This reflective text explores the importance of providing opportunities for students to develop a professional judgement and reflect on the theme of a course. Drawing on a teaching example from teacher education, the text discusses how using value- based exercises can become a tool to reflect on a theme and as an introduction to the literature in a course. These value-based exercises can also serve to develop a professional judgement.While the reflection is based on a specific teaching context, the final section of the text suggests that this exercise easily can be adapted for a use in a variety of other professional programs.

This paper is a response to Jan Masschelein’s keynote lecture. Taking its point of departure in a befriended support of his argument, the paper begins in the mood of affirmation as a form of critique. Thereafter it engages, first, with what it reads as a slightly retrotopian approach to digitalization in the paper. Second, it brings to attention that the gesture of rejuvenation and regeneration, which Masschelein suggests, always involves a moment of return or repetition. The question is asked what form the gesture of retrieving inherited pedagogical forms from the past takes in Masschelein’s proposal, and it is suggested that such retrieving is a work of constant translation. Third, a comment is made about the advocating of orature, issuing the reminder that on-campus education usually comes without noise reduction, that is, it requires reflection also on the discord that is calibrated in and through our voices. 

The paper offers a pedagogical response to the complexity of sustainability challenges that takes the existential and emotional dimensions of climate change seriously. To this end, the paper unfolds in two parts. The first part makes a distinction between 'public pedagogy' as an area of educational scholarship and 'pedagogical publics' as a theoretical lens for identifying certain qualities within educational environments, exploring what potential this distinction has for rethinking public pedagogy for sustainable development. Turning to Bonnie Honig (2015) and her call for creating 'holding environments' in the public sphere as a response to the democratic need of our time, the second part translates her political notion into an educational notion asking what fostering pedagogical publics as holding environments might involve. In relation to sustainability challenges, it is suggested that an environment that 'holds' people together as a pedagogical public has three main qualities: a) it makes room for new rituals for sustainable living to be developed in order to offer a sense of permanence; b) it invites narratives that can frame sustainability challenges in more positive registers; and c) it reinstates an intergenerational difference that serves to give back hopes and dreams to adults and children in troubling times.

De normer som förmedlas i förskola, fritidshem och skola har stor betydelse för barns uppväxtmiljö samt för deras identitets- och kunskapsutveckling. Utgångspunkten i denna bok är att de som arbetar i pedagogisk verksamhet behöver kunskap och färdigheter för att granska och förändra normer som på olika sätt begränsar och exkluderar. Ett normkritiskt perspektiv på och i pedagogiskt arbete kan bidra till en kontinuerlig reflektion som gör medvetenhet och förändring möjlig.

Boken tar sig an teoretiska perspektiv på kön, klass, hudfärg, funktionsvariation och sexualitet, erbjuder reflektion kring profession och förhållningssätt samt fördjupar sig i didaktiska utmaningar och möjligheter. Kapitlen ger rikligt med exempel på normkritiskt pedagogiskt arbete och belyser bland annat estetisk verksamhet i skolan, demokratiarbete med skolbiblioteket, representation i förskolan, fritidshemmets didaktiska mellanrum, barns lek och kommunikation mellan kollegor.

Boken vänder sig till blivande och verksamma förskollärare och lärare, skolledare och alla som har ett intresse för frågor som berör normer, makt och likvärdiga villkor i barns liv.

Sweden has been recognised as one of the most generous countries in terms of the governance of migration and asylum. The 2015 “refugee crisis” placed the Swedish migration and asylum system under extreme pressure when more than 163,000 refugees arrived in 2015. Like other EU members, Swedish migration policies have become gradually more restrictive, legitimised by the discourse of securitisation, whereby migration is addressed as a threat. By taking “securitisation” as a conceptual point of departure, the aim of this chapter is to analyse the official statements and non-official motives behind the securitisation turn of Sweden’s post-2015 migration policy and relate them to the vulnerable situation unaccompanied immigrants experienced when they came to Sweden in 2015 as refugees and asylum seekers. However, even if some of the interviewees had experienced racism and other negative attitudes and felt ill at ease waiting for their residency permit, unaccompanied immigrants are not necessarily vulnerable victims without the capacity and will to learn a new language, educate themselves and find a job.

Denna rapport är resultat av ett samverkansprojekt mellan forskare från Mälardalens universitet och samordningsförbudnet RAR Sörmland. Projektet KLARA (https://rarsormland.se/insats/klara/) siktar på att öka utrikesföddas kvinnors integration på arbetsmarknaden och i övriga samhället.

To advance the efficiency and effectiveness of inter-disciplinary research, and to obtainvalid strategies for inter-disciplinary projects, there is a need to define inter-disciplinary researchapproaches explicitly. The current study aims generally to further the understanding of inter-disciplinary ways of conducting research, and specifically to describe and explore the challenges andopportunities that characterize research projects which move across borders of different researchareas as well as the various disciplinary homes of the collaborating researchers in a recentlyperformed project focusing on Bildung and streamed art. Written reflections from the six participantsin the project, representing the disciplines of music education, musicology, education, Englishliterature, sound engineering as well as media and technology science was analyzed and interpreted inrelation to Alfred Schütz’ theory of phenomenological sociology. The results are presented through sixthemes, which together fulfill the aim of the study; (i) Crossed borders, perspectives, and contexts, (ii)Common concepts, definitions, and reconstructions, (iii) Status of theory and explorative freedom, (iv)State of the art and innovative potential, (v) Scientific identity and positioning work (vi) Place, activity,and performance.

This paper discusses a study of playworlds, arguing that this study provides an example of the study of emotion in educational settings that does not segregate emotion and cognition. Playworlds are created from a relatively new form of play that combines adult forms of creative imagination (art, science, etc.), which require extensive experience, and children’s forms of creative imagination (play), which require the embodiment of ideas and emotions in the material world. In playworlds, adults and children enter into a common fantasy that is designed to support the development of both adults and children. Our research group understands playworlds and the study of playworlds holistically, as ways of being; and thus, our research is in line with participatory approaches, which study education through long-term researcher-practitioner collaboration. In the study discussed in this paper, the segregation of emotion and cognition was avoided by the researchers appreciating that playworlds are, in part, art, and designing their methods accordingly. 

Gunilla Lindqvist (1995), a foundational scholar of Vygotsky’s theories of play, art and development, designed playworlds to identify and study the “common denominator” of play and aesthetic forms. Lindqvist (1995) calls this denominator “the aesthetics of play” and we have described playworlds as “an art of development” (Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2011). It is difficult for scientists who are working alone, without artists, to adequately describe art or subjects that are art-adjacent. The researchers in the study under discussion, thus, followed insights from an artist’s study of art – a study which avoided the segregating of emotion from cognition – and so collected observations of playworlds that the responts “fell in love with” from playworld reasearchers and practitioners (including teachers, artists, children and imaginary characters); generating an unusual corpus of insights for analysis. 

Playworlds are a form of participatory design research based in Vygotksy’s theories of play, art, imagination, and creativity.  Playworlds are designed to support all participants’ development. Our playworld research group considers playworlds to be an ‘art of development’ and a ‘way of being’: multivocal, researcher-participant, collaborative acts of creation that, we find, are very difficult to represent for study using traditional methods.  This session experiments with new ways to discuss playworlds, ways that themselves exemplify playworlds.  It will include the voices of, and photographs and performances by, playworld researchers, artists, teachers, children, administrators, and imaginary characters. The session will be grounded in a discussion of six themes concerning playworlds as care practices: truth, time, human magic, infinite possibilities, fun, and the enriching and intensifying of the real. Examples from playworlds internationally (Japan, Finland, Sweden, Serbia, US) and in various settings (preschool, school, after-school, foster care, senior center) will be included.

Taking experiences from a contemporary multi-arts dance project as a starting point, this article explores how such a project can offer opportunities for being and becoming among older amateur dancers. The article takes a phenomenological approach, in which holistic experience and sharing of experiences are central. The phenomenon of the investigation is self-conceptualisation. The artistic process and context constitute an adult educational situation. To come close to the lived experiences of the dancers, the rehearsals and performance were observed and documented. Six of the participants were also interviewed. The material was analysed in a hermeneutical phenomenological manner, and Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking regarding ageing was used as a theoretical lens. The results show how the self-images of the participants change during the course of the project. The dance activities seem to give the older participants opportunities to remain themselves, even as they allow themselves to change. They learn to know themselves, each other, and the world.

While “access models” represented by subscription services such as Spotify make vast libraries of music practically accessible to teachers, digital streaming programs also introduce new complexities to classroom settings. Therefore, the concept of digitalization in relation to listening requires the attention of researchers in education and didactics. This article examines the ways in which Swedish teachers use Spotify, including how usage influences teachers’ didactic choices and approaches to planning for music teaching and learning. Research participants included eight music educators with experiences in streaming music services in music classrooms. Findings show that digital literacy and the listening, teaching, and learning of music are inextricably intertwined; and that placing the application of music streaming in the context of a music classroom creates complications in practice. Implications highlight the importance of identifying and discussing complex issues occurring as a result of the use of streaming services in music classroom, gaining music streaming didactic literacy which is both a didactic competency that teachers use in planning for teaching, as well as a content for students to learn.

Having the possibility to experience meaning in artistic settings is a human right. However, several studies show that structures and norms may prevent human beings from participating in artistic and cultural activities. Moreover, it is not given that all forms of participation offer meaningful experiences, something which puts a great responsibility upon organizers of artistic events. The current study is based in a project where elderly people were given the chance to participate in processes of development and performance of collaborative contemporary dance. The specific aim of the study was to describe and analyse the phenomenon of the meaningful body based on a phenomenological approach. To get access to the dancers’ lived experiences, six participants were interviewed. The transcribed interviews were analysed in a phenomenological manner. The analysis resulted in three themes, which together describe the phenomenon of the lived body, namely: the intertwined body, the border-crossing body, and the body feeling at home. The themes are related to phenomenological philosophy regarding aging, awareness, existence, and aesthetic experience, as well as to art education situations and societal norms.

Music educational researchers in the Nordic countries have pointed out how municipal arts schools are organised based on, and tend to reproduce, anthropocentric values and approaches, and that such unequal norms and structures are to be challenged. Taking a border-crossing musical comedy project as a starting point, the specific aim of the current study is to illuminate how, and on what levels, organisational norms and traditional structures can be challenged, and what possibilities and new challenges that occur in a project taking place beyond the Anthropocene. To be able to grasp the aspects of becoming within the project and how that is related to aspects of organisation, we created a research entanglement based on post-human theory. Hence, situations seen as webs of relations were created, including the actors: humans with intellectual disabilities, musical performance students, educators, artists, researchers, and varied digital communication tools. Observations, video recordings, collaborative writing, qualitative surveys, and interviews produced material for analysis. Actor-network theory was applied aiming to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks were constituted, as well as how the actors influenced each other. The results identify significant actors and trajectories in Sammankonst, that in turn challenge anthropocentric organisational structures of municipal arts schools.

This article explores the concept of lived time as an aspect of aesthetic pedagogy based on a phenomenological way of thinking. Starting off from the philosophies of Bollnow and van Manen, where time is seen as an existential phenomena, intertwined with other existentials, we used experiences from an ongoing project as examples to make understanding of the phenomenon possible. Lived time concerns reconsidering and revision of thinking, a process that includes personal, relational and emotional qual­ities. The specific aim of the philosophical study is to describe the phenomenon of lived time in aesthetic pedagogy from a pedagogue perspective. We embrace a holistic view of relations between arts and education, where education in arts, education through arts, education as art, and art as education function as different perspectives of aesthetic pedagogical situations. To get acces to pedagogues’ lived experiences of time in aesthetic pedagogy, a group interview was conducted. Six pedagogues engaged in the Alla har rätt-project, with educational as well as artistic backgrounds, were interviewed together via the communication tool Zoom. Intentions, experiences, the changing situation, as well as visions about the future constituted themes for the group conversation. The philosophical analysis, where the experiences of the interviewees were used as examples, resulted in a description of the phenomenon of lived time in arts-based education constituted by four themes:  Lived time in meaningful arts education, Lived time as diminishing or disappearing in aesthetic pedagogy, Lived time and artworks in aesthetic pedagogy, and Lived time as didactic frame in aesthetic pedagogy.

Här uppmärksammas fenomenet delaktighet i estetisk verksamhet, något som är aktuellt i lärarutbildningar, såväl allmänna som med inriktning på estetiska ämnen, och i utbildningar som riktar sig mot kulturskola och annan fri verksamhet.

Författarna har fungerat som följeforskare i två Arvsfondsfinansierade konstpedagogiska projekt, Alla har rätt och Sammankonst drivna av Kulturverket. Baserat på forskningen tydliggörs vad delaktighet i estetisk verksamhet kan vara, och vilka krav det ställer på organisation, kollegium och förhållningssätt i sammanhang där konstuttryck och pedagogik möts.

Specifikt belyser författarna delatighetsaspekterna tid, rum och mellanrum liksom det dialogiska förhållningssätt som drivit Kulturverkets arbete.

Cecilia Ferm Almqvist är professor i pedagogik och musikpedagogik vid Södertörns högskola respektive Stockholms musikpedagogiska institut. Linn Hentschel är lektor i pedagogiskt arbete med inriktning mot musik vid Umeå universitet.

When the need of transforming and remixing music education is illuminated, fields of tensions in relation to the traditional master–apprentice model of teaching often appear. Binaries have been constructed and critiqued in research to describe tensions at various music educational levels. Some studies have also asked for a holistic, “both/and” holding. In higher music education (HME), the need for new approaches in research to understand how teaching and learning is developing are asked for. As a contribution, the overall aim of the article is to illuminate to what extent traditional culture norms and structures are maintained and challenged at three European conservatories. The specific aim is to map possible fields of tension surrounding approaches to teaching and related learning. The analysis in this article partly builds on understandings of culture and institutions, and partly on theories of relational pedagogy. To get access to how leaders, teachers, and students experience participating in the teaching and learning of conservatory cultures, an interview study was planned. The transcriptions were treated by a thematic analysis model. The analysis explored three themes that represent fields of tension: teaching in relation to established cultural structures, to creating or not creating new learning trajectories, and collaboration or competition—the educational culture. The fields of tension found through the analysis concern relations between the traditional conserved conservatory teaching and new open and diverse thoughts about and actions within in HME teaching. It becomes obvious that creating new learning trajectories should be a common issue, involving students and teachers, as well as leaders of conservatories, and that competition should be supported by collaboration. A consequence of such a pedagogical approach would be that differences between programs for diverse instruments could be balanced, and that all involved could learn from each other, which demands flexibility between individual and collaborative learning activities.

Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur lärare-elev-relationer förstås i fem avhandlingar samt hur dessa relationer kan påverka elevers lärande. Avhandlingarna är hämtade från olika databaser men samtliga avhandlingar ämnar undersöka lärare-elev-relationer i grundskolan eller gymnasiet. Studiens insamlade data har analyserats utifrån en tematisk analys. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten utgår från professorn Jonas Aspelins tolkning av en relationsteori som handlar om relationell pedagogik. Resultatet visar på vikten av en lärare-elev-relation i skolan samt betydelsen av dessa relationer för elevers lärande och utveckling. Resultatet visar även att lärarens relationskompetens är viktig för att skapa förtroendefulla relationer mellan lärare och elever. Läraren behöver därmed ha vissa egenskaper som att vara lyhörd, att vara en god lyssnare samt att inneha en socioemotionell kompetens för att skapa förtroendefulla relationer. Det framgår i studien att goda relationer har en positiv påverkan på elevers lärande och utveckling och att dåliga relationer i stället utgör ett hinder för elevers lärande.  

This roundtable brings together researchers who work closely with teachers and carers to develop their work to change some of the problems in the current educational practices to an anti-deficit lens. In situations where there is a need for doing otherwise, educational/care interventions often look to the future with the idea of moving beyond the (unsatisfying, unpleasant) present. However, this hurrying onwards, the need to resolve instead of staying with and tolerating (the impossibility) of the present may also miss opportunities for change, opportunities which trying to stay with and sustain current dilemmas may already entail. The question we examine together is the potential of this ‘(im)possibility’ of the present as a source of change. The studies in this roundtable all focus on circumstances in which the participants develop novel practices in their work while at the same conceive the present as difficult if not ’impossible’ to change.

Previous research has examined how mismatched dispositions within a divided or ?cleft? habitus are subjectively experienced but has not adequately explored nor theorized the variety of ways in which the dispositional disjunctures that progressively give rise to a cleft habitus are initially generated. Combining recent sociological work on ontological ruptures with an affective reading of Bourdieu?s social theory, we use an empirical case to illustrate how subtle processes of social influence set in motion by affective ties can come to sever the ontological bond between the habitus and the social space that initially shaped it, setting an affectively driven and reflexively negotiated process of habitus change in motion. By shedding light upon some of the sufficient conditions underpinning the development of dispositional disjunctures and the psychosocial forces that mediate this process, we extend the literature on habitus change and conflict in several ways.

In the popular book The Monk and the Philosopher (1998), Jean-François Revel and his son Matthieu Ricard engage in a friendly but critical dialogue between Western science and philosophy and Buddhism. The very form of the book, the critical dialogue, shows a commonality between Western philosophy and Buddhism. Both share a tradition of searching for insight and understanding through investigative conversation. Nevertheless, when Revel and Ricard encounter issues where they are not in, or do not come to, agreement Ricard struggles to communicate to his father what he means. It is not only that he can’t find words to explain his insights but also that language itself seems insufficient. Ricard returns to various metaphors, often to Revel’s frustration, in order to point to something that he has come to see through years of Buddhist practice. Certainly someone more familiar with Buddhist practices, thought, and life would more easily understand such metaphors, and even the less metaphorical explanations.

This article follows a story played out by children at a Sami early childhood centre in north Sweden. It does so by reflecting on the children's story as a form of Critical Indigenous Philosophy. In particular it explores what it could mean for a child to be a philosopher in a Sami context by developing the concept of jurddavazzi, or thought herder, in conversation with Wittgenstein's method of 'leading', and Cavell's of 'shepherding', 'words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use'. The children's play story - involving themes of death, struggles with natural surroundings, and interconnectivity through seeing life in nature - is read in relation to questions about traditional stories raised in the poetry of the Sami poet, artist and philosopher, Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, or aillohas. The article ends by discussing how the children's invitation to follow their story can be seen as a decolonizing pedagogical gesture of the child that requires a particular kind of philosophical listening by the teacher or adult. The article is in its style an attempt to demonstrate a form of philosophical storytelling the children are engaged in.

Literature and fiction, in various forms, both textual and oral, have an undeniable place in human growth and education: they are a constitutive part of our reality. This raises the question: how and what do we learn from fiction? Even when fiction does not mirror reality directly, can it still, explore, express, and teach us about the world? If so, how? In this special issue education becomes something of a link between the fictional and the real. Approaching fiction to learn from it, or learn with it, enables us to examine our experiences and to transform them in our everyday lives. The special issue, if perhaps for the most part indirectly, testifies to the various ways love of literature often expresses love of truth. Not because all the articles describe or use the notions of "truth," "fiction," "literature," and "learning" in the same way, but because they offer an extension of these concepts.

This essay concentrates on philosophizing that happens outside and in addition to planned philosophical discussions, philosophizing that comes alive in practice, that is intensified in childrens encounters with the world, with others, with language, in play. It contemplates how adults, educators and parents encounter children and are affected by childrens philosophical explorations. What is the role of the adult in childrens philosophical questioning? How can we respond to childrens philosophizing? What does it mean to do so? The essay explores philosophical exercises for early childhood educators in a range of examples from literature - memoirs, autobiographies, fiction and works that play in between those. By thinking through these literary examples, it investigates how educators can prepare for philosophical encounters with children through exercises of reading and thinking. In doing so the essay experiments with a form of writing that itself becomes a philosophical exercise. Through the examples and exercises the essay suggests how early childhood educators can train for a pedagogical immediacy that involves listening to the philosophical and existential questioning in childrens play, tantrums, and silences. The investigations and readings of the examples are not meant to lead to conclusions that can be directly applied in pedagogical practices; neither do they work as arguments for listening or listening in a particular way to children. What we get, and what I am looking for, is rather the experience of working and thinking through these examples.

In respect to the increased number of cases of research misconduct in Sweden, especially the Macchiarini case, a new national ethics legislation has been adopted. Following the previous and new legal acts and the Higher Ordinance for studies, Swedish universities have established qualitative measures to make sure that PhD students have knowledge about research ethics when graduating, for instance through offering third-cycle courses in research ethics. In this article, we describe how a Swedish university has been working with such a course to promote good research practice and ethical integrity to the researchers of tomorrow. We are doing this by describing the course structure and content, its outcome in relation to the legislation concerning misconduct in research and ethics within research, as a conscious reflection on research and its consequences. The results indicate that the course is in alignment with other scientists and/or rules and regulations.

This article departs from the educational reform of upper secondary school 2011, and the changing in the curricula for religion studies education. Our theoretical point of departure is inspired by Ivor Goodson’s and Thomas Popkewitz’s understanding of a school subject and its relation to socialisation. In relation to their understanding of a school subject and its socializing role, we see a didactical implication that the subject of religious study education will fall back to transferring knowledge that is easy to teach, control, assess, and grade. We wonder how teachers in religion education studies respond to, and handle existential and pupil related question in the classroom when they, for example, are addressed with questions about life and death, the environmental crisis or global poverty, even if there is no scheduled time for such matters. To answer this question, we have interviewed eleven religion education teachers from different programs in upper secondary school about how they consider the subject, its content and purpose and how this materialises in their teaching. The conclusions we could draw from our interviews are that most of the teachers try to be open and respond to existential and pupil-initiated question, even if there is no scheduled time for this, while others focuses on facts about the Abrahamitic religions

In UNESCO’s recent publication Education for Sustainable Development: A Roadmap the idea of community is described as playing an important role in the organization of education for sustainable development as a means of supporting transformations towards sustainability. In the present study we examine the relationship between community and the organization of Early Childhood Education and Care for Sustainability (ECECfS). This examination is based on case studies of Swedish preschool teachers’ perspectives and practices in relation to ECECfS. Drawing on Cultural Historical Activity Theory and the concept of ontological Communities of Learners, we describe ways in which community-based characteristics of the preschools shape and are shaped by cultural tools used to pursue ECECfS. Themed-Project Work (TPW), a common means in Swedish preschools of organizing day-to-day activities, emerged as an important practice through which to examine questions of community within and across preschools. We describe organizational tensions concerning how pedagogical practices like TPW change from being tools to support a preschool’s activities, to being objects toward which these activities are oriented. Such changes can enable or constrain a preschool’s possibilities for building pluralistic and democratic ECEC environments. We also discuss how the said organizational tensions are rooted in how community is conceived of in preschool provision. Community is constituted not only through the relationships among members of individual preschools but also through the relationships that preschools have with other preschools in their administrative networks. We discuss contradictions that emerge in this matrix of relationships that shape how preschools enact good governance in the pursuit of ECECfS.

We investigate the concept of care in adult-child joint play through two cases that illustrate ways in which the development of care relations among researchers, pedagogues, and children—and the imaginary characters they create through their joint play—shape and sustain early childhood education and care research and practice. We focus on the ways that early childhood education and care pedagogues’ approaches to care provide insights into practices of social sustainability, specifically social inclusion. The cases we present are drawn from recent studies of early childhood play. The studies belong to a corpus of international research projects that are researcher-teacher collaborations. These studies explore a unique form of adult-child joint imaginary play known as playworlds. Playworlds are based on cultural historical theories of development and art, Gunilla Lindqvist’s studies of playworlds, and local theory and practice of early childhood education and care. Our analyses of playworlds are based, in part, on Winnicott’s concept of transitional objects. The two cases are drawn from ECEC playworlds in Finland and the US. Each exemplifies how playworlds, as forms of participatory design research, make social sustainability possible. Furthermore, these cases highlight how, by working with the boundaries between and moving between real and imagined, the participants are able to develop new ways of being that are radically inclusive. We argue that they do so by facilitating and maintaining the development of care relations among researchers, teachers, children, and, importantly, imaginary characters, in ways that create what we call transitional subjects. We conclude that social sustainability, like care, should be conceived of as an ecology of caring practices.

In this article we focus on the ongoing research discussion concerning how the concept of teaching can be understood in preschool practice. In particular, we examine the connection between preschool teachers’ reflections on their own teaching and the culture of the preschool in which they work. This study is guided by the research question: How is teaching described and arranged for in the teachers’ preschool? The seven participating preschool teachers were drawn from two departmental teams that described themselves as working from a Pedagogy of Welcoming and Listening. The empirical materials are drawn from reflection conversations held with the preschool teachers in which the teachers discussed documentation they considered personally significant for their teaching in a recent education for sustainability project focused on play roots and semiotic production. The design and analysis of these conversations was based on cultural theories of communication (Carey, 1992; Dewey, 1916), and an understanding of preschool education as a situated cultural development process, preschools as idiocultures (Fine, 1979, 2012). Our analysis led to the description of three perspectives representative of the preschool teachers’ meaning-making in relation to teaching: Teaching processes in motion, Preschool teachers’ participation and presence, and Discernment of knowledge domains by listening to children’s actions. The result is discussed in terms of the preschool’s teaching culture, the ways in which the national preschool curriculum is manifest in the children’s actions, and the social and material relationships underpinning teaching.

Alla barn som är bosatta i Sverige har rätt till utbildning vilket för med sig nya språk, kulturer, religioner och synsätt för läraren i klassrummet (Skolverket, 2022). Denna studie undersöker lågstadielärares perspektiv på nyanlända elevers mottagande och inkludering i undervisningen samt hur skolornas resurser som svenska som andraspråkslärare används för att främja detta. Metoden som användes i studien är en kvalitativ intervjumetod med semistrukturerade intervjufrågor. Fyra lärare intervjuades, dessa arbetade i två olika kommuner och har varierad erfarenhet av yrket. Intervjumaterialet transkriberades och sedan analyserades med hjälp av en tematisk analys. Detta material diskuteras sedan med hjälp av teori och tidigare forskning.

Studiens resultat visade på att lärares upplevelser och beskrivning skiljer sig åt beroende på skola och kommun. Lärarna som arbetar i den mindre kommunen med större erfarenhet av arbetet med nyanlända elever beskriver både mottagande och inkludering som positiv. Lärarna uttrycker att de har tillräckliga resurser med en god struktur och ett bra samarbete med ledningsgruppen på skolan. Lärarna i den större kommunens upplevelser beskrivs som mer problematiska. Här beskriver lärarna inkludering och mottagande svårare då det inte har erfarenheten eller resurserna för att arbeta med nyanlända elever. Dessa lärare beskriver också att de inte känner sig stöttade av ledningsgrupp samt saknar struktur och resurser både från skolan och kommunens håll. Vilket visar på just vikten i samarbetet mellan lärare, ledning och kommuner. 

School inspection is a re-formulation of education as a realization of the school policy. When the Swedish Schools Inspectorate assesses schools’, they in practice formulate a new policy. By using the concept of a realization arena and analyzing quality audit reports, I intend to study how the Swedish Schools Inspectorate constructs its audit object and its consequences. In this study I assume a discursive approach. In the Inspectorate’s construction, the student is only expected to receive the stipulated knowledge and consume teaching. It is the teacher’s job to sell and adapt the presentation of the material to the students.

While many children grow up in linguistically and symbolically diverse communities, it is still rare that they encounter an early educational experience adapted to the complexities of their everyday communicational reality. This paper takes an ecological and multimodal approach to a preschool’s book project in a multilingual community. The study examines the web of resources that emerges from activities, actors and their interrelations during the book project. It is shown how multimodal resources emerge when supported by active pedagogical community engagement, and how resources underpinning early childhood literacy cross linguistic and modal boundaries. The paper uses a multimodal interaction analysis to show how the socioecological resources emerging during the project come together in multimodal interaction. Pedagogical potentials building on multimodal resources involving the wider ecology of actors in linguistically complex settings are discussed. 

Many children grow up in multilingual communities characterised by linguistic heterogeneity and semiotic and cultural complexity. Translanguaging theory has provided a perspective attuned to communication and education in multilingual settings. However, translanguaging pedagogies have not yet had a broad uptake in early educational settings. The recent interest in embodiment within translanguaging studies and the study of touch combinedly provide a potential perspective for early childhood education. This study examines the role of touch in a multilingual preschool featuring 2-year-olds. The results point to two key functions for touch. One is that touch creates a shared experiential ground where languages can be learned. The other function is that touch allows children to sensorially explore and learn multicultural experiences from the diverse cultural and linguistic systems available. Based on the results, the role of touch in early childhood translanguaging is discussed as a way forward for translanguaging pedagogies for creating both equitable and diverse educational opportunities for children in multicultural and multilingual communities.

While interactive touchscreens are currently entering into educational practice, little is known about what this means for learning in early childhood and, in particular, how touchscreens shape action and communication. In this paper, we examine the interactions of 2-year-olds and their teachers in a multilingual preschool in Sweden. We analyse the communicative environment between the children, teachers and shared touchscreens and books in the context of reading. A mixed-methods analysis was used, taking a concept of action that includes both verbal, non-verbal utterances and digital touch. The analysis shows a reconfiguration to the interactional dynamic where children perform comparable amounts of actions in sessions with the touchscreen and book reading but less talk during the touchscreen sessions. However, while talking less, children display other types of communicative actions. We analyse the changing interactional dynamic that follows, its implications to learning and early childhood pedagogical practice and how interaction can be reconceptualised as cycles of communication and action in which educational scaffolding unfolds. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Touchscreens are a significant part of children's lives and educational curricula. There is considerable uncertainty on how touchscreens can be incorporated into early childhood education. Little is known about how educational social interaction changes with touchscreens such as iPads. What this paper adds A mixed methods multimodal analysis of the changing actions and dynamics of iPads as compared with bookreading. Children's patterns of communication change towards less talk and more bodily communication, while teachers’ actions remain somewhat similar. Touch actions change the dynamics of interaction, can alter the pedagogical situation and bring a reconceptualisation towards a cyclical and embodied view of interaction. Implications for practice and/or policy New patterns of action may require a recalibration of educational practices. Teachers need to attend to new sets of touch actions that children use to communicate and act with as displays of knowledge. The use of touch screens should be seen as complementary to established practices of language and literacy training (such as book reading) rather than replacing them.