This study investigates the motivations and occupational aspirations of students enrolled in Swedish Higher Vocational Education programmes for the brewing industry. Drawing on narrative interviews with 24 participants aged 25–66, the research explores how personal interests, career trajectories, and structural conditions intersect in shaping vocational choices. The analysis identifies three dominant motivations for enrolment: (1) seeking new occupational opportunities following unemployment or fragmented work histories, (2) pursuing mid-career transitions prompted by dissatisfaction, burnout, or physical strain, and (3) engaging in brewing as a craft or artistic endeavour motivated by personal interest and creativity. Findings highlight the multiple functions of vocational education, serving not only as a route to employment but also as a platform for career reinvention, entrepreneurial experimentation, and personal fulfilment. The study underscores the interplay between individual agency and structural factors in occupational decision-making and contributes to understanding the role of vocational education in emerging industries.

Little attention has been paid to adults pursuing online education at the upper secondary level. The aim of this article is to identify and describe predictors of presence, academic achievement, and satisfaction in online upper secondary education for adults. The study is grounded in the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, which is based on three types of presence: teaching presence (TP), social presence (SP), and cognitive presence (CP). A survey was administered to adults who had completed, or were close to completing, an online upper secondary-level course in Sweden, yielding 672 responses. An exploratory factor analysis showed that items from the CP and TP constructs related to peer interaction and teacher guidance loaded onto the SP construct instead. Accordingly, the factors were labeled as individual TP (iTP), extended SP (eSP), and individual CP (iCP) to describe how the CoI framework is manifested in this context, characterized by substantial individual study and varying opportunities for social interaction. Multiple regression models explained a substantial proportion of the variance in iTP (adjusted R2 = .58), eSP (adjusted R2 = .68), and satisfaction (adjusted R2 = .53), a more moderate proportion in iCP (adjusted R2 = .36) and only a small proportion for academic achievement (adjusted R2 = .13). Academic achievement was primarily associated with iCP (beta = .38), whereas student satisfaction was primarily associated with iTP (beta = .58). Key predictors included course introductions related to studying and technology, tutoring, synchronous online teaching, and collaborative course design.

This study scrutinises the shaping and discursive effects of care in preschool teacher education textbooks in Sweden. Drawing on a poststructural approach, regularities of description were analysed, deepening our understanding of how textbooks shape ideas about preschool care practices and preschool teacher professionalism, and how these processes are informed by dominant discourses operating in this field. The study shows how three dominant regularities emerge in the shaping of preschool care: how it is shaped as existing in its own right; how it is shaped through system criticism; and how it is shaped as a societal benefit, aligning with neoliberal views. The study shows how predominant discourses dictate the conditions for preschool care to be shaped, but it also shows possibilities for resistance.

This study explores how and why teachers in municipal adult education (MAE) in Sweden use curriculum documents in their teaching and what this reveal about the underlying purposes of MAE. The study draws on mixed-methods data, including a survey completed by 1,321 MAE teachers and follow-up interviews with 63 teachers across different subjects and educational levels. The results showed that teachers when describing the most important objectives of education emphasized purposes with links to socialization and subjectification rather than qualification. However, the purposes that teachers described as permeating the actual educational practices were the reverse, i.e. qualification dominated other purposes. This gap, this study suggests, stems from an arrangement of specific frame factors, namely (i) time (ii) student group composition (iii) teaching materials and (iv) market organization. These structural conditions steer teachers toward lower-level curriculum documents, limiting opportunities to engage with higher-level documents and purposes such as socialization and subjectification. The findings highlight how interrelated institutional and organizational frames shape teaching practices in MAE, reinforcing qualification-oriented approaches despite teachers' broader educational aspirations. It also demonstrates how previously identified frame factors can influence one another, offering insights into the challenges of balancing educational purposes in adult learning contexts.

In this article we investigate the implications of a market orientation of adult education for teachers' work with the curriculum and for the goals and purposes of education. By focusing on municipal adult education (MAE) in Sweden, we provide a unique case. Firstly, Sweden has one of the most market oriented systems in the world, and secondly, the market orientation of adult education is not well researched in Sweden nor elsewhere, thus providing strong empirical ground contributing to the wider international discussion. Drawing on Bernstein's concept "pedagogic code" we analyse interviews with 63 teachers within MAE. Our analysis illustrates how the market steering leads to conflicts between goals stated in the curriculum and goals that emerge from a market-oriented code narrowing the aim of MAE, isolating it from broader goals such as being compensatory and meeting the needs of students replacing them with goals such as profit-making and competition.

In public discourse, the social inclusion of migrants is often regarded as a challenge demanding migrants to increase their engagement in adapting to the new host country. Such imaginaries commonly declare migrants as being unwilling to acquire language skills and specific cultural values. In parallel, formal education is often proposed as the single most important remedy to inclusion, which generally solely implies labor market participation. However, there is a range of other, often neglected, practices that migrants themselves regard as important for their social inclusion in society. This article aims to analyze what practices are assigned meaning by newly arrived migrants in Sweden on their path toward social inclusion in the country. This is a longitudinal interview study with 19 newly arrived adult migrants that were interviewed on two occasions, three years apart. Drawing on a sociocultural perspective, we understand social inclusion as an ongoing process by which individuals become members of different communities. The result shows that important for social inclusion is access to valuable relationships and close social ties. These relations are important in all communities in which the migrants participate. The analysis illustrates three different communities, outside of formal education and employment, that migrants ascribe meaning to concerning language learning and social inclusion. These communities are sports, internships, and civil society engagements. Through its longitudinal design, this study also illustrates how migrants’ narratives and their meanings shift with time and how migrants relate to these communities over time.

In this thematic issue, we present up‐to‐date research from authors who problematise the various links between adult migrants’ language learning, education, the labour market, and social inclusion. Some contributions are more focused on the relation between education and social inclusion, while others emphasise links between language learning, the labour market, and social inclusion. Together, authors in this thematic issue point to the multiple challenges migrants face when trying to establish themselves in a new country.

In this chapter, we focus on the role of lifelong learning for the inclusion of migrants. We are specifically interested to understand how a country such as Sweden, with a long tradition of lifelong learning, creates conditions for inclusion of migrants at a time when major policy changes seriously challenge the historical foundations of the system itself. Our results indicate that a strong will for inclusion among participants and a strong will among teachers and circle leaders to support such wishes are important conditions for the inclusion of migrants. At the same time, there are conditions hindering inclusion such as overly-strong demands for the level of language knowledge needed, the responsibilization of migrants in terms of learning the language, participants’ previous educational and social background, as well as the challenges for migrants to get to know Swedes. These findings are discussed in relation to policy changes in Sweden as well as the other Nordic countries, where there has been a move toward more restrictive migration politics as well as increased market orientation of adult education. We argue that the historical legacy of adult education in Sweden and the current strong state support are important factors that manage to partly counter the current policy shifts.

In this chapter, we explore what kinds of research themes on lifelong learning have been salient in a selection of peer-review journals written in the English language throughout the last half-century. We draw on large-scale text mining techniques to identify 15 latent topics that have been the most prevalent within academic journals and trace how the semantic composition has changed in character over time. Based on this topic model analysis of metadata from 4561 articles, we show how the research field of lifelong learning hinge on broad distinctions between education and work, quantitative and qualitative research paradigms, as well as encompassing more fine-grained research clusters within this broader frame. We conclude by arguing that research on lifelong learning has undergone substantial changes since the 1980s, especially with regard to adult education that has lost its former role as the center of gravity with increased attention being directed toward learning within higher education as well as in relation to workplaces.

The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisited from time to time. Not only is this line of research approached from a multitude of academic disciplines - such as sociology, psychology or philosophy - the very concepts that are used to denote the field also undergo important changes over time, e.g. from lifelong education to lifelong learning. In this contribution, we will explore this rather elusive research territory using a large-scale text analysis of a specific scientific journal, International Journal of Lifelong Education, based on meta-data (abstracts, keywords and titles) from 1,185 articles published between 1982 to 2021. Based on topic modelling techniques, we identify the main themes that have been prevalent within the journal, and how the journal's content has changed character over time. We end the paper with a more critical examination of what kind of political and scientific currents might help explain what has led research practices to be more descriptive, micro-oriented and work-related over time.

In this article, we direct our focus on some of the recent activities undertaken by popular education institutions in Sweden in relation to the refugee challenge in 2015. The aim is to analyse how these popular education activities are shaped as specific communities of practice, through the ways they are described by those who organised these, and what meaning newly arrived refugees create regarding their participation in these practices. Drawing on a socio-cultural understanding of participation and learning, we analyse interviews with newly arrived refugees, principals, managers, teachers and study circle leaders. Our analysis illustrates how popular education emerge as specific communities of practice different compared to the regular education system; how these practices are shaped as practices of stability and learning; and how newly arrived refugees construe these practices as important in their current engagement across a range of communities in the role as newcomers.

Popular education has a long history in Sweden, dating back to the mid-1800s and having developed in close relationship with the state. This relationship has been sustained over the years by the way popular education is spoken of as being “unique”—as being complementary to formal education. In this article, we focus on how the uniqueness of popular education is shaped today, and how it operates to legitimize further support. We draw on Barthes’ notion of myth, analyzing interviews with managers, principals, study circle leaders and teachers working with adult asylum seekers and refugees at study associations and folk high schools. We argue that the myth of the uniqueness of popular education is made up of three rhetorical figures that are mobilized by a range of actors legitimizing state support for popular education. The myth thus becomes a “tool” that commodifies popular education, that is, that turns the myth into monetary funds.

Despite previous critical studies on the method, Suggestopedia has re-emerged as a popular method for second language teaching and learning in Sweden. In this article, we focus on what characterises Suggestopedia teaching in Swedish as a second language for adult migrants. Taking a sociocultural perspective, specifically regarding the concepts of mediation, artefacts and scaffolding, we analyse teaching observations and interviews with teachers and students in four classes. The analysis reveals the existence of several mediational mechanisms, in terms of e.g. different visual, aural and fictive artefacts, as well as of scaffolding through a certain sequencing of tasks and mediational texts to help students learn Swedish. Although Suggestopedia as an approach serves to facilitate the students' learning in many ways, greater attention can be paid to the students' experiences when conducting the lessons.

Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much current research presupposes causal links between the degree of privatisation and issues of competition and student’s free choice, we see a need for research on other ways of organising the presence of private providers in public education. In this article, we study how two Swedish municipalities use public procurement to contract private providers and organise adult education. Interestingly, we find that competition is more heavily at play in the municipality that outsources half of its adult education, than in the municipality that outsources all adult education. We view these findings as vital for understanding how education is being outsourced to private providers and for furthering the discussion on the consequences of the ongoing privatisation of education.