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This article is a part of an on going ethnography project that run over six years in an Upper Secondary School in the south of Sweden. In this particular article we shed light over the implementation, enactment and reactions from the staff of one of the latest of a series of reforms that has been launched into the Swedish educational system: The Teachers' Salary Boost reform (TSB). The reform rewarded especially excellent teachers -- with raise in their monthly wage with 200-300 €. 40-50% of the teachers at the school did not get any raise at all. We produced our data using ethnographical methods with focus on participant observation, formal and informal interviews. From our data we draw the conclusion that while the leadership at the school executed the reform as a question concerning administration, the teachers receive the reform as a question concerning existence. The embedded trivialisation of teachers' skilfulness remodelled the teachers professional positioning and made them questioning their professional lives and professional selves.

Introduction: This paper reports results from an ethnographic study of teacher trainees' information activities in digital, group-based learning and their relation to the interplay between use and appropriation of digital tools and the learning environment. Method: The participants in the present study are 249 pre-school teacher trainees in Sweden. Three key informants and their teams were followed during a course module using online and offline participant observation. The produced material includes transcribed interviews with nine students, recorded digital interactions from Facebook, Google Drive and Prezi, field notes and a field diary. Analysis: The material was read repeatedly, coded and comparatively analysed using the lens of information literacy and the concept appropriation. The analysis generated recurring themes. These themes emerged as phases of the group-based learning process. Results: The results illustrate how information activities during teacher trainees' digital, group-based learning are performed during four phases--setting the scene, negotiating the topic, gathering material and presenting the assignment. Conclusions: Crucial aspects of an information literacy of digital, group-based learning in teacher training are identified. The learning environment of teacher training constrains and enables use and appropriation of digital tools in terms of flexibility, lack of participation and transparency.

This study is part of a school improvement programme on entrepreneurial education and investigates teachers' understanding and transmission of entrepreneurial education in two Swedish lower secondary schools, through interviews and observations. Entrepreneurship is a well-established concept within capitalist society, but the interest here is to investigate the transmission of it into pedagogic discourse and communication. Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device is used to reason on the process of what happens, and why, when the concept of entrepreneurship is transformed into entrepreneurial education. The results indicate different understandings and connotations on a deeper level, and also show that transmission to colleagues and pupils faces a series of challenges. In practise, the findings show different approaches to entrepreneurial education among individual teachers, but also between schools. This can be explained by gaps in the transmitting process, but also by different school cultures and diverse forms of collegial collaboration, which may affect transmission among colleagues and thus the transmission to pupils. Pupils' backgrounds may also have an impact on the differences.

While person-centred care has gained increasing prominence in recent decades as a goal for healthcare systems, mainstream implementation remains tentative and there is a lack of knowledge about how to develop person-centred care in practice. This study therefore aimed to explore what may be required in order for person-centred care programmes to be successful. The study used an ethnographic method of data collection. This consisted of closely following an implementation programme on a medical emergency ward in a Swedish hospital. Data consisted of participant observation and informal interviews with healthcare providers and their management leaders while they were in the process of training to use person-centred care. These interlocutors were using action learning methods under the guidance of facilitators. Our findings revealed that although the programme resulted in some of the processes that are central for person-centred care being developed, organisational factors and a lack of attention to ethics in the programme counteracted these positive effects. The study highlights the importance of facilitating mechanisms to produce desired results. These include management leaders' learning about the dynamic and collective nature of learning processes and change. They also include allowing for inter-professional dialogue to enable managers and professionals to reflect deeply on professional boundaries, disciplinary knowledge and power relations in their teams. Teamwork is essential for the development of person-centred care and documentation, in accordance with this specific implementation programme, is also indispensable. The space for inter-professional dialogue should also accommodate their various perspectives on the aims of care and organizational reality.

Education for newly arrived students in Sweden is commonly organised in introductory classes, providing a basis for transition to the mainstream system. Focusing on the hitherto underinvestigated question of how newly arrived students experience the time in and transition between introductory and regular classes, we analyse the social and pedagogical resources these two contexts provide based on interviews with students who arrived during the last years of lower secondary school. The research was conducted during 15 months at three schools in municipalities of different sizes, comprising 82 days of participant observation, 16 interviews with teachers and 61 semi-structured interviews with 22 students. Pointing to the tendency of allocating responsibility for newly arrived students' education solely to the introductory class or the individual student, we argue that social and pedagogical provision also needs to be made in the mainstream system in order for school to fulfil its inclusive and educational aim.

Introduction: This paper investigates participatory practices in library activities for young children and their care-givers in a specific cultural context. Method: Using an ethnographic approach data were collected through participant observations of songtimes for babies and toddlers, and interviews and group interviews with staff and care-givers. Analysis: With a theoretical departure point in communities of practice the data were analysed by searching for themes and connections to cultural contexts. Trustworthiness was ensured through triangulation: observations of children's activities were related to the interpretations of care-givers' through interviews; member checking through feedback from adult participants; and, ongoing discussions of interpretations between the researchers. Results: The study's findings show how library activities for children can serve as spaces where both a community of practice focused on "mothering" can develop as well as special child communities of practice. Participation is identified as work involving children, adults and professionals in interaction with place and promoted by a view of place as dynamic rather than static. Conclusions: We conclude that participatory practices in library activities for young children are situated and co-evolve through intergenerational dialogue; they are also partial and ongoing. By promoting intercultural dialogue, library activities for young children may become more socially inclusive. [This paper was published as part of: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-22 August, 2013.]

Children of foreign origin are increasingly failing in mathematics in Swedish compulsory schools. This article analyses the didactics at a school proven very successful in teaching mathematics to all children including the 70% of children of foreign origin. The situation at the studied school is compared to research of the Swedish school system through the concepts creation of meaning, intercultural leadership and linguistic approach. The environment at the school is signified by: 1) a linguistic approach to mathematics, 2) interplay in classrooms of mathematics between visual and practical materials and problem solving rarely focusing on textbooks, 3) a learning and problem solving organization where "Swedishness" (that is to say the Swedish way) is not the norm by which students are judged, including a positive approach to multilingualism, 4) high expectations towards pupils, and 5) teachers and the school leadership holding an inclusive approach to pupils who need support in learning compulsory school mathematics. Supplementary teacher training has proven to be one factor of great importance in classrooms of mathematics. The studied school shows signs of being a learning organization where one teacher takes on the part of a knowledge activist--provoking new ways of thinking (Jacobssen & Thorsvik 2008).

This article seeks to contribute to the idea of "posthumanist education" by unfolding an educational situation where an assemblage of two humans and 33 former battery hens is gathered to carry out a so-called cognitive bias experiment for two days. A Deleuzian repertoire is set in motion to configure the dynamics of hens intervening in the research schedule and affecting the results in various unexpected ways, as human-avian subjectivities co-emerge in the context of the fieldwork setting. The cognitive bias experiment ends in an ultimate line of flight; an act of animal liberation: The hens are moved from the research facility, where they were scheduled to be euthanized, to a private home in the countryside. Contained in the research process are two important messages to environmental educators: What are the implicit assumptions about nonhuman animals guiding environmental education practice and scholarship, and what are the connections between research and activism? (Contains 1 figure and 11 notes.)

Storytelling has been shown to play a key role in transferring work experience from more experienced towards novices in a number of vocational educational practices, however previous studies have not to the same extent dealt with the role of students' own storytelling practices for sensemaking of work experience. This study set out to examine police students' storytelling of their first occupational experiences from a sensemaking perspective, with an analysis drawing on the concepts of enactment, selection, and retention. The study is based on participant observations of field training follow up sessions in the context of police education. Findings indicated that student storytelling of work experience tended to be geared towards action, extremeness and the telling of 'war stories.' Furthermore, these type of stories functioned to enable student identification, self-enhancement and emotion management. These findings contribute to our current understanding of how students engage in sensemaking of work-based experiences and in extension how knowledge integration and learning from work placements can be structured pedagogically.

The upper secondary school is in Sweden practically mandatory even though attendance is voluntary and today almost all students in Sweden continue their studies at upper secondary school. But not all of them leave this school with a complete certificate of schooling as a result of experiencing a range of difficulties which may be due to cognitive, physical, sensory or social factors. This article uses ethnographic data from a case study to explore how one municipal upper secondary school allocates additional support to students with different social characteristics. The study focussed on students in the following three upper secondary schools programme all in the same school: (1) Individual, (2) Health and Social Care, and (3) Technology. The results show that existing social inequalities are reinforced through everyday activities and interactions. The prevalence and type of additional support that the students are offered is one of the factors reinforcing existing social differentiation, and is closely linked to the type of programme they are studying. Successful support services appear to be focused on Swedish male pupils from higher socio-economic backgrounds on the Technology Programme. Students from lower social backgrounds enrolled in either the Individual or Health and Social Care Programmes receive much less appropriate support. The social justice implications of these priorities for resource allocation are discussed.

This article reports and discusses findings from an ethnographic case study, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of how different children perceive their learning environment in the first grade of primary school, with regard to social as well as academic aspects. The theoretical framework is based on an interactional perspective, where children's learning and development are considered to take place in a dynamic and ecological system. The reported results are based on interviews with 16 children, and observed teaching situations during the first year of primary school. Research among children demands special ethical considerations, such as how to avoid questions and interest from the researcher affecting the position of children being vulnerable in some way. The findings show that, within a group of children, facing a similar learning environment, there are significant differences between the experiences expressed. The findings presented support the importance of listening to children when planning educational settings. Listening to and taking into account the children's different voices is an essential part of research and education that strives for inclusion, learning and well-being of all children.

During recent years, many schools have started to implement information and communication technologies (ICTs)-based learning devices (such as laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and active boards) in the classroom settings in order to increase learning outcomes. The aim of this study is to find which activities and outcomes are evident in the usages of computing devices and how those devices aid elementary-level students in their learning activities. The study includes five overt participant observations at some schools in a Swedish municipality including unstructured interviews and explains the findings through activity theory and the Alberta Education Framework for Student Learning . The major activities found were dealing with the (1) educational application assignments, (2) storytelling, (3) report writing and (4) practical interaction assignments. We concluded that ICTs aid students in becoming more concentrated, focus driven, engaged and amused, thus learning becomes more interesting.

This paper examines the strategies monolingual teachers use to scaffold meaning and encourage and enhance verbal communication with emergent bilingual children in a Swedish mainstream preschool. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a preschool group in which seven of twelve children spoke Swedish as their second, additional language. The basic assumption in this paper is that knowledge is scaffolded in talk between teachers and children. Several scaffolding strategies are identified such as guessing, qualified guessing, interactive scaffolding and co-construction of meaning. The analysis shows that successful languaging assumes a high level of trust between the children and their teachers and that it is essential that the teachers can identify each child's zone of proximal development. Some educational implications and dilemmas are identified on the basis of the results.

The paper interrogates how teacher education and schools are produced as places for simultaneous and intertwined norms of nationality and norms of sexuality. Drawing on data from observations at a Swedish teacher training programme, the concepts of banal nationalism, homonationalism, and precarity are used in order to discuss productions of sexual, national, and cultural subjects. The analysis indicates that homonationalism in education produces "tolerable" queers together with "intolerant" migrants. In this way Sweden is produced as a homonormative nation in opposition to nations and subjects that are considered "other". The concluding section suggests using investigations of homonationalism as a tool in teacher education in order to bring about more inclusive schools.

This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in an eldercare facility and a study in a large factory. Analysis of the data set demonstrates striking similarities, both in the way incident reporting texts are structured and worded and in the literacy practices that contextualize them. Dominant characteristics in the texts are the absence of actors and the structured, process-based approach of problems and problem handling. The forms often generate conflicts in the ways workers are asked to textually represent an incident. In this article, we argue that lean thinking has penetrated texts and literacy practices of two considerably different workplaces, and this has a large impact on the way workers are instructed to think and act with regard to problem handling techniques.

This article explores students' accommodation and resistance while participating in group work. The data collected are from fieldwork observations in several classrooms over the course of four terms in different secondary school classes in Sweden, and also from interviews with the students. Through this data analysis, we report that the students accommodated for such reasons as amusement, compliance, fulfilling expectations, and striving for high marks. The reasons for students' resistance were blending, inability, stage fright, and vagueness. Macro-sociological concepts from Ziehe's cultural theory were used to capture explanations for students' behaviour in order to understand why students, on a micro-sociological level, accommodate or resist when using group work as a learning mode. On the basis of results, three models of interpretation were developed, namely, individual, institutional, and structural.

This article investigates the cooperation of a teaching team in Swedish upper secondary education over a period of five years. The data collection builds on field studies and partly on a collaborative research approach. Three areas of cooperation have been identified: collaboration among the staff; interactions between the staff and the students; and the partnership between the staff and other stakeholders/local workplaces/institutions. The cooperation has been analysed with concepts from different practice theories and from Honneth's theory of recognition. The results illustrate: the importance of different kinds of connections of actions for sustainable cooperation and partnership that are socially based and flexible actions as well as action based on rigorous routines; the importance of objects and inscriptions for durable social connections; and how recognition is present and manifested in all successful areas of cooperation. Recognition is not only essential for building and maintaining prosperous "external" partnerships. The results and analysis show how recognition is also a key to durable forms of staff collaboration and for student school connectedness.

What can we learn from and with the body in order to understand more about the (lived) experiences of newly arrived students in schools? This question has hitherto been given little attention in relation to the field of migration and education. Using the perspective of Ahmed's critical feminist phenomenology, this article aims to explore the embodied experiences of the different contexts that newly arrived students encounter in a rural monolingual school in Sweden. The empirical data are based on participant observation conducted in introductory and mainstream classrooms, as well as interviews undertaken with newly arrived students during a year of fieldwork. The findings of our study show how close attention to newly arrived students' embodied experiences can help to dispel prevailing myths surrounding inclusion, bringing to light thereby how the current lived conditions of inclusion in fact carry with them lines of exclusion.

Since reading and writing digitally demand partially different competencies, there is a change in some of the premises of related educational practices. This study aims to contribute to the knowledge of educational reading practices by scrutinizing how literacy events evolve in a digital classroom where each student has a personal digital device (1:1), iPads in this study. Our study is grounded in sociocultural theories of learning and focuses on the structuring resources utilized by students, namely the notion of multiple ongoing activities and the ways in which specific resources take precedence in shaping these activities. One class of 13-14 year-old students was studied for a week across several subjects through video-recordings and observations. The findings imply that the students moved among vast array of reading practices. However, the main structuring resource is a strong focus on task-solving and the practice of schooling, which mainly builds on principles emanating from traditional text. It is only occasionally that structuring resources that also include the opportunities associated with digital technology are utilized. This indicates the importance of further studies on how educational practices could be organized to scaffold the basis of traditional reading comprehension as well as other approaches required in digital environments.

Universities traverse epistemic, sectoral and geopolitical boundaries with increasing frequency, but along the way encounter challenges in mitigating unequal capacities, soaring costs and proprietary concerns. The bridging of disparate stakeholder interests requires an enormous effort, as research policies, institutional norms and organizational cultures in global science often remain irreconcilable. In seeking to identify strategic leverages for optimal balance in cross-border partnerships, this paper considers the case study of the Structural Genomics Consortium, which represents a synergy of resources, interests and commitments by research universities, governments and industries in Canada, Sweden and the UK. By triangulating data derived from content analysis of institutional materials, interviews and participant observations in Toronto, the study zeros in on the Canadian equilibration of symbolic, cultural and organizational forces aimed at securing long-term stakeholder support across institutional, sectoral and geopolitical domains.

The article focuses on mathematics for toddlers in preschool, with the aim of challenging a strong learning discourse that mainly focuses on cognitive learning. By devoting more attention to other perspectives on learning, the hope is to better promote children's early mathematical development. Sweden is one of few countries to have a curriculum for preschool, which includes a provision of promoting children's mathematical learning. What then might mathematics be to these young children? The article is based on a pilot study in which 13 one-to three-year-old preschool children were observed in play situations. The results show that children often use their bodies as a tool for understanding mathematical concepts. These results are interesting as the body has been virtually invisible in previous research on toddlers and mathematics. The results have been analysed with inspiration from theories that open up for new ways of understanding the learning subject.

This article takes its point of departure in ethnographic data from what in Sweden is called the Individual Programme (IP). This programme was for upper-secondary school pupils who were not eligible for one of the country's academic or vocational programme. Its main formally expressed goal was to enable students to become eligible for these programmes. Our data show that this aim risks going unfulfilled as attending the kind of programme represented by the IP increases the likelihood of marginalisation and a precarious existence. The policy of freedom of choice was a problem. This policy allowed the students to opt out of academic work and staff to encourage students to opt for easy study options and activities that took them away from academic routes.

The focal point of this article is a discussion of pupils' opportunities to make their voices heard and influence the activity in a Swedish leisure-time centre. The study comprises six weeks of ethnographically inspired field work including data from participating observations and walk-and-talk conversations. Two voluntary activities, referred to here as "free play" and "thematic activity", are discussed. The study shows that free play can be described as an activity where the staff take their point of departure based on the children's perspectives and the enhancement of democratic values and decision-making. The thematic activity can, as with free play, be described as a stimulating activity which is also in line with relevant steering documents. However, staff members' points of departure are grounded in an adult perspective, a perspective that focuses on affording "good" activities. This results in an activity where the pupils' opportunities to take part in democratic decision-making differ compared to that in free play.

We investigate how different mealtime situations help shape teenager and staff subjectivities in two Swedish residential care homes and a special school for girls and boys, 12-15 years old, with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Three mealtime networks are analysed using concepts from actor-network theory, treating architectural space and artefacts, as well as teenagers and staff, as actors. The architectural spaces in the kitchen and dining room were first created for other purposes than residential care for troubled youth (i.e. a former farm, hospital and preschool) and have been adapted to be more homelike while coping with housing and feeding 20 or more people. The original architectural spaces as well as activities before mealtimes were powerful actors in the mealtime network, causing different subjectivities to emerge in the translations. The subjectivities emerge in the first network as offenders/guards, in the second network as small children/nannies and in the third network as guests/service staff. The different translations in the three meal networks create different mobilization opportunities for the teenagers concerning responsibility and normality.

The study presented in this paper focuses on young people's languaging, or ways-with-being-with-words, including literacies, in everyday practices that stretch across formal and informal learning spaces. Taking sociocultural and ethnographic points of departure, the aim of the study is to investigate aspects of young people's situated and distributed ways of engaging in knowledge production in academic "writing" genres, as well as their agency in relation to pedagogic goals as administered by teachers in these practices. Through analysis of data sets consisting of field notes, video recordings and particularly literacy data, the study presents analysis of three cases of students' work in project-based learning and instructional tasks inside and outside a "bilingual-bicultural" school setting. The paper puts forth a multi-dimensional analysis of communicative and learning practices and suggests refocusing scholarly interests of "multilingualism" towards an examination of different dimensions of modalities and language varieties in languaging practices. The findings indicate that student agency is central in contributing to the shaping of the nature of their languaging across the interrelated dimensions of time and space. Furthermore, this study suggests that pedagogical practices in language, including literacy, classes need to be transformed and recontextualized in order to embrace student agency.

Gender inequality in academia might be understood as an effect of the belief of a contradiction between woman and science, which make it difficult for women to appropriate the right to author and authorise acts of knowing and thinking in science. In relation to this concern, the aim of this article is to explore how a group of successful women researchers do science and uphold their position as researchers. It is based on evidence from participant observation and qualitative interviews. Theoretical understandings of femininity and cloning culture are used to analyse how the women united as a group that displays a subordinate, heterosexual femininity. Their strategies might be understood as a form of cultural cloning. By expressing a collective emphasised femininity grounded in white, heterosexual, middle-class norms, the women experienced a sameness that rendered them strong as a group and well adapted in academia.

This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing collegiality and for building and maintaining good relations between co-workers. The article presents data from five second language speakers, permanently employed industrial or office workers in a major Swedish company. Theoretically and methodologically, the paper has its basis in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. By means of fieldwork, a large body of empirical data was collected, comprising detailed field notes, audio and video recordings of naturally occurring talk, and texts processed and produced by participants. The analysis of the data shows that metalinguistic and metacultural awareness and performance of relational communicative acts among the participants appear to have helped to facilitate and consolidate integration in the workplace and the immediate work team. To foster good relations at work, the five participants make strategic use of jokes, compliments, narratives, swearing and greetings. In this article the use of jokes and swearing is highlighted. It closes by making a case for future research in the area of integration in the workplace through relational communication, especially among second language speakers.

This study investigates through observations and interviews what importance further education has for preschool teachers' practice in two music-profiled preschool and their way of conceptualising it. A distinction between music as a method for teaching, on the one hand, and as a content of knowledge, on the other, is used in the analysis. The result shows that the teachers act confidently in dealing with music; both in spontaneous and planned activities, and that they show competence in teaching music to the children. In contradiction, when the teachers are interviewed about their work, they say that they have never been able to sing or play. They talk about music as a method for learning language, but they realise it in practice as the content of learning. This contradiction and its implications are discussed and it is argued that further education needs to take care of the fact that teachers need to develop a professional language.

This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as "difficult, disordered and disturbed". The data draw on ethnographic work combined with video recordings of everyday classroom practices in a special educational needs unit with boys diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Drawing on ethnomethodological work on members' understanding of social categories (MCA) combined with the related methodology of "doing difference", the focus is on the local social process through which boys' unruly behaviors are made sense of and treated as the grounds for shifting categorization practices. It is found that both teachers and boys orient to the institutional categories Teacher and Student in teacher-student interactions for the ordering of the classroom . The boys' conduct is in these instances far from pathological but is meaningful in the sense that it provides local resources to resist teacher authority and display agency. Overall, the analysis highlights the complexity of locally accomplished identity practices--in terms of how institutional-, gender- and age-appropriate conduct meshes with diagnostic criteria--in the social identification of boys diagnosed with ADHD.

This article draws from ethnographic data produced inside mathematics teacher education in Sweden. It explores and makes visible the ongoing process of education during workshops in information and communication technology (ICT) laboratory contexts in which student teachers were working with spreadsheet applications on the computer. The main finding is that, contrary to the intentions to renew and revitalise education, ICT in use seemed to operate as a relay in the reproduction of traditional ways of teaching and learning. However, the investigation is not one of the failures of education to make use of ICT but one that tries to distance itself from the traditional enthusiastic rhetoric, with the ambition to contribute to a more realistic discussion. Bernstein's concept of pedagogical discourse has been used. One education setting has been studied in detail. (Contains 1 note and 3 figures.)

The study uses ethnographic research from four classes in secondary school as well as from two groups in upper secondary school, to examine everyday racism as an element of the daily institutional lives of students and teachers. The study is based on long-term participant observation and 89 interviews. These were all audio-recorded and transcribed. In Sweden the education of ethnic groups is couched in a discourse of integration and inclusion. However, the research presented shows that the aims of integration and inclusion were not achieved. Unequal and discriminatory educational experiences operated through two related actions: by private everyday racism and through public racism denial. (Contains 1 table and 5 notes.)

Research material from ethnographic studies of vocational upper secondary educational programmes in Finland and Sweden presented here indicates that the discourse of schoolwork as being either theoretical or practical is firmly fixed. However, the students on the researched programmes were aware of recent changes in the labour market that raise a need for generalisation, or at least knowledge of both practical and theoretical aspects of their programme-specific subjects. They referred to the changes with notions suggesting that a practical and theoretical divide was neither meaningful nor helpful for their education. We discuss how a stereotyped idea of what was thought of as "man's work" made it difficult for students who wanted to accomplish tasks considered as theoretical and how the teachers' framing of pedagogic practice intensified or ameliorated this difficulty. We also address the dichotomy between theoretical and practical by contemplating students' positions within different pedagogical practices. We suggest that some kinds of practices might diminish the dichotomy and could improve the students' possibilities for fully engaging in their studies.

This article engages with gender, performance and embodiment in drama classes in a Swedish context. It presents a case study of how instructors at an academy of dramatic arts integrate theoretical knowledge on gender into their students' creative and pedagogical practice, as well as an analysis of why this approach works. Visualisation of how the body is used on a concrete level offers a departure from traditional uses of theory as a way to challenge reality; instead the research describes how theory can be used in concrete didactic bodily movements, thus bringing the body, which is often overlooked in studies of pedagogy, into a discussion on knowledge acquisition.

Background: In Sweden, a process involving the deinstitutionalisation of services and the establishment of community-based settings for people with intellectual disability has meant changes in meal arrangements. In the present study, we focus on the social arrangements of meals in community-based settings. Method: Participant observations were used to study the meals as social events for 32 participants, 9 of whom lived in supported living and 23 in group homes. Results: Breakfast and dinner were often eaten alone, while lunch at the daily activity centre and the food eaten between meals (snacks) were mostly shared with other people. Meals for participants in supported living were seldom social, and meals for participants in the group homes often hierarchical. Conclusion: The participants were often limited in choosing their company at meals, which typically consisted of other people with intellectual disability and staff. If they made such choices, they were dependent upon staff support to realise them. (Contains 2 tables.)

A case study of what appears to be an inclusive classroom in Sweden is reported. The group of children in the class studied was very heterogeneous: five of the 15 children had a disability diagnosis at the time of the study. One aim of the study was to develop a methodology which can be used in order to investigate in what sense classrooms are "inclusive", especially as regards the point of view of the pupils. It is argued that an explicit definition of characteristics of inclusive classrooms and clear-cut methods to study those characteristics are necessary prerequisites in order to reach valid conclusions concerning what teaching strategies are central to inclusive processes. The data consist of interviews with the teachers and children involved, sociograms, a questionnaire answered by the children, notes from participant observations and poetry by the children. The analyses suggest that the classroom seems to be inclusive, although it is emphasised that this is not an all-or-none phenomenon, especially children's experiences are complex phenomena. It is argued that the teachers try to create a learning community where differences are valued. Six teacher strategies emerged from the data. (Contains 1 figure.)

This article reports an overview of the findings from an ethnographic research project conducted in two Swedish primary schools with the aim of exploring values education that takes place in day-to-day interactions of teachers and students. Teachers' main concern in their practice of values education is to attempt to teach students to be nice and kind to others, to behave well, and to understand and follow rules. The analysis of the rules resulted in five rule categories: relational rules, structuring rules, protecting rules, personal rules and etiquette rules. According to the findings, four main intervention strategies are used by the teachers within the everyday rule practice: assertion, explanation, negotiation and preparation. Even if students to a great degree accept and have confidence in school rules and teachers' way of upholding them, the findings also show that many of them are critical of some teacher behaviours and rules.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe a retrospective reflection over unconscious, emergent learning among employees of an organization and to suggest how to capture these moments of experiential learning for future organizational learning. Design/methodology/approach: Action research in organizations is undertaken in interaction with the employees of the organization studied. The outcome is characterized by a deep understanding of the individuals as well as of the course of events in the system. The paper therefore applies action research, focusing on the experiential learning from daily actions in the case organization at Volvo Cars' production plant in Sweden. Findings: The conclusion is that an evolution toward a learning organization, as exemplified by the case studied, is not identified until after it actually happens, i.e. in retrospect. It is suggested that the competence build-up recognized in retrospect should become an integral part of future educational programs. The multidisciplinary competence established should also be considered when teams are set up for new projects. Practical implications: Future strategies for capturing learning are provided and summarized, to structure the capturing of learning as it takes place in the daily operation, to identify the individuals who initiate changes and let them act as learning ambassadors, to integrate multidisciplinary competencies in the early stages of projects, and to facilitate multidisciplinary cooperation along organizational processes, within and between firms. Originality/value: The paper's contribution is the identification of and reflection about emergent learning that takes place in daily work tasks. It also provides suggestions for future strategies of capturing these experiential learning occasions. (Contains 1 table.)

Background/Context: This article returns to and expands upon Cremin's and Garfinkel's ideas about education as work--deliberate, systematic, and sustained work--that changes one's consociates, whether planned or not. That is, education must be seen as occurring everywhere, to and by everyone, in many contexts other than in classrooms or schools. Purpose: In particular, this article examines the ways in which people are instructed to become Hard of Hearing in Sweden. In Sweden, national and medical policies and practices have made Hard of Hearing people almost, but not quite, inevitable. This study explores how people teach each other about hearing loss, and the responses of those being taught. Research Design: Data were collected in 1998-1999 during multi-sited anthropological fieldwork in Sweden and Denmark, at hearing aid examinations, hospitals, labs, schools, manufacturers' offices, governmental institutions, research and training conferences, and universities. Research methods included participant observation, interviews, content analysis, and archival research. Findings/Results: With the active guidance of the state and medicine, people in Sweden teach each other how to become Hard of Hearing. There are a variety of responses to these lessons, ranging from the compliant patient who goes to appointments and wears a hearing aid to patients who are not at all interested in these lessons and do not "obey their teachers" (e.g., audiologists, doctors, hearing aid manufacturers). Patients who do not conform create problems for the health care field and the Swedish state, undermining the structures of Hard of Hearing created to help people who, quite often, do not want to be helped. Conclusion: Hard of Hearing is a social position (re)created by the interactions and interpretations of people, history, and machines, and whole segments of societies are dedicated to its maintenance. It is a transformative, supremely educational arena in which the state, medical institutions, and citizens try to make certain that (1) hearing loss is noticed and people are redefined as satisfactory Swedish Hard of Hearing persons, and (2) all this continues to change as institutions and persons notice each other and new deficiencies. By taking up the moments in the process of becoming Hard of Hearing, this case study exemplifies a broader concept of what can be considered "education." If we are to fully understand what education is for culture theory and research, the kinds of moments and spaces in which learning takes place must include those historical processes, policies, places, and markets of everyday practice previously ignored.

This article presents an empirical example of what a process of mobilisation and disciplination could mean in practice. The example is taken from a "validation" initiative (recognition of prior learning) among a small group of unemployed people in Sweden. An ethnographic approach means that data were collected, mainly through observations and interviews, to provide a detailed description of the process studied. The analysis applies an eclectic perspective, inspired by the Foucauldian concept of genealogy, where the idea of validation is traced in ethnography, the discursive practice of validation. The results show, among other things, how mobilising and disciplining are intertwined: i.e., mobilisation is a prerequisite of disciplination and vice versa. Furthermore, mobilising and disciplining can be seen as a process of sorting people. There was a high dropout rate in the small group, and the question of how the system could be changed to better meet the needs of these persons is asked.

This paper reports on a two-year project focusing on health communicators working with refugees in Sweden. By employing participatory action research and the theory of practice architectures, the study examines a health information practice for newly arrived refugees and highlights its potentials and constraints. The joint meetings that occurred between the participating researcher and the health communicators during the project were the primary source for collaboration, development, and data collection. The findings show that perceptions of limitations due to existing power structures initially hindered the group from experimenting with new activities for the groups of refugees. However, as the communicators gained experience, the conversations in the joint meeting practice changed, which facilitated the action research process. By challenging common working methods, which were initially perceived as causes for concern, the communicators recognised that the concretisation of the health information they wanted to convey could also function as a useful pedagogical tool. The analysis shows that, despite constraints during the working process, the participatory action research practice created a democratic work process which empowered all participants. Collective talks in the communicative space nurtured an architecture that generated new ideas and made it possible to leave the classroom-based teaching situation for new ways of learning about health and physical activity. The findings also show that participatory action research made the communicators aware of their capacity to implement change by offering various movement-based activities that benefited the participating refugees and increased their agency and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Babbling is an important precursor to speech in infancy, and deviations from the typical babbling development can predict later difficulties in speech, language, and communication. This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate babbling and early speech in Swedish extremely premature infants. Samples of babbling were collected from 20 extremely premature infants (EPT group) at the corrected age of 12 months. Data collection was home-based and consisted of an audio-video recording of each infant playing with a parent. Presence of canonical babbling (CB), and three oral stop variables distinctive of typical babbling, and consonant inventory were assessed. The assessment was performed during a standardised observation of babbling. Data from the EPT group were compared to previously collected data of a reference group of 20 10-month-old infants without known medical diagnoses. The results showed that the EPT group had a lower proportion of infants producing CB, and that they used a significantly smaller consonant inventory compared to the reference group. Although not statistically significant, oral stops were less frequently found in the EPT group. The findings of a restricted consonant inventory and low proportion of CB in the EPT group are not surprising considering that the group has been found to be at risk of speech and language delay in toddlerhood. Still, further research is needed to explore whether babbling at 12 months can predict speech and language skills at an older age in extremely premature infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Involving people with acquired brain injury in service development has the potential to improve service and give experience-based knowledge legitimacy. The objective of this study was to explore experiences of sharing experience-based knowledge of living with acquired brain injury with others, with a particular focus on the conditions for sharing and learning, and the legitimacy of experience-based knowledge. Materials and Methods. Using a single case study design, the processes in two groups that were part of a Swedish supportive network for people with acquired brain injury were explored. One group consisted mainly of people with acquired brain injury who authored a blog and the other group consisted of healthcare staff who produced educational material with the involvement of a person with own experience of acquired brain injury. The data consisted of forty-one collective blogs, fifteen semistructured individual interviews, and ten observations from meetings. The data were analysed by utilizing the community of practice framework and the concepts of legitimate peripheral participation and epistemic injustice. Results. The findings showed that both groups developed learning processes with a focus on everyday rehabilitation as a joint enterprise. Mutual engagement developed from doing activities together and legitimacy in the groups came from engagement in these activities. In the education group, the ambition to involve people with own experience of acquired brain injury was never realized in practice. Hence, experience-based knowledge of living with acquired brain injury never got legitimacy in the group. Conclusions. We conclude that integrating experience-based knowledge from people with own experience of acquired brain injury demands careful and deliberate planning with specific consideration to existing power asymmetries between healthcare professionals and people with own experience. Mitigating epistemic injustice and gaining legitimacy for such knowledge require that people with experience of living with acquired brain injury are recognized as knowledge producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to explore whether and how local civil society – grounded in bottom-up activities – responds to a top-down initiative with expectations of sustainable transformation. The focus of our research is the possible role of civil society organizations as agents in collaborations aiming for a forest-based bioeconomy. The research was conducted in a local area within the sparsely populated Swedish region of Värmland, characterized by a strong tradition of forestry. The study is explorative and uses qualitative methods: interviews with representatives of local civil society actors, participant observations of local meetings and workshops, and document analyses. Our results suggest that general policy expectations concerning the inclusion of civil society become vague when operationalized in documents at the regional level, and lack clarity concerning the roles expected from civil society. Civil society organizations (CSOs) contribute in a multitude of ways to local social, economic, and environmental sustainability. However, the inclusion of CSOs as full actors in collaborations requires a greater knowledge of the traditions and structure of Swedish civil society, as well as its conditions and challenges in different local contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limitations are described in the literature in relation to the actual involvement of older people in action research activities. Empirical social research involving any form of data collection has an impact on the people and the setting studied. Researchers should strive to be morally aware of such an impact. The article describes case studies of participatory research in Sweden, Italy and Portugal. It highlights moral issues confronted by researchers. Moreover actual examples of different order of priorities among researchers and participants are provided. The study shows possible spaces for collaboration, while recognizing the difference of interests and priorities among researchers and participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the ongoing paradigm shift on enhancing diversity climates in Swedish human services organizations. Traditional social policy arrangements based on a monocultural style of service provision has been challenged by the growing need for cultural competence and ethnic sensitivity. A study of cultural competence enhancement finds the recruitment of ethnic social workers to be the most efficient strategy for making social services more culturally sensitive. At both the operational and the managerial level, ethnic staff contribute to regular training and the updating of staff cultural competences, as well as to the strategic diversity plans of entire organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In vocational education, the learning content is often considered as concrete and specific, and the vocational learning involves physical work and interactions between participants and artefacts. Furthermore, one teacher has the overall responsibility for several students during classes in the vocational workshop at school, which means that the teacher has limited time for every single student and that the few minutes they meet become very important. However, the documented knowledge about how vocational learning is constituted in the vocational classroom and what learning content is focused on in the interaction between teachers and students is very sparse. In this study, we focus on how the enacted object of learning and its critical aspects are made relevant, when a student and teacher in a plumbing workshop session negotiate the conducting of a task in Swedish vocational education. This will be done by using CAVTA (Conversation Analysis and Variation Theory Approach) to make a close and detailed analysis of video recordings of the interaction between the student and teacher when a task is introduced in the workshop session. The results show a complex process, where the teacher alternates between parts and wholeness, using several semiotic resources at hand when highlighting the learning content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the current research on international student migration is focused on home-to-host and stay-or-leave migration behaviours. However, there is a possibility that international students might migrate within the host country before making their final stay-or-leave migration decisions. This paper adapts stepwise migration theory as an analytical tool with which to investigate the migration behaviour of Indian and Pakistani students. Based on 57 interviews and extensive participant observation, it analyses the factors that prompt South Asian student migration to, within and, subsequently for some, from Finland and Sweden. The findings support the argument that international student migration is multistage. Initial origin-to-destination migration is often insufficient to meet the high-set ambitions of talented young migrants. Disappointment with perceived missing opportunities in the university city or town lays the basis for subsequent intercity and stayor-leave migration stages. Subsequent migration within the destination country impacts on the students' stay-or-leave aspirations, while the origin-country situation influences return-or-onward migration decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to explore social interactions in the spatial and material environment within everyday life at special youth homes in Sweden, where youths with psychosocial problems, or criminal behavior are cared for involuntary. A microethnographic approach was chosen, and data was collected through participant observation. A theory integrating analysis, using Burke's (1969) dramatistic pentad as a tool for structuring the data and Goffman's (1956; 1961) dramaturgical perspective was undertaken. The findings demonstrate that the staff's control over settings and objects also means control over the definition of what kind of place the special youth home is, and what takes place there. This is shown through a decorous behavior of sociomaterial control practices, rather than care practices, by the staff. This study contributes to knowledge on spaces and objects as crucial parts of care practices highlighting the intentions inscribed in institutional design and objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ward rounds are crucial for the exchange of information among healthcare professionals to achieve joint planning and shared decision-making in healthcare to enhance patient safety. The aim of this study was to describe the content and structure of ward rounds focusing on interprofessional collaboration on an internal medicine ward at a university hospital in Western Sweden. An inductive qualitative approach was used to explore 13 participatory observations of ward rounds (sitting/team rounds). Qualitative content analysis was used. The analysis revealed one category, titled interprofessional teamwork, that utilises all available resources, which consisted of three subcategories: usefulness of specialist competencies, collaboration for patient safety, and leading healthcare to achieve goal fulfilment. It was also found that the participating specialists' competencies were not being optimally used before patients were discharged from the hospital. Therefore, communication and leadership skills were revealed as ways to improve interprofessional teamwork to achieve goal fulfilment and patient safety regarding care and treatment issues on the ward. We found that reversing the order of ward rounds to start with the sitting round followed by the team round (i.e. hybrid distance participation methods), with the same ward round leader who has skills in leadership and interprofessional teamwork, could eliminate the need for healthcare providers to repeat questions and tasks (i.e. double work) on their ward rounds. Second, patient involvement is grounded in collaboration, and can be emphasised through person-centred care to facilitate patient safety during hospital stays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]