Background: The Swedish school is based on an inclusive principle where teachers’ ability to meet and teach all children and student groups with different social backgrounds and disabilities, other ethnic backgrounds, low and high performance is central. This means, for example, that students in need of additional adaptations, special support or challenges of different kinds receive the support they have statutory rights to (Skollagen 2010: 800, chapter 3), which often involves collaboration with student health skills such as SENCO, school social worker and also psychologist ( SOU 2017: 35). Hjörne and Säljö (2014) point to the difficulties encountered in collaborating on student health issues and students in need of adaptations and support. That is an area that addresses key questions for the school, health care and social services. Different social institutions thus work with student health issues but from different perspectives. It also creates different approaches to student health issues, which can complicate the understanding of different professionals’ skills and knowledge (Hjörne & Säljö, 2014). We therefore see the importance of courses where the students have the possibility to meet, understand and discuss with each other, as a way to create bridges between different professions.

Research question: The purpose of this study is to investigate what kind of knowledge and skills of co-operation future teachers, SENCO and school social workers need in order to qualitatively achieve good results across the professional boundaries with a focus on student health issues?

Method: University students who have participated in cross-disciplinary learning activities and with active schoolteachers; SENCO and school social workers in professional teams of student health, will be interviewed. Experience and knowledge of difficulties and opportunities for collaboration, as a basis for what kind of knowledge about collaboration and action skills the students need as newly educated teachers, SENCO and school social workers. The empirical collection will start in early 2019 and last throughoutthe year.

Results and discussion: The intended outcome addresses questions about what is important to develop in terms of professionalism within the multidimensional field. It is also important to get an overall picture of the students’ experiences and reflections of the academic learning activities found in the education and professional experience and knowledge. This applies to knowledge and action competence both in terms of content and collaboration in student health issues. Experience in working in different types of profession-wide teams such as student health, as well as meeting parents.

We see this as aspects of how to develop collegial interaction and exchange of ideas about the educational activity in the context of students in need of special support. With these educational efforts in the programs, both students and teachers take an active role in the development of students’ career in the context of the multidimensional field, special education and school social work. It identify and problematize ”the gap” and develop opportunities, arenas, for this kind of issues in school’s student health work.

In Sweden, recent waves of immigration have dramatically altered the linguistic landscape of Swedish schools for the deaf and hard of hearing. Many newly arrived students come with no experience with any sign language, and/or rudimentary skills in one or more spoken languages. Educating such a linguistically diverse population poses vexing challenges. Translanguaging offers exciting potential as a framework to guide teachers in recognizing and utilizing the totality of students’ varied linguistic resources to promote learning, regardless of current proficiency in Swedish and Swedish Sign Language. However, the promises of translanguaging elicit mixed reactions among [Deaf educators]. On the one hand, it affirms that a multilingual repertoire naturally leads to language use that draws from multiple sources, a fact that should be recognized and supported by educational practices. Translanguaging offers a valuable framework for analyzing the dynamic blending of signed and spoken language that educators have long observed from all deaf children. On the other hand, Deaf signers are alarmed by translanguaging practitioners’ calls to abandon the concept of language separation and allow elements of signed and spoken language to mix freely. Such unrestricted mixing calls to mind the long struggle against “SimCom,” the simultaneous mixing of speech and degraded signing that has repeatedly proven inaccessible to deaf signers.

How can Swedish Deaf schools employ translanguaging in a way that ensures equal access for all students, not just those with greater access to spoken language? The answer depends on teachers with strong competence in both Swedish and Swedish Sign Language, specifically trained to create visual learning environments where sign language skills are actively developed and used to facilitate access to spoken language content. Our talk highlights examples of such practices and identifies specific aspects of teachers’ ability to understand and leverage the multilingualism in their classrooms.

Translanguaging is often regarded with great skepticism in the context of Deaf education, as an approach that has already been tried, with disastrous results. Already in the 1960’s educators understood the critical importance of allowing deaf children to exploit their full linguistic repertoire for learning: not only listening, lip-reading and reading/writing, but also sign language, fingerspelling, gesture, and other strategies that render language visually accessible. The resulting teaching philosophy, Total Communication (TC), quickly became the dominant approach employed in Deaf education. Yet despite its progressive stance on multilingualism and multimodality, TC ultimately failed to provide deaf students with full access to a natural language. This chapter contrasts the ineffective multilingual practices under TC with characteristically “Deaf ways” of multilingual meaning-making observed among skilled Deaf signers. Excerpts from life story interviews illustrate the impact these practices have for scaffolding learning among Deaf students newly arrived in Sweden. We conclude that prioritizing visually-oriented practices and supporting both students and teachers to become skilled signers offer the best assurance for successful translanguaging in Deaf education without engendering the problems that caused TC to fail.

Background: The educational policy is inclusive both in Finland and in Sweden. Still special educators are educated. They seem to work both in inclusive and in segregative ways. The more inclusive ways demand co-operation and planning with other teachers. Although the results of such co-operation have been good, there could be even more collaboration at schools. The main questions of our study are: 1) What is the core content of the work of special educators. 2) What is the role of a) inclusion and b) collaboration in their work?

Method: The data for the study are current main laws and documents in both countries and curriculums of special educators in 5 universities in Finland and in 10 Universities in Sweden.  A content analysis as well as critical discourse analysis are used with these documents and curriculums. 

Results: The results with regards to the curriculums will show the core areas in both countries as well as the differences in the content of studies. The legal documents will show the similarities and differences in regulations. In a previous study the core areas in curriculum for special education teachers students in Finland were reading, writing, mathematical and behavioral challenges (Hausstätter & Takala 2008). Sweden and special teachers and special pedagogs, Finland just special teachers. Sweden has education on more narrow areas, like mainly just on reading and writing challenges; in Finland special educators are general experts, studying more issues. 

Conclusions: The results are not ready yet, but we will be able to say about the differences and similarities as well as focus on the demands of inclusion in both countries after we have done the study.