Nordahl Grieg Videregående Skole

Nordahl Grieg Videregående Skole (NGV) was founded in 2010 with the vision “Bold minds interacting”. To ensure a supportive, stimulating and communicative learning environment, the school has five core values: openness, human dignity, democracy, inclusion and sustainability. To understand and being able to address the social and environmental challenges the world is facing, is considered to be the main learning outcome of the school.

All the systems and structures at NGV are shaped after socio-cultural theory on learning, based on the philosophies of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. According to his socio-cultural theory, knowledge derives from different sources and learning happens mainly through interaction with others. In relation to this, the school places communication and collaboration at the core of their educational practices, both including students and staff. 

The school is one of the five hub-schools in Norway working with deaf and hearing-impaired students, as well as offering adapted education for students with special needs. Furthermore, NGV has a sub-department located inside a hospital in Bergen where the trained teachers work with hospitalized students. NGV is a pioneering school in the use of new technologies and learning methods in education. The school received the award of ‘most innovative school’ in 2015 by the Norwegian Centre for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Education. 

Examples of Changemaking:

• Deaf and hearing-impaired students attend the same classes with other students together with their interpreters. In this way, hearing-impaired students do not feel excluded and other students develop a sense of empathy and learn to respect each other as they develop friendships. The non-compulsory ‘sign language as 2nd language’ classes are popular among the hearing students.
• As opposed to the traditional way of assigning one teacher per class, NGV relies on parallel classes. This approach allows the teachers to plan the courses together with fellow teachers, as well as offering a flexible platform for students where they can switch between different groups and teachers based on their needs.
• Inter-disciplinary projects are structured to bring students from different studies together and to inspire teamwork. Depending on their academic track, each student group is expected to focus on a different sub-aspect of the overarching course content. This approach allows the students from different disciplines to collaborate and to combine their academic studies to be able to present a complete final project to their peers, teachers and to other participants.
• The school holds an annual conference named Framtidskonferansen (Future Conference) for all the school community to participate. It is designed around a different theme each year, but always focuses on technology, sustainability and human dignity. The conference encourages the students to imagine a better future and to create projects that they are passionate about. Along with increased subject matter knowledge and awareness, the conference provides numerous collaboration possibilities between teachers, students from different academic tracks and external participants, such as politicians and researchers.