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The standardised and instrumental view of teaching overshadows the unintentional spontaneous, unpredictable aspects of teaching captured by the notion of pedagogical tact. Pedagogical tact is grounded in teacher-pupil relations involving trust and care. This article illustrates how pedagogical tact can be used as an analytical tool in empirical educational research. The overall aim was to explore how tactful acting manifests itself in teachers' pedagogical decision-making, and what can facilitate or impede teachers' tactful acting. The author provides examples from two cases. The first case shows how the teacher balances freedom and constraint in making decisions about grading. The second case demonstrates how a beginning teacher handles a situation involving a student with special needs. The findings show that the conditions for tactful acting are determined by various aspects of the educational practice, such as the teacher's freedom to make pedagogical decisions and the teacher's obligations towards the students, principal, and parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Denmark and Sweden have witnessed a historically significant amplification of parental influence in compulsory schools during the past two decades. The emphasis on parental involvement in these two countries reflects international trends of neoliberal governing of educational processes. We know very little about the interplay between beginning teachers' encounters with parents and how that influences the teachers' identity formation. This article investigates beginning teachers' experiences with parents in Sweden and Denmark and how these experiences reflect the teachers' professional identity development. Through a comparative case study approach, interviews were carried out with 10 teachers in pre-service and in-service phases of their profession to capture their interpretations of their experiences with parents. A framework involving the concepts of parent-teacher relations, professional teacher identity, and emerging and thickening trajectories was used to develop the interview questions and analyse data. The results show that beginning teachers experience challenges in their relations with parents and these challenges put a strain on their self-definition as professionals. These results provide implications for addressing the constraints on teachers' professional autonomy brought by a culture of clientelism which has the potential to change the role of teachers and therefore affect their professional identity development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged in research that common criteria and aligned standards do not result in consistent assessment of such a complex performance as the final undergraduate thesis. Assessment is determined by examiners' understanding of rubrics and their views on thesis quality. There is still a gap in the research literature about how analytic and holistic judgments are made and how they are integrated in decisions about the final grade. This interview study aims to identify the sources of inconsistency in analytic and holistic assessment. Ten examiners assessed three final undergraduate theses from a primary school teacher education programme at a Swedish university. The analytic assessment focused on two parts: theoretical framework and academic language style, which revealed inconsistencies in assessment. The analysis of the holistic assessment showed how examiners weighted different dimensions of the thesis and how they made judgements for the final grade awarded. The findings reveal several sources of inconsistency, such as examiners' own constructs, their interpretations and expectations about students' ability to manage academic work. The study calls for further discussion about whether it is possible to make criterion-based assessment reliable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring teaching as an upper secondary school teacher through lived experience offers pedagogical insights that have been challenged over a period of 25 years, when neoliberal educational policies gradually transformed the conditions for teaching in Swedish schools. The article is grounded in the assumption that the teaching profession is complex and there are multiple tacit dimensions inherent in being and becoming a teacher. Several of these dimensions are captured by the notion of pedagogical tact and have to be learned through practice. However, over the past few decades, the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Swedish education sector have changed the conditions for teaching, and created an area of tension between the teacher's pedagogical alignment and the educational practices influenced by neoliberal values. The aim of the study is to describe how the author experienced these tensions, and what they meant for her becoming and being a teacher in three different pedagogical sites: a higher education preparatory program, a vocational preparatory program, and in adult education. The description is grounded in the lifeworld phenomenological approach and carried out through personal narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores student teachers' development of professional identity in two teacher education programmes in Sweden and Denmark. Interviews were conducted with ten students in a comparative case study. Data were analysed by employing conceptual approaches of hermeneutic phenomenology and identity trajectories. The results indicate that student teachers attribute professional identity development to teacher education to a limited extent. Despite the different organization of Danish and Swedish teacher education, informants from both settings interpret the qualities of a good teacher mostly through personal beliefs and previous experiences, and refer to ethnicity, social segregation, and discrimination in characterizing themselves as teachers. • Students in teacher education interpret professional identity through personal characteristics and past experiences. • Students hold on to initial understandings in identifying as teacher throughout teacher education. • Teacher education provides students with little opportunity to reflect upon the development of teacher identity. • Ethnicity is an essential characteristic that stands out in identifying as a future teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment and grading are largely researched dimensions of teacher profession. There are though some aspects of grading that have not yet been studied to any great extent. How teachers inform their students of grades awarded can be considered as one of those aspects. This study is inspired by a phenomenological hermeneutical perspective and provides analysis of video recorded material of a grade conference taken from Swedish upper-secondary school. The aim of the study is to shed light on how the grades are communicated and understood. The results show that grades have a wider meaning for the teacher and the student than pure assessment of student's knowledge. Grades stand, for instance, for maintaining a good relationship between the teacher and the student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]