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In 2021, I was asked to give a keynote address at the inaugural symposium of the Swedish national research school, CuEEd-LL – Culturally Empowering Education through Language and Literature, which was to take place in March 2022. I decided to focus my talk on my teaching journey. This paper builds on this keynote and includes my reflections on why and how I teach literature at Rhodes University, a culturally diverse institution. My teaching journey can be described as an unending learning expedition – a journey that has been challenging yet rewarding and continues to enrich me as a Black African female academic in South Africa. In this paper, I draw freely from the elements of a play by dividing my discussion into four parts. I begin with the prologue, which lays out the structure of the paper. Act I is a summary of my teaching journey, where I briefly contextualise higher education in the world, South Africa and Rhodes University before interrogating the role of literature studies in Africa in general and South Africa in particular. Act II contains a discussion of the different theories that inform my teaching philosophy, and the epilogue concludes my teaching journey.

This position paper argues that creative writing can be a fruitful tool for cultural responsiveness in secondary education and calls for creative writing to be viewed as a more natural part of language teachers’ culturally responsive pedagogical repertoire. The integration of creative writing exercises in culturally responsive language arts education may rouse a strengthened voice, benefit cultural literacy, engender the discovery and exploration of individual funds of knowledge, enhance relational competence, and bring about the critical crafting of and engagement with cultural representations. These arguments are convergent with the view that teaching, in order to be culturally responsive, should originate from students’ funds of knowledge, taking both subject content and relational aspects into consideration – and this paper proposes that creative writing is uniquely positioned to facilitate these aims.

This paper presents the research behind the formulation of a new didaktik model on waste and material resources in preschool. The research was part of an extensive collaborative R&D programme, involving close to 300 preschool teachers/managers and researchers, to build systematic knowledge on what may characterize teaching in preschool based on scientific grounds and proven experience. The guiding question in this specific study was what it can look like to teach sustainability issues in preschool. The teaching examined in the study was informed by the concept of didaktik as well as by pragmatic theory. Using the methodological approach of abductive analysis, a new didaktik model was designed. This process of generating a new didaktik model is part of didaktik modelling, a focus of the paper.

The paper presents a review process of Didaktik and curriculum theories, one that suggests that a German Bildung Didaktik approach seems to be suitable ground for the development of a critical-democratic Didaktik in preschool. The paper examines fundamental dimensions in Bildung Didaktik as point of departure for the modelling of a Didaktik in preschool. Among other things, a circular situation-oriented and dynamic didactical model is constructed. In order to take the preschool tradition into consideration, different forms of play-based learning are stated. These form an outline of a critical-democratic play Didaktik, including the concept playworld.

The current issue consists of two position papers and six articles covering diverse aspects of didaktik in preschool stemming from a major collaborative research project Multivocal Teaching in Preschool (https://mau.se/en/research/projects/multivocal-didactic-modelling-in-preschool/). The guest editor, Professor Ann-Christine Vallberg Roth, introduces this special issue in her position paper “Teaching in preschool: Multivocal didaktik modelling in a collaborative conceptual replication study.”

This paper illuminates what fiction reading means inside and outside of Swedish schools. It also argues for the need to formulate this endeavour as both an epistemological project and a phenomenological one. At the core of this paper lies a troubling state of affairs—that reading is declining—and a wish to trace the origins of this decline to find available means for remedy. To be able to grasp what fiction reading means in a phenomenological sense, the paper first embarks on a critical discussion of the reader and the text, which is followed by a methodological and theoretical section fully devoted to the effort of describing reading as such through Michel Henry’s concept of flesh. Armed with a phenomenological understanding of the significance of reading, the paper then places fiction reading within the context of Swedish education. The phenomenological analysis finds that in education, when reading fails to be preciselyreading (pathetic-esthetic reading), it is instead often transformed into something other (objectified reading or instrumental reading) than what it sets out to be. The paper uses a literary example to concretize its findings.

The paper argues that Swedish preschool teachers tend to be depicted mainly as subjects for policy implementation when it comes to their mission to teach in preschool. Taking the perspective of inside-out-professionalism, the paper aims to make visible how preschool teachers have developed professional knowledge about teaching from within the preschool context. The methodology is based on content analysis of semi-structured interviews with ten experienced preschool teachers. Teaching is defined openly as a conscious arrangement for learning. Dewey’s notions of experience, environment and subject content further informed the interpretation of the results. Two main categories were discerned, both emphasising the experience and active participation of the child: identifying potential subject components in children’s experience, and arranging an environment in which the child becomes a part. Each main category further included two sub-categories. Thus the present issue of implementing teaching in preschool could gain from research on established preschool practice based on inside-out-professionalism and made visible through Dewey’s theorical lens.

Research shows that student reflective writing is a valuable window into student learning, particularly student metacognition; however, our knowledge of the challenges of accessing metacognition to inform curriculum design and assessment practices in the ESL (English as a Second Language) context is less robust. This paper reports two qualitative studies of student reflective writing on an ESL writing course within a teacher education programme. The studies investigate how student metacognition manifests itself in reflective papers and how mapping student metacognition can inform evidence-based curriculum design and assessment. The data comes from several iterations of an ESL writing course and is analysed using directed and conventional content analyses. Our results expose a complex relation between metacognition, curriculum design and assessment practices: 1) unless scaffolded by the curriculum design to use precise terminology, students resort to expressing their understanding of the course content in terms of everyday, vernacular language and 2) student reflective writing not only provides a more nuanced picture of their learning than the final course grades but is invaluable for developing scaffolding and assessment practices. Based on our results, we recommend integrating structured reflection as part of the regular curricula to gauge ESL student metacognition and monitor more precisely their uptake of course content.

Higher education is today characterised by increasing student groups and high pressure on teaching staff. In these circumstances, it may be difficult to provide appropriate scaffolding of activities that many students find challenging, for example, academic and discipline-specific writing. It may also be difficult to align such support with principles associated with effective learning. In this paper, we present the design of the bachelor thesis writing support for students at a university of technology. The support is delivered by a communication division and reaches approximately 900 students each year. The paper describes the principles guiding the design and use results from a student survey to illuminate the challenges and affordances of the approach. The survey results show that students appreciate the module and its focus on dialogic feedback, student engagement and student activity. Our results also show that one of the challenges for some students is to negotiate advice from multiple sources, primarily content supervisors and writing staff. Despite such challenges, the design is an example of a sustainable, large-scale writing module based on research on feedback and learning.

This position paper takes the dichotomy between the unified context for teaching writing and writing research in North America and the diversified contexts for writing in Europe as its point of departure to outline several challenges such diversification in Europe may present to students and staff in higher education. The paper further argues for the need of unifying initiatives and describes the rationale for NB!Write, The Nordic and Baltic Network for Writing in Higher Education and outlines the goals of this initiative. The network strives to determine how the Nordic and Baltic institutional, national, and cultural contexts may help find possible answers to common pedagogical questions and develop sustainable solutions for writing support.

This position paper presents Professional Orality (PO) as a basic relational competence and ethical obligation in professional practice. PO is of central importance for communication in relational phonic professions where the practitioner is depending on the personal voice in contact with others in his daily work. PO assembles the central linguistic and nonverbal parts that constitute oral communication and is considered as a field of scientific knowledge and specialized skill that can be trained, verified and assessed. PO appears as a transdisciplinary field of knowledge as well as a multimodal complex form of expression consisting of trainable skills, practice based performative knowledge and trustworthy oral presence. This paper argues that establishing the knowledge field PO contributes to strengthens practitioners’ ethical responsibility for their own oral communication practice and, therefore, contributes to the possibility to make students become aware of the importance of artistic precision and trustworthiness in professional oral communication in different educational contexts. Five claims about professional orality are brought forward in order to establish an understanding of oral utterances as different from written ones, and to anchor the professionalisation of oral expression skills as a professional ethical obligation in education. It is argued that oral skills can be developed, trained and assessed in educational contexts adapted to an understanding of orality as a performative, bodily and simultaneous mode of expression. Specific challenges and opportunities related to such training are pointed out, and the consequences of these are discussed. Finally, critical perspectives on the field of knowledge professional orality are mentioned, and areas for further research in PO are suggested.

This special issue consists of five position papers, four articles and two essays covering diverse aspects of the theme Culture on the Move that foregrounds language and literature both as pedagogical tools and disciplinary fields necessary for learning to live and work in a culturally diverse world. The contributions stem from the initial activities within the graduate school “Culturally Empowering Education through Language and Literature” (CuEEd-LL). Centre-staging teaching and learning in Swedish education, the texts in this issue present a range of inroads into how language and literature can be used to support cultural diversity among pupils, students and teachers since cultural diversity is steadily gaining attention both as a resource and a challenge in education and society.

This paper aims to glean valuable insights from critical pedagogy in order to apply them to the field of African literary studies. Specifically, I am interested in how approaches inspired by culturally responsive education can help us revisit the important but under-researched topic of student agency as it features in fictional works that deal with colonial education in Africa. Although colonial education in literature has been the subject of intense focus in postcolonial theory, such theorizations largely examine how colonial education reproduces colonial rule through the dissemination of colonial discourse/ideology. When student agency in the colonial education systems is addressed, conventional postcolonial theory sees it as being overwhelmed or assimilated by colonial discourse and power. Ideas emanating from critical pedagogy and culturally responsive education are of value here in that they can elucidate how students interact with and even resist the pedagogical and political power of the colonial education system. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Weep Not, Child is an illustrative example of how such a critical-pedagogy-inspired approach can help us reorient literary studies of colonial education systems.

Through the monolingual bias and essentialist understandings of language in education, multilingual youth across the globe have consistently been portrayed as deficient based on their linguistic practices. Deficit approaches in education stem from a colonial project meant to silence the voices and erase the experiences of the Other, and although there is a long tradition of pedagogies that try to counteract this form of discrimination, these attempts are typically built on principles and assumptions that reproduce essentialism and dynamics of marginalization. In this position paper, I argue that it is necessary for educators to engage with non-essentialist understandings of language and multi-sided perspectives on multilingualism to develop pedagogies that are empowering for multilingual youth in Sweden. By engaging with the decolonial notion of linguistic citizenship, educators in Sweden can allow fluid understandings of multilingualism to enter the classroom, creating spaces for socio-political participation and dialogue at the margins of institutional arenas in which language can be negotiated. This measure creates opportunities for empowerment for all students, engaging them in the reconstruction of language and giving voice to stories that would otherwise remain silent.

In this paper, I formulate a position on the dissemination of ‘cultural empowerment’ in schools through a critical discussion of its relation to my research field, mother tongue instruction (MTI) in Sweden. In addition, I compare the ideals of the culturally empowering pedagogies and praxis of MTI, which I see as related through the underlying utopian visions of the multilingual and multicultural school. Both are forms of education which place a focus on the validity and importance of students’ individuality and their pre-existing knowledges from outside the curriculum. In discussing the marginalisation of MTI via the discourse of its threat to ‘Swedishness’, I hope to highlight some of the underlying problems inherent in cultural empowerment as an individualising practice carried out within the universalising framework that is the state education project. The implementation of MTI demonstrates a need for change targeted not only at the level of teachers and researchers but also at a level where legitimacy is granted to such change.

The last decades have seen regular and frequent modifications of the wording of school curricula in the Nordic countries together with increased appeals from teachers for further clarification. The paper analyzes how assessment of the subject English is presented in Sweden and Finland at the lower and upper secondary levels. The aim was to explore how much space was given to assessment in the texts, the types of expectations on school staff the texts generate, and the competences required to meet these, while considering the predominant curriculum theories reflected in these texts. It is a comparative case study combining qualitative and quantitative methods. The results show an imbalance between the two countries when it comes to space allocated to assessment. The Finnish curriculum is more extensive and distinct compared to the Swedish one. In both countries teachers’ main obligation is to make assessments based on knowledge and praxeological competence. Systematic and deliberative curriculum theory permeates both, but the shorter Swedish general guidelines give more space for local interpretation than the more detailed Finnish guidelines. Nevertheless, there are several issues in both curricula that can cause ambiguity. The importance of more distinct and transparent guidelines is thus apparent.

This paper deepens the understanding of conditions for students' subject-specific reading comprehension created through different ways of working with reading in civic education, and the support students thus get to read verbal texts. Motivation for the study is found in an increasing need for knowledge about reading in various school subjects, and theoretical foundation is found in New Literacy Studies and disciplinary literacy. Video recordings were analyzed from lessons in three different schools and six different classes (ca 100h in total). The schools worked with reading in different ways, two schools used different models for teaching reading and one school did not use any particular model. The material was analyzed using thematic content analysis. Seven different functions for reading were identified together with reading materials. Furthermore, we analyzed which text levels were in focus. Results show that the classrooms where teachers work according to special models give clearer support to read and comprehend longer coherent verbal texts by using this type of texts and working with them through a variety of functions for reading activities, activities general for several subjects as well as more subject specific activities.

In this paper we present our work process, methods and concerns in developing and implementing a model for analysis of multimodal texts. Using a design-based research approach and a multimodal social semiotic framework on communication, we investigated three different groups of students using video recordings and participatory observations. The results revealed the development of the model through three different design cycles into the current version and how students contributed to this process. In addition, we examined how the design process can be understood from the concept of student agency and how it contributes to the understanding of theory. The findings show that by applying a design process, students are offered student agency while creating an opportunity for a joint exploration between students and teachers, which is a rewarding experience that contributes to the development of all participants.

The present study analyzes and discusses mother tongue teachers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary collaboration with two specific groups of professionals: mainstream teachers and SEN teachers. A purposeful sampling with a maximum variation was chosen to obtain the highest possible representativeness. Thereafter, 13 individual, thematical, open-structured interviews were conducted. To discuss the themes arising from the abductive analysis of the interviews Bronstein’s (2003) theoretical model for interdisciplinary collaboration was used. The study forms part of a doctoral dissertation, which aims to get a more in-depth view of different measures that support multilingual students’ learning in the Swedish school context. In this paper, however, only results concerning mother tongue teachers’ perspectives on interdisciplinary collaboration with mainstream teachers and SEN teachers are presented. The results show that mother tongue teachers have a firm and consistent perception of their professional role, relying on the subject curriculum when planning, implementing, evaluating, and grading. However, interdisciplinary collaboration with mainstream teachers and special educational needs teachers is limited to solving structural and administrational challenges. The findings suggest that valuable multilingual resources would be made better use of when structural and administrative matters were formalized.

Reconciliation processes – wherein governments and other organizations examine their past institutional practices to understand contemporary problems in relation to minorities or indigenous groups – have become a widespread international phenomenon in recent decades. In Sweden, such an ongoing process is the reconciliation work between the Church of Sweden and the Sami. In this process, which recently resulted in the publication of a scholarly anthology (or a “white book”), educational history has come to play a vital part. The present article uses the Church of Sweden’s White Book as an empirical object of study to examine in more detail the role and significance of knowledge of educational history for this specific reconciliation process. By focusing on various scientific complexities and epistemological tensions that tend to arise in these kinds of undertakings, this paper also aims to problematize the white book genre itself as a path to historical knowledge. By doing this, this article’s overall ambition is to contribute to future scholarly work in reconciliation activities, white papers and truth commissions. This study applies a qualitative content analysis and connects theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice research.

There is a popular discourse in Sweden describing student writing as defective. Entering the discourse about the state and possible change of student writing, this paper analyses the writing part of the national test in Swedish for upper secondary school. Student texts from 1976, 1986, 1996, 2005, and 2012 are investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Drawing on Hultman and Westman (1977) for the quantitative analysis, the paper examines nominals (in particular, the use of nouns and pronouns), and correctness (distinguishing between different kinds of mistakes). The qualitative analysis pertains to the rhetoric competence in student essays. The results show that the student texts have become somewhat more informal, or speech-like, over the years. The study also indicates that the number of mistakes has increased slightly, especially the grave mistakes, which may make the texts difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, the rhetoric competence of today’s students seems, comparatively, good. The popular discourse, then, is right in some respects, but the situation is more nuanced than the critics claim.

The current issue consists of six articles and a position paper covering diverse aspects of educational issues: preschool teachers discussing physics in preschool, the role of Swedish as a second language (SSL) teachers in language introduction programmes, undergraduate Swedish EFL (English as a foreign language) critical thinking skills online, the need of a developed conceptual framework to describe preschool teachers leadership in preschool and within education and research, the emergence of learning in dating television, smartphones as a resource for adult immigrants' multi modal text production and VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) in a Swedish EFL classroom.

The position in this paper is that Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) are very relevant for children’s education in Sweden, and that their practice makes them highly adaptable to English language teaching. The rationale for this position is that this elicitation and communication technique has proven very effective in nurturing the abilities and skills which are identified in the Swedish curriculum for compulsory schooling. The impact of VTS in the Swedish education system could be significant. First, once known and understood by teachers, VTS can be a very efficient technique in the English language classroom and can directly help to fulfil several of the ambitions of the curriculum and the English language syllabus. Second, abilities and sensitivities developed by VTS correspond to the core values of Swedish society in its promotion of democratic values, which are espoused in the compulsory school curriculum. Third, VTS lends itself to being actively used across school subjects and therefore supports an interdisciplinary sensitivity in students. VTS can help student performance and confidence across subject areas, thus again fulfilling the wider ambitions of the compulsory school curriculum and encourage these students in their growing independence as individuals and as active members of society.

Since teaching in Swedish preschool was regulated in the Education Act 2010, preschool teachers have appeared to struggle with the concept of “teaching” in their day-to-day practices. This paper is based on a collaborative R&D programme involving preschool teachers and researchers aimed to build knowledge of what can characterize teaching in preschool. The research was carried out in 40–44 preschools/preschool departments in eight municipalities in Sweden between 2018 and 2020. The method was based on a praxiographic approach where preschool teachers tried out different theory-informed teaching arrangements, including didaktik, variation-theory, post-structural gateway and pragmatic perspective. The material for the article consisted of 350 co-plans, 305 co-evaluations and 35 hours of video. Analysis was based on a didaktik premise and can be methodologically described in terms of abductive analysis. Theory-informed teaching arrangements have been tried out and shown to support teachers in conducting teaching in the complex reality that is based on scientific grounds and proven experience. In summary, the analysis is merged in a communicable entity through the concept of “multivocal didaktik modelling.”

In this paper expressions that children themselves use to describe relationships between phenomena in the world, is - when placing a mathematical gaze on them- viewed as everyday mathematical concepts. The aim of the paper is to illuminate children´s use of everyday mathematics in their social interaction. More specifically, the aim is to show in detail how four- to five-year-olds use everyday mathematical concepts to describe, argue and negotiate order of turn, in this case in their interaction around a computer at a Swedish preschool. The case study is based on five 4 to 5 year old children´s activities involving a computer at a municipal preschool in Sweden. The children´s interaction around the computer was video recorded and analyzed in detail from a participant-oriented perspective on interactional conduct. The analysis shows that the children use various expressions that can be interpreted as everyday mathematical concepts as communicative cultural tools in their social interaction. Furthermore, the results show that the children have actual use for these concepts in their argumentation for order of turn, and that the concepts they use seem to be most sufficient in their argumentation in this situated activity. A conclusion is that the everyday mathematical concepts used in the analyzed activity can form a foundation for developing more formal mathematical concepts.

The current issue consists of 7 articles and a position paper covering diverse questions in educational research: how teachers in school-age educare perceive their work situation, what significance fiction reading carries in the Swedish school, how teachers describe teaching in preschool, what upper secondary school pupils find interesting when learning literary history, how teachers scaffold newly arrived pupils’ digital text production, what teachers say about teaching newly arrived pupils at a vocational upper secondary school, how gender is represented in Swedish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks and why it is essential to publish research on Swedish higher education (also) in Swedish.

In this paper, we present the conceptual framework, objectives, and methodology of an interdisciplinary research program (2018–2022) on the media literacy competence of teenagers in French-speaking Belgium, Quebec, France, and Switzerland. The program is undertaken by researchers in four universities, one in each national context. Focusing on information search and multimodal production as core media literacy activities, this program develops a multi-level assessment method to measure media literacy competence at varying levels of complexity. Additionally, we relate task-based measures of competence with self-reported competence and practices and seek to document the influence of the students’ interpretation of the tasks contexts and purposes, their motivation and feeling of empowerment, and their collaborative practices on the exercise of their media literacy. Preliminary results reveal that students report substantially higher levels of competence in information search than in web production; however, this difference is reduced when students assess their ability to perform specific search-related or production-related actions. These results are discussed in light of the potential usefulness of the program for teachers and for curricular design.

In 2013, the University of Vienna’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) implemented a pilot project, which has since grown to become the core of the university’s academic writing services for students. The writing mentoring programme was designed with the goal to create a means for disseminating knowledge about writing processes amongst students in earlier stages of their studies. The programme’s organisational structure is based on the experience that, to ensure scalability, an institution as large as the University of Vienna (approx. 90.000 students) needs to rely on multipliers and on the cooperation of stakeholders in its many academic departments. Regarding the writing mentoring programme, this translates into a focus on the processes of academic writing and sensitivity towards disciplinary cultures. In this position paper, we aim to demonstrate how writing mentoring can be implemented to provide structures which allow advanced Bachelor and Master-students to support other students’ academic writing in meaningful ways. In this way, a programme like ours can help in transforming organisational practices.

This special issue of Educare is published in collaboration with NB!Write, The Nordic and Baltic Writing in Higher Education Network, who aim to consolidate and disseminate writing research and pedagogy and forge new collaborations in the region. Therefore, in this issue of Educare, the Reader will find contributions investigating how writing and the teaching of writing are embedded and supported in different international, national, local and institutional models. The issue consists of three research articles, three position papers and an interview. The focus is on the recent initiatives in the Nordic and Baltic region, but other European contexts of relevance to the regional writing initiatives are also represented. More specifically, the contributing authors explicitly situate writing issues in particular institutional contexts, explore writing support and development of student writing and instructor competency and articulate strategies to make this work sustainable.

This paper discusses how Universities, who train and educate professionals who work with children and young people, might contribute to the development of a citizenry for the Europe of the future. The paper considers strategies to help young people understand Europe, identify themselves with Europe, and feel that they can help frame the future of Europe. The identity and image of Europe in the minds of young people and their teachers may be very varied. Developing a positive sense and identity with Europe raises issues, particularly around those of European identity, which is only one among many possible identities (regional, national, identities of relationships). Europe is not necessarily the most dominant, and it is unlikely to be so. For young people, the identity of youth more may be more compelling and cohesive. The paper argues that enactive learning of citizenship will naturally involve enactive aspects of citizenship. This will focus on the involvement of young people in establishing rights in their own schools and societies, and extending rights to the third generation. Teaching Citizenship is learning citizenship through active participation – and is something that is done in partnership, educational institutions with and alongside a wide range of social organisations.

The aim of this study was to investigate the parents’ perspectives of children’s transitions from preschool to school (preschool class and recreation centre) in two Swedish municipalities. The aim was also to investigate the importance of transition activities from the parents’ perspectives. In this study, a transition is understood as a mesosystem, a discontinuity and a non-linear process. A questionnaire with close-ended questions in paper form was constructed and distributed to the parents with the help of the heads and teachers. 131 parents, whose children had recently moved from preschool to school, received the questionnaire, while 70 parents answered it. The data was statistically analysed. The results showed that i) the parents, with few exceptions, experienced children’s transitions as safe and well-functioning, ii) about half of the parents felt some concern or concern in conjunction with the children’s transitions, iii) the parents of children in need of extra support and/or extra stimulation and challenges felt some concern or were concerned more often and iv), overall, the parents considered transition activities to be important. The study has relevance for staff working in preschools and schools, heads and teachers in training, researchers and others interested in educational transitions and transition activities.

This summer issue consists of seven articles and a position paper. In focus in this issue are several pertinent educational questions: how the concept of proven experience shapes teaching practice in school, how professional orality should be viewed from ethical perspectives, what is the essential meaning of joy in learning, how pupils develop narrative competencies and identities through consuming and producing stories in various forms, in what ways the Swedish minorities are represented in the steering documents (Lgr11), how taste can be reconceptualised to contribute to sustainable food consumption, what teaching means for pre-school and school-age recreation leaders and how PE teachers legitimise pupils’ writing in their subject.

I argue that there needs to be a greater critical awareness in parts of the academic world as regards the use of literary translations published at a time of state censorship. Using the first English translations of August Strindberg’s Giftas (1884; 1886) and I havsbandet(1890) as a case in point, this paper demonstrates the extent to which translations of books whose content clashed with the British Obscene Publications Act 1857 deviated from their source texts, often on the very points that made the books and their authors famous. Although there are more recent and uncensored translations available today, the old and censored translations of “provocative” authors such as Strindberg, Zola and Flaubert often outnumber more recent ones on the market, sometimes under the guise of being “Scholar’s Choice” editions. I will demonstrate that several literary scholars quote and refer to censored translations, even to the censored passages themselves, and that some use them in academic courses focussing on the very aspects that were censored. I therefore suggest that it should be made mandatory for all courses dealing with translated literature to include critical discussions on the use of translations.

One of the responsibilities of early childhood education and school is that children and students are given ample opportunities for influence and democratic participation. Research about children’s and students’ influence in education has grown during the latest decades. This paper presents a synthesis of Swedish research on influence in education published 2005-2018. Four themes are identified as main topics in the research undertaken: 1. the significance of the teachers, in which the views and attitudes of teachers, their concrete actions and asymmetrical power relations in education are examined, 2. a child/student perspective on influence, in which students’ perceptions of influence, their actions to gain influence and how status and position in the group affects influence are highlighted, 3. formal arenas for influence, in which the content and processes of class- and school councils are analysed, and 4. the significance of structural factors, which investigates how influence is affected by factors such as gender, educational ambitions, social status and class. The central findings within these themes are clarified, and, based on the synthesis, suggestions for further research about children’s and students influence are given.

This paper explores how digital competence is conceptualized in recent revisions in the curriculum for Swedish compulsory school. Four themes are identified based on a thematic content analysis of the revisions in the subject descriptions: use of digital tools and media, programming, critical awareness and responsibility. The distribution of the thematic revisions differs among the subjects, but the most dominating theme, permeating all the subjects, concerns the tool-oriented use of digital tools and media. This strong dominance of operational perspective tends to narrow the conceptualization compared to international definitions and frameworks of digital competence.

Education and knowledge production have often been portrayed as the worst enemies of racism and xenophobia. However, such claims can be misused to create a narrative of modern educational institutions being “free” from racism and, in worst case scenarios, contribute to hiding the ongoing discriminatory practices in schools. This paper provides a review of Swedish research on migration, ethnicity and racism in schools and introduces the key topics in this special issue of Educare. We explore examples of colour blindness in Swedish classrooms and experiences of meeting racism in school. Further, we investigate how racism and discrimination can be expressed in a school's everyday life without anyone necessarily having malicious intentions. With this, we contribute to understanding that various exclusionary practices based on ethnicity and race can occur even in school settings that promote diversity and anti-racism.

The following paper discusses a paradox in Swedish schools: while a norm critical perspective more commonly is implemented in school settings by a growing number of teachers, many classrooms remain color mute. However, the active effort to keep the race issue silenced confirms its very importance (Castagno 2008). Based on ethnographic fieldwork at an upper secondary school with a national Visual Arts program, I video recorded a group of pupils working with an art film assignment. The theme for the task was “power and resistance”, and the pupils selected a non-white, feminine body in order to represent the position of the subordinate. I examine how femininity and sexuality are performed and encouraged to be negotiated and problematized in formal education, how inequalities are both reproduced and challenged. Challenged in the informal settings, when the pupils play around in pauses, imitating vampires or Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Reproduced in formal settings when teachers interact - or when the camera is recording. But at the same time as the pupils perform these subject positions there is something more going on; a hint of something unspoken that participants still assign significance. There seems to be aspects of the visualization of bodies that may not be articulated in words, but still is employed as a resource when pupils uses their own bodies and appearance to create an aesthetic utterance about subordination. Thus, I analyze how gender, sexuality and race interact as discursive and aesthetic practices, in some young people's visual arts assignment. Key words: aesthetics, art education, femininity, race, subjectivity

The category of the “immigrant student”, which is often used in the educational setting from where the following study collects its data, is indeed an elusive one – especially so when it is employed as a label of students who have no experience of migration at all. The frequent use of the category is even more confusing, considering that Swedish publicity could be described as characterized by a hegemonic anti-racist discourse, including an often reproduced master narrative of a country which – except from a few right wing extremists – is considered to be a nation without racism. Drawing on linguistic ethnographic data from a fieldwork in a high prestigious secondary school in inner city Stockholm, this article examines how narratives of an unruly classroom behavior become associated with ”the young immigrant student” category, and furthermore, how students rhetorically manage the dilemma to tell that story without sounding disparaging. The paper is an investigation of anti-racist waysoftalkingaboutfailing students as the ethnic or racial Others.

This paper examines Swedish secondary school’s strategies for supporting students who lack parental care, and what explanations school professionals use to describe and categorize this group of vulnerable students. The results indicate that students’ family backgrounds are central to the explanations given for social problems, as well as to how different student groups are categorized. Discourses of the non-­‐respectable family are provided as the main explanations for neglect among the students categorized as stigmatized, whereas discourses explaining problems among students who could be categorized as middle-­‐class, revolved around the absent and career focused parent.

Role-play is a useful pedagogic tool because it involves active participation and facilitates various ways of expression. However, role-play has received less attention as a research method. We have used researcher-initiated role-play with subsequent focus group interview in a study of adolescents' conceptions about food messages. In this paper we will use our experiences from this empirical study to describe and evaluate the use of researcher-initiated role-play with subsequent focus group interview as a method for data collection. In our empirical study the participants chose and played role characters representing agents they think convey food messages to them in their everyday life. They planned, bought, cooked and ate the food, and after that they participated in a focus group interview. Our experience is that this method enables participants to be active throughout the research process. They influence how the role-play proceeds, which diverts the control from the researcher to the participants and reduces the power hierarchy. Furthermore, this method promotes reflection among the participants. Both because they are acting in roles and because they are confronted with interaction with authentic food. In our study this contributed to a rich data material. Therefore, we consider this method to be a promising research method for studies concerning everyday practices.

This issue of EDUCARE is dedicated to the fields of punk and hiphop studies. In December 14-16 2014 the network for childhood and youth studies, funded by FAS/FORTE, hosted a conference at Malmö University with the name “Politics of identity, activism and pedagogy in punk of hip-hop studies”. In this issue we present four articles based on papers and presentations from the conference.

In the spring of 2013 national tests in biology, physics and chemistry in grade 6 were implemented for the first time in Sweden. Data collected in connection to the tests are used to analyse student performance at different levels. This paper reports on differences in performance in biology, physics and chemistry between teaching groups, as well as differences in results related to gender and Swedish / Swedish as a second language. Comparisons are also made with results from TIMSS 2011, which tested the same group of students. Analyses were carried out with the aim to discuss equity in science education in Swedish schools. Overall, the results indicate that differences in student performance related to teaching group have increased since 2011 and that differences depending on the linguistic background are considerable. Additionally, girls perform better than boys in all science subjects. All these differences are large enough to be paid attention to on political levels and by principals and teachers. Both overall structural changes and changes in teaching and learning activities in schools are needed to increase equity in science education.

The aim of this article is to examine aspects of democracy derived from participation in so-called research circles, and to discuss participatory and democratic ideas arising in those circles as they relate to perspectives on Early Childhood Education. This paper draws its argument mainly from material recorded from two research circles — one on Gender and the other on New subject didactic challenges in preschool. The analysis was based on the separate data from the two research circles and on a comparison between them. It is a theoretically governed approach based on Klafki’s critical constructive didactics and Biesta’s critical discussion on education and democracy in relation to the rise of neoliberalism. Larsson’s three aspects of democracy in relation to study circles have been used: equal participation, horizontal relations and knowledge that informs standpoints. The diversity between the circles resulted in variations concerning form and content that could be discussed as related to democracy aspects.

In this paper we focus on the use of a combination of socio-scientific issues (SSI) and simulations. We have developed an augmented reality (AR) simulation called Transformer. The SSI narrative in Transformer concerns an electric transformer station situated in an area close to a planned new campus. Students’ task is the issue if it is advisable to build a campus area. The simulation is organized as a roleplay. The students take part in groups, playing one of five different roles.The aim of this study is to explore students’ ways of using knowledge in relation to the AR simulation. We investigate how students integrate science and other knowledge in the debate constituting the final part of the role-play. The study is a part of a research process, guiding the researchers to further develop Transformer. The study showed that students justified their positions using scientific evidence and information collected through their own efforts outdoors in the real and actual environment where the AR simulation was situated. Students kept the controversy that existed between the different roles alive throughout the debate and stayed focused on the issue in question. We argue that this is due to the situated context achieved through the simulation.

The phenomenon I focus on in this article is the construction of “the competent child”, which has developed from both psychology and later the sociology of childhood and has influenced the Swedish Childhood Education. One purpose of this paper is to investigate the pedagogical signs in this construction of “the competent child” and to contribute to the discussion of the influence of a new understanding of children in a nursery practice. In addition to the theoretical part of the article, I present analysed material from a limited case study. I have chosen a Reggio Emilia-inspired nursery, with its emphasis on democracy and view of children as competent and active, to shed light on the connections between this view and a values education. I also aim to problematise this paradigm of childhood. The methods used in the present study are field notes and video recordings. Material from my case study illustrates how values education is expressed in a child care practice.

In 2003, the Swedish government made a “hand-shake” (Handslaget) with the The Swedish Sports Confederation, offering one billion Swedish crowns over a period of four years to local sport clubs in order to create project that will engage more children in organised sport. On of the themes for creating projects is by way of sport clubs collaborating with schools, so that within the school day time pupils will be exposed to club sport – either through club instructors coming to the school or the pupils coming to the club facilities. But what happens when an activity constructed on one social field, and according to the specific conditions of that field, is simply lifted over to another social field? In this paper I discuss some consequences emanated from such a process.

In this paper young people’s use of and relation to dance, theatre and aesthetic practices is investigated. In what ways can aesthetic practices play an important role in young people’s career expectations and identity formation? The empirical material consists primarily of a case study of an amateur theatre group in a Swedish suburb and complementary interviews. The focus is on the one hand on the different learning processes taking place, and on the other hand on the intersection between the practices of theatre, the schooling system and a multicultural context. Consequently, this is also a study of young people’s career patterns and lifestyles. The results imply that the aesthetic practices create openings for experimenting with identities and for hybridity, that is, for the complex combination of different types of identities. By developing an intermediate area in which the stable is dissolved, “traditional” distinctions are partially erased and reconstructed. The multicultural context and the societal structures are not that present. This is rather a study of self-development, individualization and an ongoing neo-liberal transformation of schools, learning processes and identities.

This paper is divided into four sections. The first of these provides a review of research on creativity. Case studies of artists and of children and young people, experimental studies in psychology as well as anthropological evidence suggest that creative work has a number of dimensions with educational implications. For example, students should be given ample time to pursue ideas; they should be given credit for being adventurous and willing to take risks; they should be encouraged to combine production with perception and reflection; and they should be given opportunities to assess their own performance and to get feedback from peers and teachers. The next section examines some unexpected results from a major Swedish study on the development of creative skills, from age five to nineteen. For example, the study did not confirm the commonly held belief that the quality of children’s art works stagnates in school. With regard to process criteria, however, referring to the capacity to work independently, evaluate one’s work, and so on, students in comprehensive school appeared to stagnate or show only insignificant improvement. The findings indicate that self-assessment, as well as investigative work, inventiveness and the ability to use models, are not learned by life experience or maturation alone. The third section presents a meta-analytic study by Folkert Haanstra on the effects of art education on aesthetic perception. Haanstra demonstrated that a combination of studio art and reflective art education is most effective in bringing about changes in the ways people understand art. The fourth and final section discusses the use of portfolios to foster an interaction between studio art and reflective art education. A portfolio project in the Netherlands suggests that the school can be reformed from within, if teachers are given opportunities to co-operate around issues such as evaluation, assessment and curriculum development.