Anna Grinde writes about her experience with the Seljord school in Norway!
February 26, 2009
I attended Seljord Folk High School in Seljord, Norway which is in the southern part of Norway (right in the middle of Telemark just 3 hours from Oslo). There are over 70 different folk schools all over Norway with different majors offered at each. I wanted to take an active class like soccer, sports, or outdoor life. I also wanted to stay somewhat close to Oslo so I could learn Bokmal in an understandable dialect. I chose Seljord and took an outdoor life class for the whole year. This means that this was my only main class for the whole year. There are elective classes you must sign up for. For these classes I took drawing, knife making, and ceramics. Along with these classes twice a week I had a Norwegian class which is freely offered to foreigners. There are no grades or tests at folk high schools, everything is considered "Learning for Life"! You motivate yourself by deciding how much you want to do. The other 50 students at my school were mostly Norwegians, I was one of two Americans, along with two from the Netherlands. We live in dorm type buildings, and we each got our own room which was very nice. The other courses offered at my school were art, hunting and fishing, and music. Other schools offer theatre, international awareness, skiing, sport, scuba diving, hand crafts, and much more.
My outdoor life course consisted of 20 students and two leaders. We took many, many trips. Some were day trips, some were overnight, and some were week long trips. I was able to experience things I never thought possible like mountain biking, hiking for hours straight, sleeping in snow holes, dogsledding, snowboarding, sailing, rock climbing, canoeing, kayaking, cross country skiing, glacier climbing, and more. I learned Norwegian just by being immersed into the culture. It was the most amazing experience of my life and I'm so glad I did it. The first couple weeks were really hard being away from home, but I made friends quickly. I stayed very busy which helped. The mountains surrounding my school were beautiful so it wasn't hard to fall in love with the place. I woud do it again in a heartbeat, but I don't think I could ever beat the experience I had at Seljord. I highly reccommend it to anyone.