Utbildning & Demokrati – tidskrift för didaktik och utbildningspolitk

Att anpassa eller frigöra. Åtta studier om pedagogikens uppdrag

Gunnlaugur Magnússon — 2025-12-12

Norms at stake in the history classroom

Hära Jess Haltorp — 2025-12-12

This study examines how norms and gender are negotiated in history lessons integrating Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) with an anti-oppressive intent in Swedish vocational programs. Through classroom observations and interviews, it explores student positioning, resistance, and didactic dilemmas. Findings show that while the teacher aimed to challenge traditional gender norms, male students often resisted, reinforcing conservative views, whereas female students generally supported the norm-critical approach. The study highlights how meaning-making is shaped by intersecting norms of gender, education, and social belonging, often resulting in classroom power struggles. A key challenge is that anti-oppressive education can unintentionally reinforce hierarchies if not supported by explicit strategies for critical engagement. By addressing the complexities of integrating norm-critical perspectives in history education, the study contributes to understanding how controversial issues can be pedagogically managed and calls for clearer frameworks to support teachers.Key words: controversial issues, history education, relationship and sexuality education, anti-oppressive educational intent.

What happens under the duvet?

Auli Arvola Orlander — 2025-12-12

“Less of everything else, more of what sex is!” fifteen-year-old Hilda declared in a student interview about her recent sexuality education unit. Although the interview also indicated that students found the teaching engaging, it was clear that something was missing. This study is part of a four-year research project exploring Swedish sexuality education in five secondary schools. In this paper, we focus on the teaching at one of the participating schools, where teachers chose to address the question of what sex might be. The study builds on the work of Annemarie Mol and her perspective on multiple realities. The aim is to investigate how sex might be enacted in Swedish secondary sexuality education. The study contributes with a patchwork of situated events from the teaching of sexual practices. This patchwork comprises student expectations, teacher planning, student participation, sexual role models, and the experiences of both students and teachers.

En annan verklighet?

Niclas Ekberg — 2025-12-12

Another Reality? Encounters with Generative AI in the Swedish Subject at the Upper-Secondary Level. This article presents a qualitative study that investigates how upper-secondary teachers of Swedish engage with Generative AI (GAI). Drawing on interviews with eight teachers, the researchers analysed the perceived challenges and opportunities the technology poses and how it reshapes instruction and conceptions of the subject. The interviews were reflexively thematised, and the salient themes were elaborated through an ecological framework of teacher agency, which formed the basis for a metaanalytic discussion of subject specific educational approaches and the professional spaces for action they enable. The findings show that GAI can both transform teaching and learning and challenge task design, assessment practices, and relational dynamics in the classroom. The study further demonstrates how encounters with GAI can be critically understood as temporal movements in relation to surrounding social, material, and cultural resources. It also offers nuanced perspectives on constructive didactic stances and strategic choices regarding the teacher’s role and conceptions of the subject in relation to generative AI.

Fritidshem som försäkringsinstitution

Linnéa Holmberg — 2025-12-12

School-age educare as an insurance institution: The caregiver’s perspective on the organisation. How do caregivers speak about school-age educare in Sweden today? While their voices are seldom given space in either the media or research, this study reveals knowledge of caregivers regarding the purpose and societal function of school-age educare. The analysis is based on empirical material in the form of responses to a qualitative survey, starting from the research question: How do caregivers construct and position school-age educare discursively? The theoretical inspiration for the study is Foucault, alongside theories on risk management and insurance. School-age educare is positioned as a threefold institution that i) ensures that children’s leisure time is organised in a specific way, ii) prevents certain given problems and iii) facilitates a certain kind of meaningfulness. The caregivers’ staging of the organisation is of a risk-managing insurance institution that revolves around the safe and secure location, the constructive activity and the fun to be had.

Språkintroduktionsprogrammet och nyanlända ungdomars väg genom det svenska utbildningssystemet

Jonna Linde — 2025-12-12

The language introduction programme and the paths of newly arrived youths through the Swedish educational system. This article analyses organisational aspects of the Swedish language introduction programme for newly arrived youths and the implications for their following transitions and career paths. This article draws on 52 interviews with students, teachers, career counsellors and principals. An analysis of their responses, with a Bernsteinian theoretical framework, indicates that the programme has major deficiencies in relation to upper secondary programmes, adult education and knowledge required for educational transitions. Findings include limitations with regard to the introduction programme’s integration with upper secondary school academic or vocational programmes. Additionally, the age requirement for starting upper secondary school is particularly problematic. Combined, these limitations tend to lead to the newcomers’ exclusion from successful education.

Lärande i partipolitiskt engagemang

Annika Pastuhov — 2025-12-12

Learning in Political Engagement. A Practice Theoretical Analysis of Social Democratic Party Members’ Learning in Political Practices. This article aims to study learning as part of Social Democratic party-political member engagement. Political parties have recently been described as increasingly professional organisations focused on strategic management and winning elections, rather than member engagement and acquiring ideological support. This development may limit party members’ roles and influence within the party organisation, which might be reflected in how they perceive their conditions as members. This study focuses on how members of Finland’s Social Democratic Party have learned to be involved in party-political practices and developed in their political engagement as part of party-political practices. The results reveal how the interviewees become embedded in party-political structures through dialogues, by helping others, making themselves available and creating networks. Efforts to develop as party members are intertwined with political engagement through self-studying and discussing with other party members, balancing diversity and achieving consensus.

Redaktionellt

Redaktionen — 2025-12-12