To Örebro University

This article examines how the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), incorporated into Swedish law in 2020, is recontextualised in five socioeconomically and ethnically diverse school settings. Drawing on Bernstein's concepts of recontextualization, classification and voice, the study analyses interviews with teachers, principals and superintendents to explore how the CRC shapes pedagogical relations in terms of boundaries and power relations between children, school staff and parents. The results indicate that the CRC's weak classification enables markedly different local interpretations. These, in turn, produce distinct configurations of voice: from individualised child- and parent-driven claims in affluent majority contexts to juridical boundary-setting or collective empowerment approaches in disadvantaged ethnic minority settings. Across cases, the socioeconomic and ethnic contexts strongly condition how boundaries are drawn and whose voice is strengthened or constrained - illustrating the importance of understanding the CRC as a context-sensitive educational object.

This article examines how the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), incorporated into Swedish law in 2020, is recontextualised in five socioeconomically and ethnically diverse school settings. Drawing on Bernstein's concepts of recontextualization, classification and voice, the study analyses interviews with teachers, principals and superintendents to explore how the CRC shapes pedagogical relations in terms of boundaries and power relations between children, school staff and parents. The results indicate that the CRC's weak classification enables markedly different local interpretations. These, in turn, produce distinct configurations of voice: from individualised child- and parent-driven claims in affluent majority contexts to juridical boundary-setting or collective empowerment approaches in disadvantaged ethnic minority settings. Across cases, the socioeconomic and ethnic contexts strongly condition how boundaries are drawn and whose voice is strengthened or constrained - illustrating the importance of understanding the CRC as a context-sensitive educational object.

This paper explores how teachers in a Swedish teacher "rebellion" group on Facebook discuss institutional expectations related to the use of time in teachers' work. Drawing on a narrative research tradition, group discussions are analyzed as negotiations where teachers co-construct their own narratives about the teaching profession. In this endeavor, the analytical focus is turned towards how the teachers' discussions relate to notions of professional responsibility and accountability. The results highlight that the teachers emphasize a desire to be trusted, but also that they need to deserve such trust by acting responsibly towards the needs of the whole school. Group discussions on these matters illustrate a tension between teachers' individual autonomy and collective responsibility. While the teachers emphasize teaching-related duties as the core part of their work, their narratives about the professional teacher were constructed in argumentations where the room for discussing social and relational aspects of education was limited.

In this inaugural lecture, I explore the relationship between educational policy governance and the space for professional discretion in the Swedish education system. As a point of departure, the lecture is situated in relation to earlier professorial inaugural lectures in Sweden, a tradition dating back to 1910. Drawing on completed and ongoing research, I demonstrate how changing societal expectations and policy frameworks have reshaped the conditions for teachers’ professional work over time. These dynamics are illustrated through examples such as the introduction and evolving meaning of the concept of quality, local initiatives to counteract school segregation, the increasing juridification of education, and finally three governance logics that conceptualize changes in how educational governance frame professional discretion. The lecture concludes with forward-looking reflections, emphasizing the importance of empirically grounded theorizing and further theoretical development that reconnects the changing educational landscape with fundamental questions about education and its relationship to society.

In recent decades, improving teaching quality has been a priority on the political agenda, and the role and responsibilities of academic developers (ADs) has expanded from running courses for individual teachers to engaging in strategic work. Utilising Shulman's concept of signature pedagogy, this article contributes to the literature by scrutinising the practice of an AD's collaboration with dental educators to improve their practice of suitability assessment. This case study employs qualitative, multi-method data analysed abductively and theory driven. It explores the AD's efforts to challenge entrenched teaching practices, enrich teachers' pedagogical vocabulary, and make tacit knowledge explicit. The results highlight the benefits of academic development, emphasising sensitivity and curiosity towards the discipline. However, the study identifies missed opportunities to explore epistemological assumptions in teaching. The findings suggest that deeper engagement with signature pedagogy structures could foster critical examination and adaptation of teaching practices, ultimately enhancing both societal and individual development.

This paper analyses and discusses the possibilities and challenges of collegial mutual deliberation among teachers as a way of counteracting racism. It takes its starting point in research on teacher collaboration that emphasises the importance of creating conditions locally for critical discussions, building on knowledge from different perspectives and going beyond simple solutions. With a focus on the practical, the idea of deliberative communication serves as a theoretical lens to analyse discussions among eight teachers on their responses to racism. The study provides theoretical and empirical knowledge about the potential contribution of collegial deliberation to developing a communicative teacher community that counteracts racism.

This study examines conversations in a Swedish teachers' School Rebellion (SR) group on Facebook, a group that attracts members who wish to engage in activism for a different and better Swedish school system and improved conditions for teachers. The phenomenon of teachers' Rebellion Facebook groups is relatively new. It has emerged in several countries over the past decade and clearly differs from traditional online teacher collaboration and professional development groups. Placing the Swedish SR initiative in the context of discussions on changing teacher professionalism over the last decade, the aim of this study is to examine what content is given presence in SR posts and how it is discussed by members, and to determine the extent to which the communication between the participating teachers has the potential to strengthen collective professionalism. To this end, curriculum theory and the concept of deliberative communication are combined to address questions of content and various relations between actors and levels, such as power and responsibility issues. The analysis shows that many topics related to teaching and education appear in the conversations, deliberative approaches vary from what is termed pre-deliberative to deliberative and even counter-deliberative. Although all participants have a voice, the administrators' role is shown to be of special interest. Based on these findings, the administrators' responsibility to maintain professional collegial deliberation is discussed as a complex mission of deliberation over political, pedagogical, and practical issues.

This article takes as its starting point that governments in different countries increasingly tend to use legal means to solve societal problems and argues that this tendency reflects broader changes in the welfare state. While previous critical studies of education policy have contributed important knowledge on governance changes, the impact of the legal system has, however, until recently remained an outlier. By synthesising links between different theoretical and empirical contributions, the purpose of this article is to identify and explore key historical drivers for the development of juridification. The guiding research question is: Why juridification of education now - and how? To approach it, three interrelated and interwoven international trends are outlined: marketisation, accountability and human rights. The article contributes knowledge on how these three drivers have created contextual opportunities for juridification to develop, and invites further examination by the growing community of researchers dedicated to exploring juridification of and in education.