Utbildning & Demokrati – tidskrift för didaktik och utbildningspolitk

Den utvecklande förskolan

2026-05-05T15:49:33+02:00

The enriching preschool: Language, Swedish and family in legitimations for preschool for multilingual children. This paper contributes to research on immigration and integration by analyzing conceptions of language, Swedishness and multilingual speakers in argumentation for preschool for multilingual children as formulated in a public enquiry. We scrutinize the legitimations for preschool for multilingual children, the construction of social actors such as immigrants and Swedish vs. immigrated parents, as well as conceptions about language and language development. According to our analyses, Sweden is not only constructed as progressive and democratic, but such values are “nationalized” (Bauer, von Brömssen, Milani & Spehar 2023), in relation to which immigrants are often constructed as deviant. We discern deficit approaches toward multilingual parents and families and their abilities to provide for their children’s linguistic and social development. Although advantages of multilingual practices are recognized, these are not considered possible to achieve. However, we argue, such recognition would potentially enhance multilingual children’s learning and second language development of Swedish.

Från utredning till insats

2026-05-05T15:52:42+02:00

From assessment to intervention: A study on the realisation of special support in compulsory school. Using the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis 2022), this study explores the conditions for realising special support for students in eight compulsory schools in two municipalities in central Sweden. The study is based on a method of collegial learning dialogues and open-ended survey questions, and includes a total of 47 participants from the selected schools. In the study, two areas of instability in the practice landscape could be identified. One instability concerns different ways of understanding and explaining school difficulties in terms of compensatory and relational perspectives. The other concerns the imprint on the practice architecture entailed by a governance ideology rooted in New Public Management. Arrangements in three areas were identified as particularly important for the realisation of special support, namely organisation and structure, collaboration, and consensus. The findings indicate that the realisation of special support, like other (special education) policies, involves extensive and multifaceted processes of change within school practices.

Förändrade mål i examensordningen för lärare

2026-05-05T15:55:23+02:00

Changing goals in the degree ordinance for teachers: Policy enactment supporting students’ identity work? Goals related to Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) and Neuro-Psychiatric Difficulties (NPD) were added to the Swedish degree ordinance for teachers in 2021. These changes affect future teachers’ opportunities to support children’s development. Drawing on the work of Popkewitz on the fabrication of kinds of people, we explore how prerequisites, categorizations, and conditions are ascribed to children and future teachers. These fabrications are constructed through a discursive analysis of the memorandum and responses from ten referral bodies working with students’ rights in education and RSE or NPD. The analysis shows that teachers are fabricated as lacking either knowledge or courage, often in relation to the age group they are expected to teach. Children’s identities are fragmented along lines of age, gender, and functionality, and RSE is constructed as relevant only to some of these fragments. We argue that there is a need for further research into the extensive and ongoing policy processes shaping teacher education, and how they might enable or constrain future teachers’ possibilities to support all children.

Omsorgsetik i forskning och praktik

2026-05-05T15:39:15+02:00

Care ethics in research and practice: To do good and not give poison. This article draws on the insights made though my research engagement in mathematics education, assessment and inclusive education. I propose that a pedagogical Hippocratic oath is needed for education and national assessment to do good and not harm students. I discuss ethical dilemmas in relation to national assessment in mathematics, particularly from the perspective of inclusive education and students who experience challenges in their learning. The article examines prevailing national and global social epistemologies on national assessment, and how these fabricate both students and teachers. Care ethics is explored as a perspective that can contribute to a repositioning of national assessment, highlighting how assessment may function as care for learning in a didactical sense. In the final section, I outline a vision for future research and education, advocating an approach to national assessment as a shared ethical responsibility involving research, education, and policy.

Utbildningspolitisk styrning och professionellt handlingsutrymme

2026-05-05T15:42:01+02:00

Educational policy governance and professional discretion. Reflections on the past, present, and future. In this inaugural lecture, I explore the relationship between educational policy governance and the space for professional discretion in the Swedish education system. As a point of departure, the lecture is situated in relation to earlier professorial inaugural lectures in Sweden, a tradition dating back to 1910. Drawing on completed and ongoing research, I demonstrate how changing societal expectations and policy frameworks have reshaped the conditions for teachers’ professional work over time. These dynamics are illustrated through examples such as the introduction and evolving meaning of the concept of quality, local initiatives to counteract school segregation, the increasing juridification of education, and finally three governance logics that conceptualize changes in how educational governance frame professional discretion. The lecture concludes with forward-looking reflections, emphasizing the importance of empirically grounded theorizing and further theoretical development that reconnects the changing educational landscape with fundamental questions about education and its relationship to society.

Transnationellt orienterad läroplansteori

2026-05-05T15:44:31+02:00

Transnationally oriented curriculum theory. In this essay, written to mark my installation as professor of education at Linnaeus University in September 2023, I present three central and interrelated themes of my research. The first theme I call an expanded educational policy practice. In it, I discuss the need to widen the analytical gaze of curriculum theory beyond national borders and incorporate transnational policy arenas and actors. In this transnational approach to curriculum theory, I apply discursive institutionalism as a curriculum theoretical perspective, which constitutes the second theme of the essay. The third and final theme is critical reflection, in which I discuss the importance of developing critical educational research in times of increased dogmatism and/or populism. I conclude with a call for the university to take renewed responsibility for its seminar culture in fostering such a critical reflective approach among academics in a broad sense.

Pedagogikens charm och besvär

2026-05-05T15:47:13+02:00

The charms and challenges of pedagogy: Confessions of a researcher. In this inaugural professorial lecture, I reflect on my intellectual journey into pedagogy and how my understanding of the field as a scientific discipline has evolved. Although initially trained as a teacher, I was skeptical of pedagogy as an academic subject due to its perceived lack of practical relevance and the conceptual confusion I encountered during teacher education. My interest emerged during doctoral studies, when I began to see knowledge as dynamic and relational, shaped as ideas move across disciplinary boundaries. This led me to view education not only as classroom practice but as a broader societal process involving multiple actors, interests, and mechanisms of social reproduction. I define pedagogy as the study of the conditions of education. Drawing on curriculum theory, policy research, and the sociology of knowledge, I examine how visions, measurement systems, and policy frameworks shape educational practice. Pedagogy, I argue, critically analyzes the assumptions, measurements, and policies through which societies reproduce themselves through education.

Minnesord

2026-05-04T10:59:45+02:00

Redaktionellt

2026-05-05T15:32:40+02:00