This editorial introduction examines how accelerating geopolitical tensions and the rise of neo-nationalist politics reshape the conditions, meanings, and practices of higher education (HE) internationalisation across Europe. While internationalisation has long been central to European HE through mobility, transnational collaboration, and policy frameworks such as the Bologna Process, recent developments including war, migration, securitisation, and geopolitical rivalry, challenge established assumptions about the openness of HE systems. We propose three themes through which contemporary transformations can be understood. First, we identify a geopolitical reordering of openness, whereby international engagement persists but becomes increasingly conditional and governed through security and geopolitical considerations. Second, we analyse the reappropriation of concepts, policies, and practices, demonstrating how academic freedom, institutional autonomy, mobility, and rankings are strategically reinterpreted and mobilised for authoritarian, illiberal political projects. Third, we explore the recontextualisation of nation-state logics in HE, highlighting how national authority and sovereignty acquire significance within a sector historically shaped by transnational aspirations. Drawing on contributions from diverse European contexts, we demonstrate how geopolitical pressures are translated, contested, and institutionalised in different ways. We discuss the emergence of conditional forms of internationalisation and raise important questions about the future governance, legitimacy and boundaries of openness in European HE.
In a time of declining reading comprehension and weak interest in reading among children and teenagers, learning more about how different kinds of texts are read in school is important. This is why this study aims to provide knowledge on how language arts teachers implement reading in their everyday instruction. The study relies on video data from 42 lower secondary classrooms from Sweden and Norway. Focusing on literary texts, it investigates and compares reading practices in language arts instruction. The study examines to what extent literary texts are read silently vs. listened to, and how teachers promote students’ reading comprehension in both reading conditions. The most important finding was that students in both countries listened to literary texts more often than they read them silently on their own. This practice was somewhat more common in Sweden than in Norway, where students in several classrooms were given time to read books of their own choice. Furthermore, when reading literary texts aloud, Swedish teachers interacted with students more often than Norwegian teachers in ways that can be assumed to promote students’ understanding of the text. Consequences of teachers preferring that students listen to texts instead of reading them silently also are discussed.
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.
