Focusing on the interplay between community context and principals' leadership, this study contributes knowledge of the situated dimensions of school leadership. Based on qualitative content analysis of the statements of 20 principals leading schools in low-socio-economic status communities in a highly segregated Swedish city, we address the…

National policies aiming at marketisation and privatisation in welfare sectors such as Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) require governance and organisation to be realised. In Sweden, the municipalities are key but largely under-researched organisers for preschool quasi-market infrastructures. This study explores the different ways in…

This paper explores how school community collaboration is given meaning by municipally employed coordinators whose task is to organise collaboration between schools and other actors in urban areas in Sweden. Inspired by Carol Bacchi's theorisation of the constitutive aspect of discerning problems, it examines how coordinators give meaning to the…

In this paper, we engage with five Swedish universities' discursive articulation of, and responses to, an alleged post-truth crisis in communication, aimed at the public. Taking discourse theory as our point of departure, the aim is to analyse how universities are trying to maintain or restore trustworthiness against a backdrop of problems with…

This paper re-examines the position of the Tanzanian Folk Development Colleges, a national network of adult education institutions, at a time when their long-term financial assistance by the Swedish International Development Agency has come to an end and they are being transferred from the Tanzanian Government Ministry of Community Development to…

In the face of the global sustainability crisis, schools and teachers are called on to transform education and implement educational innovations to strengthen sustainability education. One of these innovations is 'open schooling': educational practices that involve students in identifying, exploring, and tackling real-world sustainability problems…

Universities play an important role in the development of society. However, it is not always clear what the objectives of collaboration between a Higher Education Institution (HEI) and external stakeholders from the surrounding society are. In this study, value-focused thinking was applied to construct structures of strategic, fundamental and…

Few Nordic studies put children's experiences of social inequality at their centre. This article explores the children's perceptions of their education and well-being within two Nordic cities. The participants in this cross-national comparative qualitative study are children living in polarised urban metropolitan areas in Norway and Sweden. Our…

In many countries, assessment for learning (AfL) is recommended in both policy and research as a concept that should be integrated into the teaching of physical education (PE) in schools. AfL is also part of physical education teacher education (PETE) programs in several countries and, consequently, something future PE teachers are expected to…

The focus in this study is the relationships between one tertiary music academy and four amateur orchestras. In this study the kinds of cooperation that exist, how students benefit from participating in amateur orchestras, and how cooperation can be further developed is identified. Four administrators from the academy and four conductors were…

This exploratory, comparative study focuses on the leadership challenges encountered by American and Swedish school superintendents in communities that experienced an unexpected increase in the number of refugees being placed their towns. We focused the study on two small communities in northern Sweden and two communities in northern Vermont. Our…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to draw from data collected as part of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) and present cases of democratic and heroic leadership from three countries, discussing to what extent successful school principals in each of their research sites (Melbourne, Australia; Umeå, Sweden;…

Cooperation and partnerships between schools and public organisations, private companies and non-profit organisations have become a common model as a form of governance for addressing social problems. The aim of this article is to explore the strategies used by professionals to counteract segregation at a school located in a multi-ethnic suburb,…

This article presents research from a school in a multicultural suburb on the outskirts of a large Swedish conurbation that used a particular pedagogy with strong classification and framing to address an identified problem of academic failure amongst its pupils. The analysis shows that the pedagogy was chosen based on an assumption that pupils…

Research on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) implementation tends to focus primarily on student and teacher outcomes, and there have been few studies on leadership practices at the school organisation level that provide information on how quality in education contributes to ESD implementation. To address this issue, we conducted an…