INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE WORKING WITH LITERATURE IN NORDIC SECONDARY EDUCATION

In 2013, four of our five guest editors for this special issue were early career PhD researchers meeting in Paris at the 9th conference of the International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE). Affiliated at four different universities in four different Nordic countries, we shared the experience that the L1 literature education research community consisted of a rather small number of researchers at each of our institutions. Meeting in the international (although rather European) setting of the conference for IAIMTE (now the International Association for Research in L1 Education, ARLE) highlighted the sense of regional belonging to the Nordic countries. From these experiences, the idea of founding a research network within the Scandinavian speaking region was born a couple of months later. In November 2014, we organized the first seminar in Stavanger, Norway and, as a result, established the Nordic Research Network on Literature Education © 2021 International Association for Research in L1-Education