The promise that AI tools will relieve teachers of tedious tasks and liberate time for more 'valuable' work with students has become a dominant narrative. However, the implementation of automated technologies raises questions around how human labour is implicated and situated in these processes. From the perspective of maintenance and repair studies we approach the often-hidden labour that teachers undertake when engaging with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies. Drawing on interviews with Swedish teachers we expose the tools' inherent limitations in teaching contexts, and highlight the pedagogical, social, and moral dimensions of educational practice. We argue that these essentially inexplicable and ungeneralizable aspects of teaching - grounded in teachers' situated awareness, professional experience, and tacit knowledge - cannot be codified or reduced to training data. Our results demonstrate the need for a radical rethinking of the forms of AI that education could benefit from - and those it should resist.

Policymaking around educational technology (ed-tech) is increasingly influenced by networks of public and private actors ranging from Big Tech corporations and international organisations through to ed-tech evidence brokers and consultants. This paper considers a relatively unexplored facet of contemporary ed-tech policy work - public-facing (ex)teachers advocating for technological change through various publicity, lobbying and market-building activities. In particular, the paper considers how such actors have recently been promoting the take-up of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies within Swedish schools as a policy issue. Drawing on interviews with 13 prominent 'AI advocates', we detail how these actors are centrally involved in an issue network looking to shape policy imperatives around school AI in the absence of clear leadership from national government, state agencies and local ed-tech industry. Despite being motivated by ideas of AI-driven pedagogical and societal change, the paper examines how this issue network is largely reproducing conservative forms of onto-epistemic governance by replicating valuations of generative AI in familiar corporatised terms of efficiency, utility and solutionism.

Teachers are now encouraged to use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools to complete various school-related administrative tasks, with the promise of saving considerable amounts of time and effort. Drawing on interviews from 57 teachers across eight schools in Sweden and Australia, this paper explores teachers' experiences when working with GenAI. In particular, it focuses on the large amounts of work that teachers put into reviewing, repairing and sometimes completely reworking AI-produced outputs that they perceive to be deficient. Rather than reflecting teachers' lack of skill in prompting GenAI effectively, the paper shows how this work foregrounds the educational limitations and frailties of AI and other automated technologies - with teachers having to act on a wide range of complex professional judgements around pedagogical appropriateness, social relations and overall educational value to bear on AI-generated content. The paper concludes by considering the need to challenge ongoing industry and policy claims around the labour-saving benefits of artificial intelligence in education, and instead focus on the ways in which these technologies are dependent on the hidden labour of humans to co-produce the illusion of automation.

I denna artikel undersöks hur omställningen till distansundervisning i svenska gymnasieskolor i samband med coronapandemin påverkade lärare och förutsättningarna för deras pedagogiska uppdrag. Fokus i artikeln ligger på lärares upplevelser av sitt arbete och hur deras lärarvardag i flera avseenden kom att negeras under pandemin, vilket också kom att innebära att delvis omedvetna föreställningar om lärarprofessionen synliggjordes. Vår studie visar att omställningen till distansundervisning innebar en rad förluster, förluster som även tydliggör vad det innebär att vara och verka som lärare. De intervjuade lärarna upplevde att deras professionella gärning försvårades som en konsekvens av övergången till distansundervisning. Utan skolan och klassrummet som materiell och symbolisk inramning upphörde mycket av det mellanmänskliga, pedagogiska och kollegiala i lärargärningen. Det allvarliga och högtidliga i läraryrket försvann samtidigt som en maktlöshet och sorg infann sig då man inte längre kunde hjälpa eleverna eller utföra skolans kompensatoriska uppdrag i samma utsträckning som tidigare. Genom övergången till distansundervisning blev lärarna vingklippta. English abstract The Constrained Teacher: Teachers’ Experiences of Distance Teaching During the Corona Pandemic This article examines how the transition to distance teaching in Swedish upper secondary schools during the corona pandemic affected teachers and the conditions for their pedagogical labour. The focus of the article is on teachers’ experiences of their work, and how their everyday teaching practice in many respects was negated, which also, we argue, rendered partially unconscious notions of their profession visible. Our study shows that distance teaching resulted in a number of losses, that also make visible what it means to be and work as a teacher. The interviewees experienced that their work became difficult when teaching was to take place online. Without the school and the classroom as a material and symbolic framing, much of the interpersonal, pedagogical and collegial aspects of teaching ceased. The seriousness and solemnity of the teaching profession disappeared at the same time as feelings of powerlessness and sadness arose when teachers no longer could help their students or carry out the school’s compensatory mission to the same extent as before. Through the transition to distance teaching, teachers were, we argue, constrained.

The doctorate forms the basis for academic careers and the regeneration of academia, and has increasingly become important for other sectors of society. The latter is reflected in efforts on institutional, national as well as supranational levels to change and adapt the doctoral degree to new expectations. As doctoral education is embedded in research, changes in governance and funding of research further affect the doctorate. The evaluation of the doctoral thesis appears, however, to have remained true to the academic tradition: an examination committee exercising their gatekeeping in a ceremonial setting. This study sets out to explore doctoral examination committees’ evaluation practices. Insights were gained through six focus group interviews with experienced examination committee members at three large research-intensive universities in Sweden. Of particular interest is how the object of evaluation is formed, the nature of the boundary-work conducted, and variations in examination practices related to different and changing conditions for research and doctoral education. Our results show how the object of evaluation emerges through a gradual interpretation of the thesis and defence, becoming more complex and nuanced as the process of evaluation progresses from its initial stages to the final closed discussions of the committee. The finalised object of evaluation, only fully present at the conclusion of the closed meeting and hence transient in nature, encompasses the research contribution, educational achievement, and academic competence of the candidate. Furthermore, the boundary-work conducted in this process often transcends the object of evaluation to include also supervision and the local context for doctoral education and research, and hence contributes to upholding, and potential changing, norms in research fields, educational contexts, and academia at large. This extended boundary-work intensified as problems and inconsistencies were discovered during the evaluation process. The ceremonial staging underscored the gravity of the decision and the extended boundary-work. Despite changing conditions for the doctorate, our findings highlight the importance of the practice of evaluation committees, and the disciplinary communities to which they belong, for upholding and negotiating norms in academia.

ABSTRACT Several authors have described how the formalization of recent decades has steered doctoral education towards structured curricula, more managerial control and new models for supervision. Largely absent from these accounts, however, is if and how doctoral education has been affected by the concurrent changes in research governance, in particular by the ‘projectification’ of research. For this study, we were interested in the convergence of educational formalization with research projectification around doctoral education in the context of highly competitive, externally funded research in medicine and health sciences in Sweden. Using Cultural-historical activity theory and constructing activity systems for education and research, respectively, we were able to identify several contradictions and tensions, both within and between systems, that were consequences of adaptations to the abovementioned formalization and research policy changes. The contradictions were manifested in the tying of doctoral students, and their education, to their supervisors’ research projects, grants and future prospects, and in students being deprived of opportunities for learning and developing independence. Supervisors were torn between supervision and project management while doctoral students had to balance being students and project members. Our analysis provides a system level explanation to previously reported pedagogical and ethical challenges in STEM doctoral education.

At the present conjuncture of political, economic, social, and ecological crises, it is important to pay attention to the ways in which intensifying demands for equality, sustainability and social inclusion are met in education policy. In this article, we present results from a critical discourse analysis of an EU council recommendation on 'microcredentials' - credits for short courses primarily oriented towards the attainment of skills. Through our analysis, we identify a set of discursive techniques that use progressive language in order to depoliticize issues of social inequality and protect a fundamentally neoliberal and market -oriented agenda from being contested. We conclude that the linguistic expressions used in the operationalization of these techniques have the capacity to 'bling' the argumentation for microcredentials - making invisible an underlying neoliberal foundation and hypervisible an apolitical and consensus -oriented surface, thereby preventing disagreements over aspects of education that are fundamentally political.

I denna forskningsöversikt kartläggs svenskproducerad och kvalitetsgranskad forskning om svensk forskarutbildning i syfte att illustrera forskningsfältets fysiska och vetenskapliga formering 2000–2020. Databasen Swepub användes för att identifiera licentiatavhandlingar, doktorsavhandlingar och refereegranskade artiklar som sedan analyserades med deskriptiv statistik och tematisk analys. Fältets fysiska formering består av totalt 122 publikationer, varav 14 avhandlingar och 108 artiklar som publicerats i 71 tidskrifter. Generellt är den geografiska och institutionella/disciplinära spridningen mycket stor, och majoriteten av förstaförfattarna är kvinnor (64 %). I fältets vetenskapliga formering dominerar kvalitativ metodik (70 %) och innehållsmässigt har forskarutbildningen studerats som (1) Pedagogisk verksamhet, (2) System och tillvaro, (3) Icke-traditionell kunskapsmiljö, (4) Könad och kulturell miljö, (5) Karriärmöjlighet eller (6) Vetenskaplig produktion. Resultatet visar även att doktoranders (forskar)karriärer respektive forskarutbildningens icke-traditionella kunskapsmiljöer betonas alltmera efter 2015. I diskussionen lyfts hur forskningen följer utbildningspolitikens och forskningspolitikens olika agendor över tid. Från att forskningen tidigare primärt har närmat sig forskarutbildningen som ”utbildning” i samklang med utbildningspolitikens växande krav på kvalitet har det nu blivit allt vanligare att närma sig forskarutbildningen som gränsyta för ”forskning” och ”samverkan” – i linje med forskningspolitikens ökade krav på excellent forskning, tvärvetenskap och samhällsnytta under 2000-talets andra decennium.

Sweden aspires to become ‘the best in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitalization’ and is internationally recognized for its digital performance. Education has been identified as instrumental for the digital transformation of Swedish society, and efforts are made to accelerate the digitalization of the educational system. As governments’ demands for digitalization get increasingly loud and persuasive, it is important to critically explore what values and ideologies are embedded in the argumentation. In this study, we use Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the Swedish Digitalization Commission’s report ‘For digitalization with the times’. Our results demonstrate that the policy argumentation, despite being anchored in traditional Swedish welfare values, is characterized by a coherent and reductionist neoliberal framing of education. Students are represented as self-managing entrepreneurial citizens with a moral obligation to renew their human capital and adapt to market demands, while the educational system is constructed as a flexible, largely automated, infrastructure for ‘life-long learning’, in which teaching is reduced to ‘facilitating’. We suggest that such discourses around education in Swedish policy rest upon three preconditions: digitalization as an interconnective policy object, Swedish digitalization policy making as soft governance, and the Swedish welfare model as susceptible to discursive drift.

This study aims at exploring multimodal discursive images of academic teachers from 1950 and 1980 in Sweden. Using a discourse-historical approach, linguistic and visual data were analysed in a government report and three media sources related to a single Swedish university. Findings reveal how four dominant ideologies of academic teaching contributed to constructing eight discursive images of teachers via various stakeholders. Overall, a discursive degradation of academic teachers could be noticed between 1950 and 1980. Also, the image of teachers changed from societal critics in 1950 to political critics in 1980, when the government forced scholars to become all-round labourers processing the new mass of students. In turn, this led to an undecided debate about the scholarly role of teaching researchers. Throughout the material, female academics were almost invisible, and a feminist voice was absent. The image of academic teaching is a gendered issue that deserves further attention.

The Nordic doctorate has its roots in the Germanic Bildung-tradition, with a decentralised and discipline-oriented curriculum, local and individualised leadership and autonomous supervisors. Currently, the Nordic doctorate has arrived at a crossroads where it is pulled in two different directions. The first characterised by formalisation and centralised Graduate Schools with study directors, middle-management and educational bureaucracy, and an increasingly generic curriculum. The second characterised by the projectification of academic work through new modes of governance on national and EU-level. The double pull threatens to create a ‘torn curriculum’, where curricular planning, formal requirements, and supervision and community support are not aligned, which confuses and fragments the learning journey and the PhD-degree. We argue that a new way is needed, which lies not in choosing either tradition, but to form a societally oriented, community anchored, and at the same time highly specialised and research-driven doctorate. (Less)

In this session, we will describe how Lund University’s courses for doctoral supervisors have evolved over time and how they have been key for learning and development on the individual, collective and organisational level. The courses provide a unique arena that allows supervisors to share and investigate experiences, practices and circumstances that normally are hidden, sometimes deep within departments and research groups. Course participants’ investigations are used and developed further in subsequent courses and enduring patterns have provided starting points for the course facilitators’ own research. As a result, a cumulative and highly contextualised body of knowledge has materialised and over time replaced much of the traditional “generic” content. In parallel, local and national networks and conferences on doctoral supervision have emerged, and both course participants and facilitators have published their research. In some instances, supervisor courses have become deeply integrated with doctoral education, quality work and faculty strategies. Additional Information

Den vanligaste formen av forskarutbildning i Sverige innebar att doktorand och handledare forskar och publicerar tillsammans inom ett projekt som utformats av handledaren. Forskningsprojektet och doktorandens studiefinansiering bekostas oftast med handledarens forskningsmedel. Dessa omstandigheter forekommer framforallt inom medicin, naturvetenskap och teknik men aterfinns allt oftare inom andra omraden, som konsekvens av bland annat de krav om full studiefinansiering som infordes i Hogskoleforordningen 1998 samt att forskning och forskarutbildning genom svensk forskningspolitik i okande grad finansieras med externa forskningsmedel vunna i konkurrens. Granserna mellan utbildning och forskning respektive handledarskap och projektledarskap ar i dessa utbildningssammanhang diffusa eller upplosta vilket kan vara bade positivt och negativt for utbildningen och doktoranden. A ena sidan ar doktorandens arbete av stor vikt for handledarna och ovriga inom forskningsgemenskapen och doktoranden kan gradvis skolas in i forskarrollen inom ett projekt som sannolikt bade ar av hog kvalitet och har goda utsikter att lyckas. A andra sidan innebar placeringen inom forskningen att utbildningens och doktorandens behov riskerar att komma i skymundan for andra prioriteringar och mal, vilket kan hamma doktorandens utveckling till sjalvstandig forskare. Vi bedriver sedan en tid ett forskningsprojekt om forskarutbildningen och handledningen vid Medicinska fakulteten vid Lunds universitet. I likhet med andra medicinska fakulteter i landet, har har en mycket stor forskarutbildningsverksamhet (ca 1200 doktorander) byggts upp med hjalp av extern forskningsfinansiering och vi ar intresserade av hur denna omstandighet paverkar forskarutbildningen. Vara data bestar av oppet tillganglig information om fakulteten, dess forskning och forskarutbildningen, regler och riktlinjer, samt intervjuer med handledare, doktorander samt ansvariga for forskarutbildningen. Vi anlagger ett systemperspektiv och anvander aktivitetsteori (Engestrom, 1987) som ramverk for var analys, som bland annat sker genom deduktiv kvalitativ innehallsanalys (Elo & Kyngas, 2008). I denna presentation kommer vi att redogora for resultat kopplade till handledarintervjuerna. Handledarnas huvudsakliga fokus (objekt) ar doktorandernas forskning men denna tillskrivs olika innebord och ses som medel antingen for handledarens egen forskningsproduktion och akademiska avancemang, for det lokala forskningsfaltets och forskningsgemenskapens utveckling och regenerering, eller for larande och kvalitetssakring inom utbildningen. Doktoranden beskrivs som en allt mer sjalvgaende arbetare inom forskningsproduktionen, en junior medforskare som bidrar till projektets design och utveckling och som gradvis forvantas overta ansvaret, eller en student som skall lara sig att forska genom att delta i forskningsprocessen med stod av handledning och utbildningsinslag. Handledarna ger ocksa en varierande bild av vilka inslag i forskningsprocessen (verktyg) doktoranden ges tilltrade till och inflytande over. Aktivitetsteorins regelelement aterfinns dels i form av formella regler och riktlinjer relaterade till utbildningsregleringen och dels som tvingande omstandigheter och villkor inom forskningen. Det finns flera exempel pa hur de forsta reglerna anpassats efter de sistnamnda.Vara preliminara resultat visar flera exempel pa spanningar, motsattningar och anpassningar inom forskarutbildningen vilka kan relateras till forskningens forandrade villkor. Flera av dessa ar problematiska och vi menar att de senaste decenniernas forskningspolitik innebar en stor utmaning for forskarutbildningen med potentiella konsekvenser for den framtida akademin och for forskningen sjalv. (Less)

Detta ar en efterlangtad bok som bidrar till utveckling av forskarhandledares kompetens och ger ett fordjupat perspektiv pa doktoranders larande. Med forankring i aktuell forskning behandlar forfattarna forskarutbildningens organisation, handledarens professionella praktik, doktorandens larande samt utbildningens kvalitetssystem. Kopplingen mellan teori och praktik utgor en rod trad genom boken. Med autentiska fall och exempel fran olika utbildningsmiljoer tydliggors hur handledningen villkoras av bade individuella och kulturella faktorer. Dessutom bjuder boken pa manga reflektionsuppgifter som kan hjalpa tankandet framat, bade enskilt och kollegialt. Boken riktar sig framst till handledare pa forskarutbildningsniva, oavsett amnesomrade och tidigare erfarenhet. Den kan med fordel lasas aven av doktorander som ar intresserade av att forsta sitt larande och vad som forvantas av dem i utbildningen, samt av utbildningsansvariga som vill starka utbildningens kvalitet. (Less)