coast. Only 40% of the population have an education above grade ten (Department of Education, 2020), meaning that people from the outside – often Denmark – fill many jobs requiring higher skills. Greenlandic Inuit, are recognised and self-identified as Indigenous, and everyone born in Greenland have Danish citizenship. About 89% of the population are from Greenland, while 8% are from Denmark. Approximately 1% come from the other Nordic countries and 2% from other parts of the world (Statistics Greenland, 2021).

The contemporary structures of education in Greenland have roughly the same pattern as in Denmark: 10 years of Folkeskole (compulsory primary and lower secondary school under municipal jurisdiction for pupils aged 6–16); however, the content and curricula in Greenlandic schools have been under Greenlandic legislative and municipal control since 1980 (Demant-Poort, 2016; Lennert, 2018).

Secondary school is divided into vocational and academic preparation tracks (Greenland Department of Education, 2020). The tertiary education system is mainly centred on the University of Greenland [Ilisimatusarfik], which offers a limited range of courses and subjects: language, literature and media (Greenlandic), theology, social studies, economics, law, cultural and social history, journalism, translation and social work. Among these higher education options is a 4-year teacher education programme that is similar to a Danish teacher education programme.

Greenland inherited its education system from Denmark, including the length of education, which creates sustainable structures for schools and teacher education. It is the Greenlandic authorities and institutions that make decisions about the content of education within the established structures, but the complexities of a colonial past and of attempts to assimilate Greenland into Danish culture are not easily remediable.

Greenlandic society faces a number of economic and social challenges. Greenland currently receives an annual block grant from the Danish state – equivalent to about 40% of Greenland’s gross domestic product in 2020 (Greenland Economic Council, 2020) – but the size of the grant is expected to decrease over time. This creates formidable economic challenges for Greenlandic society, where the idea of a future of full independence is alive and enticing for many. Independence depends on a culturally sustainable education system based on Greenlandic culture and values (Lennert, 2021).

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the evolution of Greenlandic education and its challenges and further to explore the evolution of Greenlandic teacher education and its challenges. It opens with a brief discussion of the role education can play in shaping the future of Greenland. The second section is centred on the challenges of schooling today, and the third describes the geographical and historical context of teacher education in Greenland. The fourth section deals with the development of teacher education as a university degree in Greenland, and the last section is a description of the current structure of teacher education in Greenland.

2 Education and the Future of Greenland

As in any other society, there are different opinions on how Greenland’s societal challenges should be addressed. Greenland’s political parties disagree about how society should look like today and in the future. Should Greenland seek full independence from Denmark as soon as possible? Should it further evolve its relationship with Denmark? Should Greenlandic society focus on businesses that use natural resources like mining and fishing and develop tourism? Should the emphasis be placed on preserving a pristine environment or should the future of Greenland be based on all of the above? These tensions lie beyond the aims and scope of this chapter, but those same patterns also concern schooling and teacher education, although indirectly, because a fully developed society rests on an educated population. Some of these patterns of tension have similarities with teacher education in other countries, but the situation in Greenland has unique characteristics due to, among other things, the enormous geography of the country, a sparse population and its immense social problems, such as a high suicide rate (Olano & Rasmussen, 2019) and care failure of children (Bjerregaard & Larsen, 2016), that influence teachers’ work.

From this perspective, educational institutions stand as central social entities that must ensure broad competence for future employees, for business leaders and for citizen participation in democratic processes. Educational institutions must also facilitate deeper and more specialised competence for performing professional tasks. Education thus requires a great deal of effort to build Greenland’s future society: in the words of Darnell and Hoem (1996), ‘education is at the forefront of a new national purpose and character’ (p. 247). How should the education of the generation now in school contribute to meeting the needs of tomorrow’s Greenland? Education is not the only factor that will impact Greenland’s future, but it is an important one.

3 Challenges

A main challenge in today’s schools is that education quality (measured by testing in grades three, seven and ten through standardised national tests and oral examinations) has remained low over time. Greenland’s primary and lower secondary schools have faced a crisis for several years because many youth reach late adolescence without having achieved the most basic life skills, as measured by standardised testing (Lennert, 2021; Statistics Greenland, 2020). The crisis of school achievement is most evident in math, where about half of students do not pass or barely pass the grade ten exam in written math (Statistics Greenland, 2020). A large majority of those who graduate have one or more course grades that do not meet the admission requirements for a secondary education (Department of Education, 2015a, b). More than half (62%) of the population have primary and lower secondary school as their highest level completed (Statistics Greenland, 2020), and in 2019 59% of youth between 16 and 18 did not take part in any form of education (Department of Education, 2020). Only 29% of Greenland’s youth between the ages of 16 and 25 were active in education (Statistics Greenland, 2020).

Human resources are underused when a large proportion of the Greenlandic population is neither employed nor active in the education system. There are several reasons for the current situation, including language where Greenlandic is the main language in primary and lower secondary education, Danish is the main language used in upper secondary school. Access to secondary education after the 10 years of compulsory schooling is thus somewhat limited by language barriers. Though Greenlandic and Danish have equal status under education legislation, most subjects in primary and lower secondary education are taught in Greenlandic, especially in smaller towns and settlements, thus limiting students’ exposure to Danish and English. After graduating from lower secondary school at age 16, students who enter high school are likely to encounter a system in which almost all subjects are taught in Danish because most of the teachers are Danish.

The lack of Greenlandic teachers at the high school level is caused by the unavailability of sufficiently educated teachers from Greenland:

In the context of Greenland, the access to education for those who cannot speak Danish at a sufficient level is severely limited… in Greenland today, many children and families, especially those who live in smaller settlements and only speak Greenlandic, find themselves in an unenviable position: on paper included in the country’s development project vis-á-vis the education system, but in reality, excluded some meaningful opportunity given the poor quality of that system. (Lennert, 2021, p. 205)

Though Greenlandic and Danish have equal status as languages of instruction, it is obvious that a school system that mainly operates in one language, Greenlandic, limits students’ access to the language of educational mobility. At the University of Greenland many teachers come from outside Greenland, whether or not that poses linguistic challenges for university students is unknown.

A further challenge to schools is the teacher shortage, especially in smaller towns and settlements. In most schools with a teacher shortage, teachers teach a variety of subjects they are not trained to teach. However, schools in larger towns use a different approach to administer teacher qualifications. Two surveys from 2010 (Dorph, 2010) and 2016 (Demant-Poort, 2016) both document that teachers were teaching subjects they were not qualified to teach. This is often related to a very rigid administrative structure in schools, with teachers ‘locked’ into one of three steps.

The 10 years of public schooling are divided into step one (grades one to three), step two (grades 4–7) and step three (grades 8–10). Though there is no legislative requirement to lock teachers into only one of these steps, this is most often the case. For example, a fully qualified English teacher can teach biology in grade eight but not English in grade seven, while a fully qualified biology teacher teaches English in grade seven but not biology in grade eight (Demant-Poort, 2016). Municipalities and schools are not required to ensure that teachers are teaching the subjects they are actually trained to teach. Aside from the above two surveys, there are no data available on how teachers’ subject competencies are deployed in schools.

Since the early 1980s, in a yearly publication from the Agency of Education, teachers’ professional qualifications have been documented by only three variables: fully trained teachers, non-trained teachers and whether a teacher is able teach in Greenlandic. All other possible qualifications for teaching students are not monitored on a nationwide scale. There are no data available on how many mathematics teachers teach mathematics, how many English teachers teach English, or whether math teachers, for example, teach students in math. This constitutes a systemic challenge to schooling and its evaluation in Greenland: how is it possible to assess student outcomes when there is no monitoring of how teacher qualifications are – and are not – used? Additionally, this makes it difficult for student teachers to make an informed decision on what their teaching subjects should be or what subjects are most needed in the schools in Greenland’s five municipalities.

The teacher education programme today faces some difficulty in attracting enough qualified students from Greenland’s four high schools, a problem that will only escalate in the near future as more and more teachers retire. According to an estimate from the Agency of Education (Grønvold, 2018), there will be a teacher shortage of 300 (or a third of those required) by 2028, on top of the 150 or more untrained teachers [timelærere] who currently work in settlement schools and schools in smaller towns.

4 The Historical and Geographical Context of Teacher Education in Greenland

Greenland is isolated not only by its far northern location but also internally, as every town and settlement is separated by vast distances, and transport between towns and settlements is only possible by boat, snowmobile, dogsled or plane or helicopter. Since the end of World War II, Greenland has gone through significant changes, evolving from a society based primarily on hunting sea mammals to fishing for cod, halibut and shrimp. The shift from hunting to fishing meant a complete change in the country’s economy (Hendriksen, 2013); the idea behind this transition was economic growth. Fishing, primarily for halibut and shrimp, is now responsible for 95% of Greenland’s total exports. The shift from hunting to fishing was part of what is known as G50 politics. The monopoly of The Greenlandic Royal Trading Company [Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel] was abolished in 1950, but the company was still responsible for almost all imports to the country, leading to uniform pricing across the country.

Four periods in Greenland’s past are important for its development in schooling and teacher education: (1) the pre-colonial period, (2) the colonial period (1721–1953), (3) the modernisation period (1953–1979) and (4) the home rule period, which began in 1979. The 2009 implementation of self-government has not had an impact on either schooling or teacher education.

Before colonisation in 1721, Greenlandic traditional education was informal and a vital social activity. To conceptualise learning in a pre-colonised Greenland, it is necessary to look at informal learning activities in Indigenous communities today. Subsistence activities remain a vital cultural sign in Greenland (Christensen, 2012; Demant-Poort, 2016; Poppel, 2015). Several concepts have attempted to frame the transfer of knowledge that occurred between generations in close contact with the environment. Aikenhead and Ogawa (2007) use the concept of ‘ways of knowing’, which is a variation of interconnected epistemologies strongly tied to the place where one lives. Cajate (1999) writes that ‘Indigenous ways of living in nature are strongly place based’, meaning that learning in an Indigenous community was linked to a specific place, such as a particular hunting ground. In addition, the concept of traditional ecological knowledge is used to describe Indigenous epistemology (Sutherland & Henning, 2009).

Since the first half of the 1700s, there has been some kind of organised, formal, Western schooling in Greenland. In 1721, Hans Egede – a Norwegian minister– came to Greenland with intension to preach Christianity to the local population (Nielsen, 2021), and to reincorporate this country [Greenland] into the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway (p. 189). To facilitate content for his teachings Egede learned Greenlandic, and in 1723 ‘he drafted his first written catechism in the Greenlandic language’ (Nielsen, 2021, p.190). This was more or less the beginning of education in Greenland. In the years that followed, children and adults were taught basic reading skills in their own language so they could read the catechism. In the 1700s, trading stations and ‘colonies’ [kolonier] were established from Nanortalik in the south to Upernavik in the north. Ministers and catechists sought to educate the population by teaching them to read and write. In 1845, a teacher education college – Ilinniarfissuaq (‘The great place for learning’) – was established in Godthåb (now Nuuk), taking physical form in 1847 when the first students began their studies and took up residence in the minister’s house. The catechists were taught with the goal of sending them to settlements along the immense coastline to teach children to write, to read the catechism and to do basic mathematics. In 1907, a new building for the college was constructed. Through 2009, the building was featured on Nuuk’s coat of arms; it remains the teacher education programme’s main building.

From the 1950s onwards, enormous efforts were expended to combat tuberculosis. Through the end of the 1940s, tuberculosis had been responsible for one third of all deaths in Greenland (Kristiansen, 2004). A sanatorium was established in Godthåb, and a small hospital vessel visited all inhabited places, a number that totalled 159 in 1944 (Kristiansen, 2004, p. 18), to document incidents of tuberculosis. In the late 1940s and 1950s, new housing was built, and the number of tuberculosis incidents fell. As a positive result of the effort, the population of Greenland grew rapidly. At the time, teaching in many settlements and small towns around the coast was the job of locally trained teachers and catechists, along with a few teachers and priests from Denmark. However, with the growing number of children, there was also an increasing demand for teachers, a demand that had to be met with teachers from Denmark. In 1953, Greenland formally moved from being a colony to a county of Denmark – which officially became the Commonwealth of Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Aside from a population increase, the 1950s and 1960s were also years of rapid development in Greenland; small settlements were abandoned as people moved to larger towns.

In 1979 Greenland was granted Home Rule Status, and the first area of responsibility transferred from Denmark was public education. In 1979 the first school act from the Greenlandic Home Rule was passed (Home Rule, 1979), which meant a change in the discourse on schooling. Greenlandic became the official language of teaching. From the 1980s onwards, there was political pressure for schooling in Greenland to be based on Greenlandic values and ideology (Hindby, 2004). This was realised through elective subjects such as hunting, sewing and fishing, which were taught alongside subjects such as Greenlandic, Danish, mathematics, social studies, and history. Hunting was the only elective subject divided into a boys and girls content (Kultur-og Undervisningsdirektoratet, 1985). Boys were to train in constructing kayaks, making basic engine repairs, training in outdoor survival and so on. Girls were to be taught in skin sewing, cooking, preserving berries and the like. These are considered traditional learning activities, as they reflect a unique culture based on subsistence hunting (Demant-Poort, 2016; Nuttall, 1992; Poppel, 2015). The major change in schooling after 1979 was a heightened focus on the Greenlandic language. It was no longer viewed as just one of several subjects, but as the teaching language for all subjects other than Danish and English.

The strong focus on Greenlandic was also evident in the requirements applying to the teacher education college. Before home rule, students applying to the teacher education college had to pass a test in Greenlandic (written and oral), Danish (written and oral), arithmetic (written and oral), religious knowledge, history, geography, biology, natural history, mathematics, singing and English or German (Nalunaarutit, 1964). According to the 1979 act on teacher education, applicants had to pass the Higher Preparatory Examination in Greenlandic: ‘Admission to the college is conditioned on the applicant having passed the Higher Preparatory Examination in the subject Greenlandic or having passed the core subjects in the Higher Preparatory Examination in Greenlandic and with limited optional subjects’ (Nalunaarutit, 1979). The focus on Greenlandic for admission to the teacher education college was extended in the 1989 act on teacher education (Nalunaarutit, 1989).

The sole focus on Greenlandic for admission to the teacher education college has disappeared over time. In the academic regulations on teacher education, requirements for applying to the programme are now a high school diploma with a grade point average of at least 7 (a C average). In the 2002 school act, Greenlandic is no longer the sole teaching language; teaching now takes place in both Greenlandic and Danish, which have equal status, at least from a legislative perspective. However, it is worth speculating what level of other languages students are exposed to, as the Agency of Education only documents and report on the percentage of teachers who are able to teach subjects in general in Greenlandic (Department of Education, 2021).

Requirements for applicants in 2021 are similar: a high school diploma, but with the addition of minimum grades in specific subjects, such as an A-level in Greenlandic with a grade minimum of C/7 for Greenlandic and Danish and B-level with a minimum grade of D/4 in mathematics and English. In all other subjects, there is a minimum of levels C and D/4 (Institute of Learning, 2018).

Between the beginning of the 1980s and 2021, there has been a slight increase in the number of students graduating as teachers, from around 20 per year to around 30. Within the same period, there has been a decrease in the number of teachers from Denmark, from 350 in the early 1980s to fewer than a 100 in the late 2010s. In the 2020–2021 academic year, there were 1053 teachers in Greenland’s 73 public schools and 7400 students from grades one through 10, a 14% decrease in student enrolment since 2009–2010 (Agency of Education, 2010, 2021).

5 The Teacher Education Programme: The Development of a University Degree

In the early 2000s, teacher education in Greenland was on the verge of something new. In 2001 parliament decided to build a university campus that would merge the existing university, Ilisimatusarfik, with the non-academic teacher education, journalism and social work programmes (Home Rule, 2007). Ilimmarfik, the new university campus, opened in 2008.

The intentions to craft a more academic teacher education degree implied that future teachers would be both practitioners and able to operate on a more reflective academic level. In 2009 Greenland saw its first Bachelor of Education graduate. Since 2009, Ilisimatusarfik has graduated more than 450 teachers (Personal communication, Student office, Institute of Learning).

Has the shift to a more academic profile of teachers had a positive influence on overall student performance in schools around the country? In the early 2010s, student performance began to show a decline. This was visible in the final tests after grade ten. In 2015, the Department of Education engaged with The Danish Evaluation Institute (EVA) to evaluate public schooling within the context of the 2002 school act. The report’s conclusion points to several reasons why students seemingly do not perform as intended: for example, a lack of teacher–parent collaboration, teachers who do not understand the national curriculum and the inappropriate organisation of teachers across the 10 years of schooling. The 2015 EVA report spurred an evaluation of the teacher education programme, initiated by the university administration.

Ilisimatusarfik set up an expert panel and collected data through interviews with teachers and students and analyses of BA theses. The evaluation showed that the programme had several serious quality challenges and had not satisfactorily met the need for qualified teachers in public schools. Many graduates were not educated well enough to work as teachers in primary school, and the academic level of many students was too low for their teaching subjects. The evaluation also showed that in several major subjects, the grade point average of the students’ final exams was too low and that a relatively large number of students either failed or obtained only a low grade (EVA, 2016). In some language subjects, the academic level was low and curricular requirements for academic content were not always fulfilled in the teaching. However, the school practice element was well structured; there were five internship periods, each with a different focus. The student teachers were happy with that feature of the programme. However, the evaluation showed that there was limited contact between teacher education and the internship schools and insufficient mechanisms to ensure that the quality of the internships was in order.

In 2012 the Institute of Learning opened up for a new trajectory on its path towards being a research-based teaching institution; on January first 2012 the institute’s first PhD-student was employed. As of 2021 two PhD students have defended their dissertations [both in 2016], and three more are on route towards their doctoral life in educational research in Greenland.

6 Teacher Education Programme in 2021: The Current Structure

Following the publication of the evaluation, a 2-year plan for modifying and improving the programme was initiated, and on 1st September 2018 the current curriculum was put into operation (Studieordning, 2018).

Teacher education at Ilisimatusarfik is a 4-year programme, consisting of 240 ECTS at the Institute of Learning, where teachers will be qualified to teach three subjects. There are no statistics, however, documenting what subjects are sought by schools, so student teachers select their teaching subjects based solely on personal interest.

The current structure of the teacher education programme is centred on a range of pedagogical and professional subjects (professionsfag) throughout all 4 years, along with three teaching subjects.

One of the major innovations in the curriculum was the introduction of language tracks. A mandatory subject was developed between 2016 and 2018 to provide student teachers with the tools and skills necessary to include language in all teaching; the central idea is to heighten their understanding of the role language plays throughout the school career. A second change based on the 2016 evaluation was special education changing from a major subject that students could choose to a mandatory subject for all student teachers. This was called for by municipalities, the teachers’ union and individual teachers, who expressed a need for theoretical and practical knowledge on how to work with students with emotional and/or psychological challenges.

The 2018 curriculum also meant a change in student teachers’ field experiences. Aside from the regular 19 weeks of teaching practice in the 4-year programme, student teachers in year three are now teamed up with a trained teacher at a school in Nuuk on a weekly basis throughout the school year, with the aim of obtaining a deeper understanding of the teaching profession.

When teachers graduate from the programme, they are qualified to teach three subjects; however, as documented earlier in this chapter, teachers often teach subjects they are not qualified to teach, partly because on the municipal level, there are no restrictions or even guidelines on what subjects teachers should teach.

The teacher education programme is divided into two categories of teaching subjects: 50-ECTS subjects and 35-ECTS subjects. Every student teacher must choose two 50-ECTS subjects and one 35-ECTS subject; Greenlandic is often the most sought for subject as one of the former. Often this comes down to an understanding of Greenlandic as being the ‘easy’ choice because it is their mother tongue.

6.1 Recruitment

The teacher education programme often has to turn down applicants (The Danish Evaluation Institute, 2016), when they do not meet the application criteria. Most people apply to the programme on the basis of a high school diploma. Until the 1980s, the teacher education programme was the highest degree a student could attain in Greenland. Training to be a teacher was regarded as the most prestigious course, and several of the founders of home rule were trained teachers. Today, the requirements for applying to the programme are a grade point average of 5.5 on the 7-point grade scaleFootnote 1 (Curriculum, 2018); for comparison, admission to a Danish teacher education programme is 7.5 on the same scale (The Danish Evaluation Institute, 2016).

However, student teachers enter the programme from diverse backgrounds. Relatively few student teachers arrive on a straight trajectory from high school; some have worked in the trades or held odd jobs between high school and teacher education, while others have worked as substitute teachers for several years or completed other university degrees. However, there are no systematic data that to tell the full story of Greenlandic student teachers’ previous educational attainment.

As in most other Nordic countries, the teaching profession and student teacher applicants are dominated by women. In the past 10 years, the proportion of male to female student teachers has been around 1 in 5. As for age distribution, student teachers in general are older than in other university programmes. The average age for graduating student teachers, around 30, has changed only slightly in the past 10 years.

Student teachers apply to the programme for a variety of reasons. The teaching profession in Greenland, though often in the line of fire due to poor student performance, also essentially guarantees a job. While job security is important to teachers, a second dimension is that a teaching degree is one of the few university qualifications to offer access to positions in the small towns and settlements from which many student teachers come.

7 Discussion

In this chapter, we have emphasised the complex patterns of tension between the various considerations of Greenland’s society, which both pose enormous challenges and offer exciting opportunities. The transfer of decision-making power in key areas of society from the Danish authorities to the Greenlandic self-government authority has ensured democratic governance and decision-making autonomy for the population of Greenland in schooling, health, taxes, regulation of hunting and fishing and so on (Statsministeriet, 2012). Democratic processes have functioned within the established structures, but there remain challenges in Greenlandic society that are much different from other Nordic societies. Greenland has one of the highest suicide rates in world, and one third of all children grow up in homes with alcoholism, abuse and violence. Between 20% and 40% (depending on age) have experienced sexual abuse (Larsen et al., 2019).

Aside from the language issues involving Greenlandic and Danish, schools emphasise cross-cultural encounters and mutual respect to achieve cultural synthesis, which is a starting point for helping society develop further and a feature that is in line with the Nordic school model’s focus on equality and shared experiences across different groups. The school is a social institution that serves as an important foundation for future social development and can contribute to the self-image of Greenlandic students and their retention of cultural identity. A comprehensive evaluation of Greenland’s primary and lower secondary schools (The Danish Evaluation Institute, 2015) showed that schooling faces a long list of challenges, which together are reflected in the fact that students leave school with poor grade point averages and that only just over a third of students immediately continue in the education system. Some school challenges are about management, municipal administrations and parental support, but the evaluation also points to the teachers’ competencies and actions as essential parts of the challenge (Lennert, 2021). The schools’ challenges are indirectly the challenges of teacher education, which prepares prospective teachers.

A special difficulty for Greenland is the geography of its scattered settlements, which creates several issues for schools and teacher education that do not have a readily available, let alone ideal, solution. The school system has about 7500 students in 73 schools spread along an immense coastline. The vast distances between settlements and towns pose significant logistical and financial challenges.

The goal of teacher education – graduating enough qualified teachers to meet the foreseeable needs of Greenlandic schools – is already not being met, and 300 teachers (a quarter of the number today) will retire from their positions within the next decade. In addition, teacher education in Greenland has the same challenges as other Nordic regions in creating the conditions needed for good interaction between theory and practice – between on-campus teaching and classroom experience. Creating positive interactions between very different institutions like a school and a teacher education programme can be demanding, and Greenland’s scattered settlements make it particularly difficult to create field experiences for student teachers in the most remote areas. Technological development has made digital communication easier, and teacher education in Greenland had sought solutions to the challenges posed by scattered settlements even before the COVID-19 pandemic; distance learning for both schools and teacher education appears to be a viable, or at least promising, route to practical solutions (Øgaard, 2019).

Securing a broad portfolio of education courses in an institution with relatively few students creates major challenges that are partly due to the financial and qualification disadvantages of operating on such a small scale. Whether enhanced collaboration across teacher education in the Nordic region institutions can help reduce these challenges is an open question, and whether efforts towards closer co-operation between the Nordic countries and their autonomous territories is also relevant. Weaknesses in the teacher education programme were noted in an external evaluation (The Danish Evaluation Institute, 2016); this criticism was harsh, but it also created momentum for a change, and in 2018 the teacher education programme saw a new curriculum, with a new view of accountability and evaluation.

Creating a solid school system under Greenlandic conditions is far more complex than what can be measured through, for example, a PISA survey,Footnote 2 and the fact that Greenlandic pupils may or may not obtain high scores in international comparisons can be explained by the fact that the notion of school quality has its own meaning among the Greenlandic population. Nevertheless, the challenge remains developing schools that are as relevant as possible for that population, and research on Indigenous schooling emphasises that the cultural distance between pupils and their school must not be too great, lest the challenges faced by the pupils become too difficult to manage (Darnell & Hoem, 1996).