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This paper explores policy related to digital competence and the digitalisation of Nordic K-12 schools. Anchored in some key transnational policies on digital competence, it describes some current Nordic movements in the national policies of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The concept of boundary objects is used as an analytical lens, for understanding digital competence as a plastic and temporal concept that can be used to discuss the multi-dimensional translation of this concept in these Nordic countries. The paper ends with a discussion of the potential to view digital competence as a unifying boundary object that, with its plasticity, temporality and n-dimensionality, can show signs of common Nordic efforts in the K-12 school policy.

The paper explores factors of importance for young people's choice of upper secondary education and for their future life, from a student perspective. The paper builds on data from a questionnaire study, answered by 1,414 students in grade 9 (age 15-16) in Sweden, prior to their choice of upper secondary school. In addition, data from earlier studies, have been included. Results show that the majority plan to transit to further levels of education. There is, however, a group of students who opt to move directly into work. In relation to making an educational choice, the factors that dominate the decision-making processes of students are related to; interest and ability, wellbeing and fun, but also plans after upper secondary school. Views and choices among friends and adults outside the family, is of less importance. With regard to perceptions of a future life, what dominates students' thinking relates to their views of a secure and comfortable life. Comparisons between boys and girls and between students with parents born outside Sweden and students with native-born parents, show similarities as well as differences. Drawing on our results, we argue that career learning needs to be flexible and adapted to the students' different situations and needs.

This paper focuses on the role of the OECD as a boundary organisation in Swedish education policy during the last 10 years. This has been a critical period of the transformation of the Swedish education system. Post-PISA, Swedish education moved from a position of confidence and relative strength to one of crisis and slow recovery. So far, most educational research has either tried to identify a top-down linear influence from the international to the national "levels", or has disputed such influence by suggesting that PISA has not causally led to substantial national reforms. On the contrary, this article suggests that education policy research has to move away from viewing the relationship of the national with the global as hierarchical, linear and hegemonic. Through the operationalisation of the concept of boundary organisation, this paper is asking pertinent questions about the conditions, processes and practices that led to the entanglement of a large international organisation, the OECD, in the day-to-day policy-making of a country such as Sweden. This requires a nuanced theoretical and empirical approach, attentive to the political work of material artefacts, actors and organisations in the negotiations and ultimately the making of educational consensus.

Motivated by earlier research highlighting Swedish teachers' beliefs that the setting of homework compromises deep-seated principles of educational equity, this paper presents an exploratory study of Swedish parents' perspectives on homework in their year-one children's learning. Twenty-five parents, drawn from three demographically different schools in the Stockholm region, participated in semi-structured interviews. The interviews, broadly focused on how parents support their children's learning and including questions about homework in general and mathematics homework in particular, were transcribed and data subjected to a constant comparison analytical process. This yielded four broad themes, highlighting considerable variation in how parents perceive the relationship between homework and educational equity. First, all parents spoke appreciatively of their children receiving reading homework and, in so doing, indicated a collective construal that reading homework is neither homework nor a threat to equity. Second, four parents, despite their enthusiasm for reading homework, opposed the setting of any homework due to its potential compromise of family life. Third, seven parents indicated that they would appreciate mathematics homework where it were not a threat to equity. Finally, fourteen parents, despite acknowledging homework's potential compromise to equity, were unequivocally in favour of mathematics homework being set to their children.

This paper aims to investigate the reasons some female mathematicians give to justify their choice to not work in academia after finishing their doctoral studies. Nine female mathematicians who finished a PhD in Sweden answered a written questionnaire. Through collective narrative analysis, two main tracks were identified. One narrative described the struggle with self-identity in a gendered structure which included implicit power, while the other was more positive about exposure to discrimination, and highlighted the desire to work with applied mathematics. Through deductive thematic analysis, the results show that the main obstacle raised was the difficulty of getting a job in academia after their doctoral studies, especially permanent positions, without support. Compared to previous research, the lack of family-oriented political policies was not considered a main problem. Instead, the reasons provided by the respondents are structural problems, such as access to post-doc positions, and the stress of having to get research grants, as well as cultural aspects within the structure, including implicit and explicit use of power.

In this paper, we investigate how elite coaches reflect on their practice and interact with each other, as part of their informal professional development. We use observations of 14 coach meetings, over a period of two years, where coaches came together to share their experiences of coaching elite athletics, and to discuss ways for continuous professional development. Through an action research approach, data collected included notes and audio-recorded conversations. The theory of practice architectures was employed as a theoretical tool to frame the analysis of the data in order to understand the meeting practices and how these practices were enabled and constrained. The research revealed how conversations led to awareness, which became turning points for new practices. Specifically, the coaches became aware of the importance of belonging to a community, their lack of knowledge and understanding of inequality, and the complexity of coaching. The meetings, as forums for dialogic practice, were enabled by open-minded collaboration, a willingness to share experiences, and a mutual understanding of the coaching context, but they were also constrained by the structures of coaches' athletics clubs and federations, that do not fully support coaches' meetings as an informal educational practice for professional development.

With a focus on resources for learning through writing, this paper compares the interdisciplinary framings of two teacher education programmes. What are the implications of these framings and resources for students' possibilities when they write independent projects/bachelor theses? The paper presents a case study with data (interviews, texts, observations) from two different teacher education programmes. The conceptual framework stems from the Academic Literacies approach. The analysis shows that one of the programmes shapes interdisciplinarity by a "block approach" that allows students to work independently, while the other is shaped as a "bridging approach" with tight collaboration between students and tutors. The two educational programmes apply the same national regulating documents in different ways, thus creating different possibilities for students to learn and write as "independent" or "collaborative" students, respectively. The results contribute to a discussion of higher education structure and the role of writing within it.

Amid increasing global and national interest in the built educational environment, this editorial considers developments within the Nordic countries that are investigated and discussed within the articles in this special issue. We discuss commonalities and divergences in the experiences of transition and change in the schools, located in a range of times and places. We observe Nordic openness being reflected in the interest of policy-makers and architects in schools with open designs, but also note the very real challenges for school leaders, teachers and students of transitioning from traditional enclosed classrooms and teacher-centred learning to student-centred approaches in a versatile space. Yet the articles of this special issue also make clear the educational and societal reasons and values behind attempts at this transition, and we conclude our editorial by proposing some ways to address the challenges we have identified.

This paper investigates trends in the study of Modern languages or second foreign languages (SFLs) in Swedish lower secondary school between 2000 and 2018. Over the last decades, SFLs, i.e. French, German and Spanish, have been the target of several policy measures as a response to a declining interest. However, few reports on their impact have been published. We report the proportion of pupils studying an SFL at the national level and across demographic municipality groups and analyse a possible impact of one policy measure, grade point average enhancement credits (GPAEC, "meritpoäng") for SFLs. We found an increase in the proportion of pupils studying an SFL, but mainly in urban areas. Moreover, we found important differences between SFLs. Spanish is the most widely studied SFL in all municipality groups. French is most popular in urban areas while German is more chosen in rural areas. If the increase of the number of pupils studying and SFL can be ascribed to GPAEC remains still to be seen, but if so, the GPAEC mainly had an impact on highly urban areas where the proportion of pupils studying an SFL was the highest already before introducing this policy measure.

This study addresses a fundamental but neglected aspect of efforts to ensure quality and improvement in a decentralised school system: the relationship between the local education authority (LEA) and local school principals. Empirically, it is based on analysis of relevant documents and interviews with key actors in a Swedish LEA (a municipality), selected as a deviant and successful case. The data analysis is rooted in the theoretical concepts of sense-making and framing. The results show that to handle the joint responsibility the LEA introduced new artefacts for quality and improvement work. These included an expanded support unit for quality and improvement, a visionary document for all educational units and a system of tools and forums to expand quality work at local school level and stimulate collaboration between LEA-level actors and school principals. The principals saw a need for most of the artefacts and regarded them as useful. However, the analysis also reveals some negative resonance concerning relevance for the local schools and expectations of uniformity. In addition to presenting and discussing these findings, issues concerning trust and relationships are highlighted in this paper.

The modest impact of national policy efforts on school digitalisation relates to a gap between views among policy-makers and practitioners, giving rise to complexity in translating policy into action. Acknowledging changes in governing through alternative policy formation-processes, and Ward and Parr's (2011) arguing for the importance of strategic- and operational policy coherence, the focus of this paper is the forming of a national plan of action for the digitalisation of schools in Sweden (#skolDigiplan). Within this interview study, the views on policy work and challenges of digitalisation of schools are explored among an exclusive management group of non-traditional Swedish policy-makers appointed to produce the #skolDigiplan. Based on the findings, I conclude that national policy making regarding the digitalisation of schools may be conducted through a collective process, with several educational stakeholders contributing. Furthermore, I suggest that non-traditional national policy-makers, arguing a lack of digital competence knowledge concerning schools at the governing or authority level, may consider taking a step back in the policy-formation process as a supportive action. Teacher training programmes, despite being portrayed as important for the policy outcome, were declared distant in this policy process.

This exploratory paper focuses on applying information and communication technologies (ICT) in educational settings, particularly in higher education. Based on qualitative data studying four courses in detail, the article starts by discussing educators' expectations associated with technological advances. It proceeds to discuss the concept of learning based on Bruner's concept of agency, collaboration, reflection and culture concerning the transformations that ICT brings to the educational environment. It analyses the ICT-supported activities employed by teachers in four different types of courses: a) face-to-face (f2f) with a formal use of ICT; b) f2f with a creative use of ICT; c) online learning; and d) blended learning. The paper concludes with design considerations for a university course that reveals the potential of ICT to support intense, varied and continuous engagement in the learning process within the framework of Bruner's principles.

The aim of this paper was to examine the relationship between Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) mathematics achievement and the two school achievement measures of grades and national test results in Sweden. A further aim was to examine the association of TIMSS mathematics achievement with different subgroups of students. The results show that there is a strong positive relationship between TIMSS mathematics achievement and national tests and obtained grades from both grade 6 and grade 9. Students from more educated homes performed better overall on TIMSS than those from less-educated homes, and the relationships between TIMSS and the school achievement measures were stronger for students from more educated home backgrounds. The school context and the students' background had an impact on the students' TIMSS result. The results have implications for how one should view the results from TIMSS as a measure of student mathematics achievement and thus how TIMSS results can be used in a national context.

The decentralised Swedish school system has become increasingly directed to the construction of self-governing and responsible pedagogic identities that are supposed to enable integration and participation. Drawing on the work of the geographer Edward W. Soja, I acknowledge how material and symbolic spatialisation intersect with the local production of included and excluded identities in the context of restructuring education. The paper is based on a study in two areas in a segregated Swedish city; one disadvantaged and one advantaged area. I use a wide range of data such as policy documents, questionnaire data, longitudinal statistics, interviews with local politicians, school actors and former students. The findings show that former students from the disadvantaged area were more often excluded from further education and were dependent on social welfare to a higher extent. Moreover, they faced low expectations and were simultaneously excluded from new educational processes that explicitly aim at social inclusion. In the paper I discuss how ethical ideals of decentralisation and participation, and the evaluation of such policies in terms of access to further education and work, conceal the local production of excluded identities. This production, I argue, is based on an amalgamation of material conditions and spatial representations.

In this study we examine how the academic-vocational divide is manifested today in Finland, Iceland and Sweden in the division between vocationally (VET) and academically-oriented programmes at the upper-secondary school level. The paper is based on a critical re-analysis of results from previous studies; in it we investigate the implications of this divide for class and gender inequalities. The theoretical lens used for the synthesis is based on Bernstein´s theory of pedagogic codes. In the re-analysis we draw on previous studies of policy, curriculum and educational praxis as well as official statistics. The main conclusions are that contemporary policy and curriculum trends in all three countries are dominated by a neo-liberal discourse stressing principles such as "market relevance" and employability. This trend strengthens the academic-vocational divide, mainly through an organisation of knowledge in VET that separates it from more general and theoretical elements. This trend also seems to affect VET students' transitions in terms of reduced access to higher education, particularly in male-dominated programmes. We also identify low expectations for VET students, manifested through choice of textbooks and tasks, organisation of teacher teams and the advice of career counsellors.

In what way might writing of different kinds contribute to the development of a professional identity? By analytically distinguishing three discourses of communication, everyday, professional and academic, applied to three preschool student teachers' conceptions of writing during their education and in their initial phase at work as preschool teachers, we attempt to understand the role of writing in their development of professional identities. What we have found is that the professional discourse which all three have achieved is something each of them creates and develops in very different forms. Their independent final projects show that all three have a mastery of academic discourse, but only in exceptional cases do they make use of that discourse in contexts other than this specific piece of work and to some extent earlier papers written as part of their teacher education. However, judging from our interviews and their responses to our questions, it seems as if they have acquired modes of expression quite close to an academic discourse, but have primarily developed and use different variants of a professional discourse. This professional discourse also seems to be an important element in their development of a professional identity.

This paper explores the use, functions and constitutive effects of evaluation systems in local school governance, and identifies how contextual factors affect various uses of evaluation in this context. This case study of three Swedish municipalities demonstrates that local evaluation systems are set up to effectively sustain local school governance and ensure compliance with the Education Act and other state demands. Local decision makers have learned to navigate the web of evaluations and developed response strategies to manage external evaluations and to take into account what can be useful and what cannot be overlooked in order to avoid sanctions. The study shows that in contexts with high issue polarisation, such as schooling, the use of evaluation differs between the political majority and opposition, and relates to how schools perform in national comparisons and school inspections. Responses to external evaluations follow the same pattern. Some key performance indicators from the National Agency of Education and the School Inspectorate affect local school governance in that they define what is important in education, and reinforce the norm that benchmarking is natural and worthwhile, indicating constitutive effects of national evaluation systems.

This paper explores how evaluation, which has expanded at all levels of school governance across Europe, shapes parental roles by studying how local school governors and schools in Sweden represent evaluation to parents on their websites. Websites are prime locations for public communications and are useful for exploring the functions of evaluations intended for parental use. In recent decades, parental influence over school has increased through 'choice and voice' options, while the role of evaluations has continued to expand in school governance. Evaluations construct social roles, identities and relations and, as such, are constitutive of the social world and our place in it. By drawing on Dahler-Larsen's concept of "constitutive effects", the discursive implications of evaluation are discussed. The dominant type of evaluation represented on websites is performance data used for accountability and informed school choice purposes. Parents are primarily positioned as customers who exert influence through choice and exit options, reinforcing the almost unquestioned norm of parental right to educational authority. Representations of evaluation differ depending on local political majority, school performance, and public versus independent provider; as such, they are not hegemonic but tend to strengthen the position of parents as individual rights-holders, marginalising forms of collective action.

This article reports on the experiences of 104 doctoral candidates who participated in six offerings (2008-2015) of an intensive 5-day course for doctoral candidates associated with the research programme of an international research network. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how higher education practices, like those of this course, can be understood through the lens of a particular form of practice theory, namely the theory of practice architectures. The analyses show how the practice architectures of the course enable and constrain candidates' academic practices such as presenting and discussing their own research, chairing seminar presentations and being discussants for research papers whose authors are present. The candidates entered some new academic practices in the course but sometimes contested these practices, for example by requesting greater structure in some sessions, perhaps reflecting their expectations that the course would be more similar to other doctoral courses they had attended. Using the lens of the theory of practice architectures, the analyses shows how these new practices were enabled and constrained by specific arrangements built into the design of the course that served both as practice architectures for learning in the course and for the academic practices being learned.

A range of factors can lead to situations where university courses have to be taught with a very small number of students. In this paper, we report on our experiences of a chemistry course that was especially designed to encourage learning in small groups of students (four to five per course). The course design included inquiry-based approaches, case methodology and problem-based learning concepts. The main goal was to enhance student motivation and to support them to become active agents ('pro-sumers'). Technology was adopted to support students in their inquiry-based learning processes by using online logs, group wikis and quizzes and with sections of laboratory work. We explored student perceptions during the first 2 years in two courses. The students were, in general, very positive about the course and communicated that the technological tools along with the pedagogical design decisions had assisted them to different extents in their learning. Our conclusion is that such a design is appropriate for an advanced-level chemistry course with small numbers of students, and the course will continue to be given in this form.

Meeting the challenges of teaching to all individuals requires a multifaceted approach, especially from the Swedish standpoint of inclusive education for all pupils. In the context of applied standards for receiving special educational provision, the present paper strives to shed light on the scope of novel indicators which can accommodate pupils' different needs. Founded on three established and robust psycho-educational concepts -- working memory, test anxiety and self-regulation -- all of which are important for educational, social, emotional and behavioural development, the present study examines those concepts in terms of profiles and their relations to mathematical achievement. A battery of tests was completed by 624 children between the ages of 8 and 10 to assess their working memory, test anxiety, self-regulation, and mathematical achievement. Person-centred analyses confirmed the negative academic outcomes associated with the aforementioned variables but also revealed individual variations that warrant attention. Further, pupils labelled with an 'At-risk' profile were more likely to achieve low Maths scores, compared to pupils with an 'In-vigour' profile. An implication for special educational provision is discussed, and practical suggestions are provided.

Boys' (under) achievement is frequently on the agenda in the Nordic countries, like in other parts of the Western world. Theoretical explanations for their lower achievement than girls typically emphasise the dissociation between hegemonic young masculinities and school work. In this paper, we focus on boys' strategies for managing schools conflicting demands, using data from a recently completed Swedish ethnographic study of the discourses of gender and pupil achievement at school in various local settings. The analyses show that boys engage in a strategy of complex parallel positioning to master school demands and peer-group expectations; they appear to distance themselves from swotting yet, at the same time, devote themselves to schoolwork. This dual positioning needs to be accomplished over a short period of time at the beginning of the semester. The analyses point to the critical time sequencing, and reveal what seemed to be a carefully self-monitored process where boys' academic participation had to appear convincing to teachers but neither too long nor too intense to interfere with their peer-group interactions and positioning. The analyses also show teachers' appreciation of the boys who manage to position themselves well academically.

This article considers the place of theory within education in two contexts -- Sweden and the UK -- and advances the argument that both governments and academics themselves have contributed to a 'theoryless' education. Examples are offered from the fate of education science in Sweden and, in the UK, from responses to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and from the actions of a group of independent academics charged with producing guidelines for assessing qualitative research. Work with the Council of Europe in which theory was used to guide discussions with Government Ministers is described and the paper ends with some proposals for enabling academics to engage more fruitfully with theory. These involve a framework of ethics, informed by Levinas, and a 'creative ontology', developed by Simons and Masschelein.

This paper presents a theoretical approach to analysing educational media using the concept of historical consciousness. The concept of historical consciousness is defined and operationalised and its relevance for analysis of historical media is discussed. One aspect of the theoretical framework proposed is then applied in an analysis of a history textbook account. The analysis finds that while the framework may be applied in analysis of textbooks, its results regarding historical consciousness are tentative and in need of further investigation from the perspective of how its users perceive and appropriate the textbook account. Still, it is argued that the framework proposed may be useful since it specifies how a historical consciousness may be manifested and what methodological approaches that can be used when analysing it.

The uptake and use of digital technologies in the classroom is studied in Unos Umeå, a joint One-to-One (1:1) project between Umeå University and the Municipality of Umeå in Sweden. This paper presents the results of a survey completed by upper secondary students (N=923), focus group interviews (N=7) and classroom observations (N=22). Students see possibilities in accessing information, text skills, and work variation, while the challenges they see are difficulties in focusing on the task at hand, technical problems, and the lack of alignment between students' and teachers' skills in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Using the Ecology of Resources Model (Luckin 2010), these challenges can be interpreted as the manifestation of filters in the learning environment. How collaborative learning environments are created, the lack of alignment between teachers' and students' ICT skills and how everyday use of computers in the classroom develops will hold implications for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in the classroom.

This article explores how four male vehicle engineering students at an upper secondary school in Sweden engage in literature discussion. The study combines a Conversation Analysis (CA) approach with a reception theory perspective and shows that the boys use direct reported speech (DRS) in their interaction as a technique to handle intimate and personal dimensions in the text, but also to construct themselves as skilled readers. Approaching the empirical data in this way makes it possible to go beyond the stereotyped images of (working class) boys presented in so many research papers and provide a more nuanced picture of boys' reception pattern in a school context.

This paper reports on an analysis of how school inspection in Sweden -- its aims, directions and procedures -- is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible national authorities. The study involves a textual analysis of official annual accounts and plans (texts directed to the government, municipalities, schools and the public) produced by the National Agency for Education and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The analysis concentrates on key concepts conveying the dominant ideas of inspection and education. The analysis is structured around four dimensions that are based on an understanding of inspection as education governance and on the characteristics of the Swedish education system. The results suggest that the rhetoric and dominant ideas of schools inspection changed when the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School Inspectorate in the autumn of 2008. Key concepts before that time are more supportive of schools and municipalities, recognising local conditions. Later, a language with the intention of detecting shortcomings and supporting an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent.

The study presented in this paper examines and compares how issues of children's rights in education are constructed in policy in two nations: Sweden and New Zealand. Claims for human rights for children originate from international human rights agreements, but have to be incorporated into national policy. The central interest of the analysis is the process of the contextualisation of human rights, in which rights are transformed from their expressions at the universal level to concrete interpretations in a particular policy of an individual state. Similarities and differences in the political constructions of children's rights in education in the two nations are identified, and their expression in policy is discussed as embedded in national particularity.

The processes of learning mathematics are immensely complex and we largely lack insights into these processes. This is especially problematic when it comes to tertiary mathematics education, which has been much less researched than primary and secondary mathematics education. It is thus far from possible to clarify all relevant issues related to university mathematics learning difficulties. This paper will discuss the notion of learning difficulties and some related insights.

Policy documents for schools and education are being increasingly standardised all over the world and some research claims that a global curriculum is developing in which aspects such as entrepreneurship, lifelong learning and sustainable development are common denominators. This is regarded as a sign that economic rationality is gaining more and more ground in education alongside, or at the expense of, a democratic educational ideal. The aim of this study is to discuss one of these aspects, entrepreneurship, as a concern for schools and education and to put entrepreneurship in relation to the democracy-fostering mission of education. What do the policy documents have to say about entrepreneurship? Is there an inherent opposition between the entrepreneurial and the democratic justification of education? The paper is organised in two steps. The first step illustrates the global spread of entrepreneurship in policy documents for education through examples from the north and the south, respectively, in this case Sweden and South Africa. The second step deals with the concept of "democracy", which is of crucial relevance to education. Both connections and conflicts between fostering entrepreneurship and fostering democracy are discussed, and an integrative perspective is tested as an alternative to dualistic attitudes.

In 2011, Sweden introduced tuition fees for students from countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland when they enrolled at higher education institutions (HEIs). As a direct consequence, the number of students in Sweden from those countries decreased by 80% that year. Since then, the number of students has increased again and, before COVID-19, was on its way to reaching the same level as before 2011. Nevertheless, the number of tuition fee-paying students only dropped by 3% for the academic year 2020/21, after nine consecutive years of growth. In this article we are assessing changes in inbound student flows and compare the outcome with the ambitions expressed by the Swedish government when the fees were introduced. The introduction of tuition fees in Sweden and the experiences from this offer quite unique possibilities to learn how students, HEIs, other actors, and societies react and adapt. By use of previous studies and new empirics we analyse and reflect on the outcome given the motives behind the reform, especially with regard to the ambition to continue internationalising post-secondary education and, furthermore, on the reform's possible benefits and costs for post-secondary education in Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role of the OECD as a boundary organisation in Swedish education policy during the last 10 years. This has been a critical period of the transformation of the Swedish education system. Post-PISA, Swedish education moved from a position of confidence and relative strength to one of crisis and slow recovery. So far, most educational research has either tried to identify a top-down linear influence from the international to the national “levels”, or has disputed such influence by suggesting that PISA has not causally led to substantial national reforms. On the contrary, this article suggests that education policy research has to move away from viewing the relationship of the national with the global as hierarchical, linear and hegemonic. Through the operationalisation of the concept of boundary organisation, this paper is asking pertinent questions about the conditions, processes and practices that led to the entanglement of a large international organisation, the OECD, in the day-to-day policy-making of a country such as Sweden. This requires a nuanced theoretical and empirical approach, attentive to the political work of material artefacts, actors and organisations in the negotiations and ultimately the making of educational consensus.

Boys' (under) achievement is frequently on the agenda in the Nordic countries, like in other parts of the Western world. Theoretical explanations for their lower achievement than girls typically emphasise the dissociation between hegemonic young masculinities and school work. In this paper, we focus on boys' strategies for managing schools conflicting demands, using data from a recently completed Swedish ethnographic study of the discourses of gender and pupil achievement at school in various local settings. The analyses show that boys engage in a strategy of complex parallel positioning to master school demands and peer-group expectations; they appear to distance themselves from swotting yet, at the same time, devote themselves to schoolwork. This dual positioning needs to be accomplished over a short period of time at the beginning of the semester. The analyses point to the critical time sequencing, and reveal what seemed to be a carefully self-monitored process where boys' academic participation had to appear convincing to teachers but neither too long nor too intense to interfere with their peer-group interactions and positioning. The analyses also show teachers' appreciation of the boys who manage to position themselves well academically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses and discusses the possibilities and challenges of collegial mutual deliberation among teachers as a way of counteracting racism. It takes its starting point in research on teacher collaboration that emphasises the importance of creating conditions locally for critical discussions, building on knowledge from different perspectives and going beyond simple solutions. With a focus on the practical, the idea of deliberative communication serves as a theoretical lens to analyse discussions among eight teachers on their responses to racism. The study provides theoretical and empirical knowledge about the potential contribution of collegial deliberation to developing a communicative teacher community that counteracts racism.

This article analyses the knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity that is delineated in the syllabi of teacher education programmes for pre-, primary and secondary schools at two Swedish universities. A quantitative search for 14 chosen keywords preceded a closer analysis of the concepts *language* and *cultur*, when using truncation, in 192 syllabi. This showed that linguistic diversity was to a certain extent evident, mainly through the subjects Swedish and English, while for one university cultural diversity was mainly identified in the syllabi of Educational Work and English. If knowledge about linguistic and cultural diversity is limited to language subjects, and to some extent to pre-school and earlier school years, the risk is high that student teachers are not prepared to support equity in education for multilingual and non-dominant groups. Thus, we find that students studying the current Swedish teacher education programme are unlikely to be well equipped to meet the challenges related to creating equal educational opportunities for students in situations of linguistic and cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modest impact of national policy efforts on school digitalisation relates to a gap between views among policy-makers and practitioners, giving rise to complexity in translating policy into action. Acknowledging changes in governing through alternative policy formation-processes, and Ward and Parr’s (2011) arguing for the importance of strategic- and operational policy coherence, the focus of this paper is the forming of a national plan of action for the digitalisation of schools in Sweden (#skolDigiplan). Within this interview study, the views on policy work and challenges of digitalisation of schools are explored among an exclusive management group of non-traditional Swedish policy-makers appointed to produce the #skolDigiplan. Based on the findings, I conclude that national policy making regarding the digitalisation of schools may be conducted through a collective process, with several educational stakeholders contributing. Furthermore, I suggest that non-traditional national policy-makers, arguing a lack of digital competence knowledge concerning schools at the governing or authority level, may consider taking a step back in the policy-formation process as a supportive action. Teacher training programmes, despite being portrayed as important for the policy outcome, were declared distant in this policy process.

Motivated by earlier research highlighting Swedish teachers’ beliefs that the setting of homework compromises deep-seated principles of educational equity, this paper presents an exploratory study of Swedish parents’ perspectives on homework in their year-one children’s learning. Twenty-five parents, drawn from three demographically different schools in the Stockholm region, participated in semi-structured interviews. The interviews, broadly focused on how parents support their children’s learning and including questions about homework in general and mathematics homework in particular, were transcribed and data subjected to a constant comparison analytical process. This yielded four broad themes, highlighting considerable variation in how parents perceive the relationship between homework and educational equity. First, all parents spoke appreciatively of their children receiving reading homework and, in so doing, indicated a collective construal that reading homework is neither homework nor a threat to equity. Second, four parents, despite their enthusiasm for reading homework, opposed the setting of any homework due to its potential compromise of family life. Third, seven parents indicated that they would appreciate mathematics homework where it were not a threat to equity. Finally, fourteen parents, despite acknowledging homework’s potential compromise to equity, were unequivocally in favour of mathematics homework being set to their children.

This paper investigates trends in the study of Modern languages or second foreign languages (SFLs) in Swedish lower secondary school between 2000 and 2018. Over the last decades, SFLs, i.e. French, German and Spanish, have been the target of several policy measures as a response to a declining interest. However, few reports on their impact have been published. We report the proportion of pupils studying an SFL at the national level and across demographic municipality groups and analyse a possible impact of one policy measure, grade point average enhancement credits (GPAEC, meritpoäng) for SFLs. We found an increase in the proportion of pupils studying an SFL, but mainly in urban areas. Moreover, we found important differences between SFLs. Spanish is the most widely studied SFL in all municipality groups. French is most popular in urban areas while German is more chosen in rural areas. If the increase of the number of pupils studying and SFL can be ascribed to GPAEC remains still to be seen, but if so, the GPAEC mainly had an impact on highly urban areas where the proportion of pupils studying an SFL was the highest already before introducing this policy measure.

Internationalisation of higher education and teacher education has been a key issue since the 1990s and many universities still attempt to increase student mobility ever since. Much research has been done on the topic of internationalisation and higher education, including teacher education trying to show how a certain programme impacts on students’ learning, especially intercultural learning when it comes to programmes in teacher education. These studies are often directed towards programmes that last several months or a whole year. The focus of this study is rather to explore if and in what way experiences in a two-week field study can contribute to a student teacher’s intercultural learning and professional development. The findings of the research show that even a short field study has an important impact on the individual student teacher’s understanding of themselves and on awareness of teachers’ living and working conditions in a different culture like South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategies for entrepreneurship in the educational system are present not only in the Nordic countries, but also in the majority of other Western countries. Linked to these strategies different research efforts have been made. Although the research efforts have a common origin in supranational policies on entrepreneurship, there has been little research analysing the similarities and differences in how the topic is addressed by researchers in different countries. Being able to relate to both the policy and the available research in a nuanced way is important especially in the context of teacher education. The purpose of this article is to review the most recent research in pedagogical entrepreneurship from three countries: Finland, Iceland and Sweden. The aim is to discover whether the common phenomena of entrepreneurship in an educational context are approached differently in these three countries. The review of 21 articles in all, covering aim, method, concepts, references and results, draws a rather fragmented picture of the research. The main results are that the reviewed research was mostly qualitative and covered the entire spectrum from theoretical research to practice-oriented research. A variety of concepts were used. The analysis of the use of references uncovered a need to be more aware of including research from neighbouring regions. The research field seems to be quite lively and is still developing. However, it would benefit from a better dialogue between researchers in order to strengthen the contribution of Nordic research on pedagogical entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the teaching in higher education in Slovenia, with an emphasis on the pedagogical training and pedagogical qualification of university teaching staff. Various aspects of the latter were examined among 513 respondents. The results showed that university teachers attribute significant importance to pedagogical work (the term used in Slovenian higher education legislation), yet nearly half of them had never been involved in any kind of pedagogical courses. The other half of the respondents had participated in various kinds of pedagogical courses (i.e. 'adult education' or a pedagogical study programme for the primary and secondary level of education) and only 31.4% of all respondents had participated in higher education pedagogical training. At a higher education institution with well-defined criteria in the field of pedagogical work, the percentage of teaching staff without any pedagogical education is lower than in an institution with less defined conditions. In recent years, a growing number of various higher education pedagogical training programmes have been offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sweden has commonly been regarded as a striking example of a social democratic welfare-state regime (Esping-Andersen 1996), characterized by strong state governance and active involvement in welfare matters. In the last two decades, however, the Swedish public sector and education system have been radically and extensively transformed in a neo-liberal direction, a move that was preceded by extensive decentralization of decision-making from the state to municipalities and schools. In this article the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and external marketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact of competition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular. We conclude that the external marketization of education has proceeded a long way and Sweden also fully embraces new public management, i.e. 'inner marketization', of education in most respects. However, aspects of the older social democratic policy paradigm are still visible with regard to the assigned functions, values and governance of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]