To understand what to improve in initial teacher education to better prepare teachers for their profession, we asked alumni (N = 93) from three Swedish initial teacher education programs, what in their education they thought had benefited them the most in preparing them for a teaching career, and what they thought was lacking given their…

International teaching experiences, even if short-termed, are great opportunities for student teachers to challenge their assumptions and scrutinise their beliefs, to discover different ways of approaching teaching and learning, and to better understand their own education system through a global education lens. They offer student teachers the…

The present article focuses on teaching and learning about the Holocaust in Sweden, conducted as study trips to Holocaust memorial sites. Although about a quarter of Swedish teenagers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum each year, this study is the first to examine these Swedish study trips. Since there are no centralised systems for…

Citizenship education played a crucial role in the 19th century transition from royal sovereignty to democracy in the Nordic region, with folk high schools (FHS) playing an important role. While established to empower the people ("folk") for active participation in society, the contemporary folk high schools have reoriented from their…

In Swedish compulsory school, individual development plans (IDPs) are mandatory for all students up to 6th grade. The purpose is to summarize and facilitate pupils' learning and tune instruction to national standards. In this study, 233 IDPs drawn up for 5th grade pupils were analyzed with focus on qualities that have been found to impact…

Despite an extensive debate and an openness of teachers to a strength-based approach to health and physical education, it is not always clear what a salutogenic strengths-based approach might look like in practice, at least not in the day-to-day work in schools. The purpose of this article is to present a salutogenic strengths-based school…

A human right to higher education was included in the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which came into force in 1976. Yet the world has changed significantly since the ICESCR was drafted. State legislation and policies have generally followed a neoliberal trajectory, shifting the perception of higher…

We know from research that there is an intimate relationship between student learning and the context of learning. What is not known or understood well enough is the relationship of the students' background and previous studies to the understanding and learning of the subject area--here, computer science (CS). To show the contextual influences on…

Seven successive curricula for Swedish in the Swedish primary school are investigated using a linguistic method that traces its origin to the Russian literary theorist, Michail Bakhtin. The amount of dialogicity, viewed as the room given to different paradigms to argue against each other, is shown to decrease from the earlier curricula to the…

Action research can be understood as a complex interplay between local circumstances and local research traditions, embedded in their turn in local intellectual-philosophical traditions, national as well as international. Because of this interplay it is questionable whether it would be particularly fruitful to look for 'typical local forms of…