This article examines how Poland’s higher education and research policies were mobilised within shifting geopolitical opportunity structures following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on the SAIOS framework, document analysis, and non-local ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023, it explores how the Law and Justice (PiS) government reframed research policy through securitising discourses of regional leadership and Polish exceptionalism. Focusing on the creation of the Copernican Academy and the activities surrounding Collegium Intermarium, the study demonstrates how geopolitical narratives of the Intermarium were instrumentalized to advance neo-nationalist ambitions in global academic governance. The analysis highlights the appropriation of internationalisation discourse to legitimise ideological projects in higher education, and shows how subsequent policy reversals under the Tusk-led government have sought to dismantle this institutional legacy. The findings contribute to broader discussions on nationalism, policy-making, and the geopolitics of knowledge in post-crisis Europe.
In response to growing concerns surrounding children’s health and well-being, interprofessional collaboration across different sectors has become an important form of support for school-aged children. This study examined how professionals in teaching, student health, and social work in Finland describe their involvement in interprofessional collaboration and their perceived facilitators and barriers to it. Interview data from 28 professionals were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings showed different forms of collaborative involvement: 1) the teachers saw themselves as information providers to student health, social work and home; 2) the student health professionals (SHPs) saw themselves as coordinators of communication between school, social work, and home; and 3) the social work professionals (SWPs) saw themselves as promoters of service processes between school, home and social work. Furthermore, the teachers and SHPs perceived interprofessional collaboration within the school as mixed, identifying both facilitators and barriers to their collaborative involvement. The three professional groups viewed school-social work collaboration differently, the SWPs emphasising facilitators to their involvement, while the teachers and SHPs emphasised barriers, indicating somewhat asymmetrical collaboration. To reduce the barriers to collaboration, it would be important to deepen the interaction between the different parties.
This study is situated in a three-year research and development (R&D) programme focused on instructional development, involving 170 Swedish teachers across five municipalities (2021–2024). It investigates how teachers’ professional agency developed through the appropriation of conceptual and practical tools introduced within the collaboration. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the study conceptualises instructional development as a mediated and contextually situated process and examines how professional agency may evolve as teachers appropriate introduced tools in response to identified instructional challenges. Data comprise 101 teacher-authored case narratives and interviews with 12 teachers. Using directed qualitative content analysis, the study explores how teachers interpreted, adapted, and mobilised conceptual frameworks and practical tools in relation to locally defined student needs. The findings indicate a shift from deficit-oriented interpretations of student difficulties towards needs-driven instructional analysis. Assessment information was increasingly reinterpreted as a resource for instructional development, and teachers described integrating subject knowledge, didactical strategies, and situational judgement more deliberately. Collegial collaboration and documentation functioned as mediating arrangements supporting both individual professional agency and, in some instances, emerging collective transformative agency. The study contributes to research on teacher learning by illustrating how tool appropriation can mediate expansive reorientations of instructional reasoning and practice.
Education policies provide guidelines for testing and grading, but research on such prescriptions and prospective teacher perspectives is scarce. Hence, this qualitative investigation explored evidence-based policies juxtaposed with pre-service language teacher beliefs on summative assessment at three Nordic universities. The conceptual framework included teacher cognition and deliberation, while constructivist grounded theory guided the analysis of the data. The findings detected high expectations on graduate teachers' summative assessment literacy in the education policies for Sweden and Finland. However, the participant-based data revealed that instructional alignment between teaching and testing should be reinforced in teacher education. Moreover, the pre-service teachers gave examples of perceived gaps between theoretical and practical literacies. Preferences for further training in deliberative and other practical approaches to summative assessment also emerged. Hence, some divergencies were detected between requirements in the respective national regulatory policies vis-& agrave;-vis stated beliefs. Proposals for enhancing the instruction in teacher education were introduced.
This paper examines the politics of appropriation through which the meaning of academic freedom is strategically redeployed within contemporary struggles over knowledge and governance. Across both illiberal regimes and consolidated liberal democracies, recent years have witnessed escalating disputes over freedom of speech and academic freedom - concepts increasingly collapsed in political and public discourse. This conflation is not incidental but strategic: by invoking the authority of "free speech", political actors reframe academic freedom thereby narrowing its scope and undermining its democratic potential. What appears as the protection of freedom thus functions as a disciplinary mechanism, reordering scientific knowledge for national, cultural, or geopolitical advantage. This politics of appropriation is powerful precisely because it does not present itself as censorship but as the mainstreaming of anti-liberal norms within the very institutions designed to protect post-war freedoms. Academic freedom is thereby transformed from a practice of critical inquiry into an instrument aligned with nationalist, authoritarian, and neoliberal orders. Reclaiming academic freedom as a contingent, collective practice of inquiry and truth-telling remains crucial if universities are to serve as spaces of accountability and democratic imagination in a fractured geopolitical order.
This article aims to contribute to an in-depth discussion about what teachers’ educational videos on social media mean from the students’ perspective and to explore further questions related to the broader purposes of education. Based on a student survey, in which a total of 1065 lower and upper secondary students participated, we analyse usage patterns and students’ understandings of teachers’ educational videos on social media as resources for learning. Based on Drotner’s work on discourses about informal learning, students’ answers to open-ended questions about educational videos on social media were analysed, using thematic content analysis. Four main themes were found, concerning positive and negative aspects in relation to individual learning, social media versus regular teaching, student diversity and a connected generation. The analysis shows how a functionalist discourse is dominant, where the use of educational videos is seen as a means of achieving better results. The findings highlight that teachers’ educational videos have implications for the individual student, for the relationship to teaching and regular education and to broader societal implications as pedagogical relations become embedded into social media’s platform economies.
This study focuses on the factors that make teachers’ work meaningful. Exploring the topic is important, because it provides insights into what keeps teachers in the profession. Teacher burnout and reasons for changing careers have been studied widely but there has been less research on why teachers want to engage in teaching and stay in the profession. The purpose of this study is to highlight the aspects of their work that teachers perceive meaningful. The data concern Finnish teachers’ written responses to an open-ended question (N = 1,627). Conventional content analysis was used to analyse the data. The results indicate that teachers find their work meaningful through witnessing students’ learning, growth, and success, as well as through their role in guiding and supporting students’ development. Teachers highlighted the importance of positive social relationships in the workplace, including interactions with students, colleagues, and parents. Support, feedback, and collaboration within the work community were perceived as essential for meaningful work. Furthermore, student behaviour was noted as an influencing factor, as well-behaved and motivated students enhanced teachers’ experiences of meaningfulness. Findings underscore the importance of fostering a supportive and collegial school environment that strengthens teachers’ sense of purpose and engagement in their profession.
This article examines how de-risking policy instruments interact to shape implementation conditions for Sino-research collaboration in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs). Using comparative policy analysis, it analyses how instruments combine across types, functions and actor loci, and what these interactions mean for HEIs. The findings show that implementation conditions are shaped less by individual instruments than by broader governance arrangements. Across the three cases, nodal instruments like guidelines depended on organisational settings to be reinforced, with different consequences for institutional practice. Denmark displays a reinforced, security-oriented mix that supports more coherent action among HEIs. Norway exhibits a layered mix that offers coordination support while preserving interpretive space. Sweden shows a less coordinated set of instruments that leaves HEIs with greater interpretive space but less coherent national guidance. The article shows that the actor loci behind nodal and organisational instruments matter. Policy mixes anchored more closely in security-oriented state structures appear more protection-oriented, while mixes mediated through higher education sector actors preserve more room for collaboration-oriented logics. The article contributes to research on policy instrument mixes, research security and higher education governance by showing that de-risking is an interactive governance arrangement rather than a set of isolated instruments.
This study explores how Grade 7 students experienced a student-directed inquiry for the first time in a Science and Technology course at girls' school in Qu & eacute;bec, Canada. Drawing on an exploratory case study design, we centred on students' voices to understand their perspectives on student-directed inquiry and the competencies they felt they developed throughout the process. Data were collected through written reflections and semi-structured interviews. Students described student-directed inquiry as an iterative, problem-solving process that was both empowering and challenging. Autonomy allowed students to take ownership of their learning - selecting a meaningful topic (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) and co-creating a Red Dress exhibition - while also requiring resilience in the face of ambiguity and time constraints. Collaboration was both generative and difficult, with students navigating group dynamics while benefiting from shared ideas and peer support. These experiences contributed to a strong sense of classroom community. By foregrounding students' voices, this study offers a nuanced understanding of student-directed inquiry and highlights the importance of supporting students' autonomy, interpersonal skills, and emotional development. Findings offer implications for educators and school leaders seeking to implement student-centred approaches that foster critical competencies and meaningful engagement in middle school classrooms.
In recent years, inclusive leadership has become established as a theoretically relevant approach for schools committed to equity, social justice and diversity. However, there is less theoretical background on its practices compared to other leadership approaches. The aim of this paper is to conceptualise inclusive school leadership from a critical and socially grounded perspective by proposing five theoretically relevant dimensions of practice that support the development and enactment of inclusion in schools. These dimensions are as follows: (1) management of pedagogical processes to cater for diversity; (2) development of an inclusive school culture; (3) promotion of whole school participation; (4) professional development of the whole school community; and (5) interpersonal resources for inclusion. For each dimension, a set of practices, narratives, competencies, and evidence that support their development and enactment in school contexts are presented. The conclusion is that inclusive leadership is grounded in social justice, critical reflection and contextualisation. This approach is indispensable to overcome the limitations imposed by traditional structures and standardised solutions that can hinder true inclusion in school contexts.
This case study explores how school management and teachers perceive the school’s role and activities within an outcomes-based governance framework while operating in a small rural school. The relational perspective adopted in this paper suggests that place is not an independent entity but is instead constructed through particular social relations at a given time depending on both physical and social factors. The local place and space are shaped by relations that integrate national and global influences with the local context. The study was conducted in a Swedish municipality with a low median income. Since the knowledge criteria were difficult to achieve directly, the teachers approached the attainment of these knowledge criteria as a multi-faceted process that is achieved gradually: creating a positive classroom environment, developing strong relations between students and between teacher and students, promoting students’ conversational and listening abilities while maintaining a focus on basic skills. Within education, digitalisation has contributed to exceed local borders, while entrepreneurship has done so to a lesser extent. The expansion of students’ space in terms of social relationships does not aim to abandon the rural area but rather to highlight the possibilities of bringing resources back to the area in a future.
This paper presents a thematic analysis of the experiences of a group of teacher educators and student teachers during an action research project that examined how collaborative learning can be fostered in online mathematics teacher education. Data were collected via written reflections from teacher educators and a questionnaire completed by student teachers. Guided by the Community of Inquiry framework, we investigate the three presences of both students and teacher educators in the online environment. Our results indicate that the course design met participants' expectations regarding cognitive presence, while teaching presence requires further development. With respect to social presence - particularly, affective expressions - our findings suggest that emotions mediate the relationship between teaching presence and cognitive presence. For example, feelings of curiosity transformed instructional scaffolding into active exploration. Conversely, frustration moderated collaboration: when left unaddressed, it reduced students' willingness to engage, but when acknowledged by peers or educators, it became a driver for problem-solving.
This article critically examines Sweden’s National Professional Programme (NPP) for principals, teachers and preschool teachers, launched in 2025, through the lens of Bacchi’s framework “What’s the problem represented to be?” From an international perspective, the Swedish case is an example of transnational policy trends carried by powerful agents such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Three main problem representations were identified in the analysed documents: governing; equity and continuous professional development (CPD). The analysis identifies various binaries, such as individual vs. collective efficacy, successful vs. unsuccessful professionals and national standardisation vs. local autonomy. The NPP has been framed as a solution to local governance inadequacies by calling for centralisation and tightening control over educational quality. This shift poses potential risks, including competition for control over professional development opportunities, marginalisation of principals’ roles as pedagogical leaders and creation of hierarchies within the school professions. Furthermore, the emphasis on CPD as a singular path to improvement may overlook collective efficacy and local contexts, favouring a one-size-fits-all approach that may exacerbate existing inequities. The findings indicate the need for further investigation into practical effects that the NPP poses and its impact on Sweden’s educational landscape.
In this article, we explore and discuss Swedish Early Childhood Education (ECE) teachers’ professional mandates related to recent policy of teachers’ responsibility for leadership in teaching activities. Through written descriptions and group interviews, data were compiled on ECE teachers’ experiences and visions of leadership as well as evaluations of their leadership practice. The results show that the ECE teachers’ enactment of leadership consists of both professional responsibility and accountability logics in different fields of tension. ECE teachers stressed trust in characteristics such as children’s needs and interests to be part of leading teaching activities, simultaneously as they emphasised trust in predefined evaluation through systematic quality work. We interpret the ambiguous emphasis on trust as an expression of “in trust we trust”. This ambiguity might hinder the development of a good ECE practice. We conclude that leadership in ECE as a concept needs to be discussed to avoid a fixed and predefined leadership practice. The responsibility for what direction this discussion will take must be shared among ECE practitioners, policy makers and researchers in the field.
This article examines the design and enactment of a Media and Information Literacy (MIL) curriculum within the decentralised, federalist Swiss school system. It explores how national and state actors shape the design and implementation of education policy. An analysis of expert interviews reveals that the curriculum design process involved stakeholder dialogue and aimed for collaboration and inclusivity of the different states. Furthermore, the article profiles six states and their MIL policies, highlighting varied strategies of enactment. The integration of qualitative data and the formulation of vignettes illustrate the iterative nature of policy design and enactment processes, demonstrating that not all states align with national policy but rather define their own strategies and regulations. This multi-case approach also underscores how societal demands may precede national policy design, emphasising the importance of the state context in educational governance.
This article investigates how Colombia's decentralised Secretariats of Education (SoE) institutionalise exam-oriented preparation for Sabre 11, the mandatory upper-secondary exit exam governing higher-education access. These state-procured services are conceptualised as shadow education, satisfying Bray's canonical criteria - supplementary nature, academic focus, and fee-based delivery - while functioning as a publicly financed, contract-based modality. Operating beyond the core curriculum, these programmes often become mandatory through contractual mandates. Theoretically, the study is situated at the intersection of state responsibilization and privatisation; subnational authorities, under pressure to improve metrics, outsource service delivery while retaining accountability for outcomes. Methodologically, the research employs a documentary analysis of procurement dossiers (2021-2024), systematically coding service configurations, delivery modalities, and per-student expenditures. Findings reveal that local development plans mobilise public resources to improve Sabre 11 rankings, which are centrally monitored by the Ministry of Education. Despite significant data constraints - notably the absence of a national registry and the discontinuation of student-level participation surveys since 2012-the evidence demonstrates a sophisticated bundling of tutoring, teacher training, and curriculum alignment. This model effectively embeds shadow education within the public apparatus, illustrating how state-initiated private interventions are leveraged to advance subnational performance imperatives and quality assurance goals.
Doctoral students with English as an additional language (EAL) in the natural sciences who work in non-Anglophone research settings commonly write their research texts in a foreign language during their short research apprenticeship. Learning to write research texts in an additional language is typically scaffolded by expert feedback, but doctoral supervisors’ time can be limited, thereby creating a need for additional sources of help. Peer feedback (PF) can be such a source; however, there is little research addressing how peer feedback might scaffold the writing of doctoral students with EAL in non-Anglophone settings. This case study explores six EAL doctoral students’ descriptions of receiving, assessing and using multiple rounds of PF that were provided to their original research texts by other EAL doctoral students in the natural sciences. Using text elicitation interviews and thematic analysis, this case study in a Swedish university explores how EAL peers’ feedback can potentially scaffold doctoral students’ research writing. Findings showed that peer comments mediated writers’ knowledge on rhetorical moves, organisational and cohesion features, academic and disciplinary constructs, and in some instances, mediated research knowledge.
This study investigates Swedish university students’ engagement with academic reading in English, with a focus on reading compliance, perceived comprehension, and preparedness. Based on a nationwide survey (N = 1,000), the study offers a representative account of students’ academic reading practices and experiences. While a majority of students report reading most or all assigned English texts and generally find them comprehensible, a substantial minority read selectively/not at all and struggle with understanding. Many students also feel underprepared for the demands of academic reading in English. These challenges are unevenly distributed and show systematic variation across demographic groups (gender, age, level of education and academic discipline). Overall, the study highlights that academic reading in English is not merely a linguistic challenge but a socially and institutionally shaped practice. The findings call for more coordinated support across educational levels, including stronger alignment between pre-tertiary and tertiary education, and targeted interventions to support students’ developing academic reading literacy. This study contributes to the growing literature on academic reading in non-Anglophone higher education contexts.
Formulaic language accounts for a substantial part of any language. Learning formulaic language accounts for a substantial part of any language. Learning formulaic language has therefore been identified as important for successful language learning, as it provides a basis from which more advanced grammar can develop. So far, few studies have focused on to what extent formulaic language is given attention to in school materials aimed at young learners. In a Swedish context such an analysis is wanting. This paper presents an analysis of formulaic language in three EFL teaching materials used in Swedish primary school. To identify instances of formulaic language, glossaries and exercises accompanying text materials were run through Phrase Profiler and the Sketch Engine n-gram function. The results show that much of the formulaic language featuring in the texts is not highlighted in the glossaries and is not further practiced in the exercises either, suggesting that there is little understanding of formulaic language and its importance for language learning among materials developers.
While recent decades saw European universities align with globalisation and internationalisation through various policy initiatives, current trends signal a growing backlash from neo-nationalism. This article proposes an analytical lens that foregrounds four interrelated dimensions – geographies of scale, community, affect/emotion, and time – for examining how neo-nationalist discourses are mobilised, institutionalised, and contested across diverse higher education contexts in Europe. Informed by scholarship in nationalism studies, affect studies and geography, this paper interprets the rise of neo-nationalism not simply as a rejection of internationalisation, but as a reconfiguration of universities’ mission in response to intersecting challenges such as migration, economic precarity, and cultural anxiety. The proposed framework enables a nuanced analysis that both attends to local particularities and identifies transnational patterns. This framework bridges the disconnect between nationalism studies, geography, and higher education – fields sharing concerns with identity, power, and governance, yet historically evolving in parallel rather than engaging in sustained dialogue.
