The aim of this study was to explore, analyse, and critically discuss conditions for Swedish ICT coordinators working on school digitalisation in a local municipal school context. More specifically, the study draws on findings from interviews with 13 Swedish information and communication technology (ICT) coordinators working in eight municipalities that have adopted two contrasting approaches to school digitalisation. One is a general approach with a strong element of individual within-school accountability in the work, and the other a specific approach in which such work is addressed more as an organisational process with involvement of municipal governing officials. Findings show that the two approaches set different conditions in terms of how and with whom the ICT coordinators work and the foci of their efforts although both are framed by the same national educational policy. A conclusion is that the ICT coordinators’ role, function, and responsibility should be considered in parity to the level of support, in-school resources, and mandate given to them, not least when organisational instability and reorganisations hamper the work in progress.

This study explores practitioners’ beliefs and experiences of education, socialisation and care and their impact on the introduction of a software application for quality work in early childhood education. Based on field notes, audio recordings and follow-up semi-structured interviews in four Swedish preschools, it explores how teachers’ beliefs and experiences frame and are framed by the introduction of a software application by an EdTech company. The findings show that preschool teachers perceived the software as disruptive to their established beliefs and practices, despite efforts to align it with the preschool curriculum’s goals. It also highlights the challenges that practitioners faced in understanding and implementing the software, the importance of peer discussions and time for reflection. The study’s conclusions emphasise the importance of a thorough introduction, peer support and opportunities for reflection when introducing software in preschool settings. It also stresses the need to align software implementation with practitioners’ beliefs and experiences to facilitate a successful adoption. In addition, the study highlights the role of ongoing professional development in managing technological change in early childhood education.

This chapter focuses on a local school development project initiated by teachers who experienced students' lack of engagement, passive learning, and absence from school. In order to achieve more active learning among the students, the teachers built an active learning classroom and set out to develop teaching methods appropriate for the new classroom. This process turned out to be more complex than expected and raised questions not only about the teachers' teaching, but also about their learning and more specifically about how they as a collective created transformative agency. In this chapter, we highlight how the teachers gained transformative agency and the situations that characterized this process. Inspired by cultural historical activity theory, we pay attention to stimuli that helped the teachers to bring forth and deal with conflicts of motives that led to break-outs from the teacher-centered teaching and thereby created transformative agency toward a classroom practice characterized by students' active learning.

This study explores teachers' practice and aims to understand the complexity of and the difference between teacher-centred teaching and student-centred learning in the one-to-one computing classroom. Generally, prior research has examined moving from teacher-centred teaching to student-centred learning. Here, we scrutinise one-to-one computing practices in Grades 1–6 in Finland by analysing how power and control emerge from the way teachers organise the physical classroom and communicate in practice. We target variations in practical classroom orchestration as well as in how teachers reason about their practice. A mixed-method analysis was conducted in two phases, including 15 classroom observations and subsequent teacher interviews. First, a quantitative analysis displayed three clusters of ways teachers distributed power and control in their classroom orchestration. Second, the clusters were integrated in a qualitative analysis of the interviews. The findings show that the variations of teacher practice depended on their beliefs and higher-order learning goals related student autonomy in the use of material resources. It also showed a variation in the way teachers scaffolded students’ individual work and created collaborative learning opportunities. In the one-to-one computing classroom, this emerges from issues that teachers can control inside school regarding the use and organisation of material resources. However, another factor that made teachers adapt their practice was the integration of heterogeneous student groups into their classrooms.

Although many studies have investigated teaching in one-to-one computing classrooms, not many have considered the material dimension as equally important to the human dimension. Thus, by using a sociomaterial perspective, we aim to broaden the discussion about emergent teaching practices in Nordic classrooms where students use tablets as personal devices. We therefore provide three vignettes from ethnographic classroom studies in Sweden, Finland and Denmark. These illustrate how tablets were used in specific classrooms. In our qualitative analysis of the vignettes, we draw on the concept of patterns of relations to describe the dynamic entanglements of the emergent teaching and learning practices. These are patterns of 1) interrogation, 2) spacemaking and 3) materialisation. Our findings show that tablets do not enter empty learning spaces but are woven into and participate in forming ways of teaching in one-to-one classrooms. Teachers must therefore learn to engage with and manage complex relationships rather than learn how to use an iPad.

This study highlights how 20 Swedish principals, school managers and architects involved in planning, construction and reconstruction of primary and secondary school buildings at regional, municipal and local levels represent good learning environments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, the analysis focuses on how the stakeholders understand the physical, pedagogical and social aspects of learning environments, including the power relations and principles of control that are embedded in their understandings. The findings indicate two orientations when the interviewees discuss good learning environment, an orientation towards clearer boundaries and control in physical, pedagogical and social spaces (strong classification and framing), and an orientation towards weaker boundaries and control (weak classification and framing). The first orientation is directed towards what, in previous research and policy discourses, is described as traditional school design, whereas the second rejects some basic principles of traditional school design and aligns with what is commonly described as innovative school design.

This participatory design-based research study addresses the relational character of the physical learning environment and pedagogical practice in the context of a design project carried out at a Swedish upper secondary school. Three teachers initiated the project with the intent to introduce student centred pedagogy and increase active learning. In collaboration with the research team, they designed and furnished a classroom supportive for communication and intense interaction between students, and where students and teachers could work and construct knowledge together. Drawing on observations, video recordings and design conversations with the teachers, the analysis, which is inspired by Actor Network Theory, concentrates on the six month period when the teachers started to teach in the new classroom with focus on their experiences, asking what they experienced as advantageous and challenging. Considering the new learning environment as a network of socio-material relations consisting of a) physical and spatial agents, b) organisational structural agents, and c) teacher/teaching agents, we conclude that whereas some actors corresponded well and contributed to a well-coordinated classroom practice facilitating the project's intentions, some actors contradicted each other and challenged the same intentions.

This paper reports on a research and development project based upon problems in upper secondary school, namely students’lack of engagement, passive learning and students’ absence from school. Looking to solve this problem, a group of

This paper reports on a case study of a school development project in a Swedish upper secondary school. The project initiators (three teachers), wanted to change their teaching towards student acti ...

This study provides new insights into Swedish teachers' didactical designs when handling two contemporary challenges regarding the new national curriculum and the increasing digitalisation of schools through one-to-one computing initiatives. The research questions consider how teachers organise physical and digital resources in their classrooms as well as variations in teachers' pedagogical communication. From a study of 23 one-to-one computing classrooms (using tablets), some ethnographic-inspired methods were applied based on classroom observation and recordings of teachers' teaching. The findings show two distinct forms of teachers' classroom organisation that indicate different didactical designs used by teachers to integrate one-to-one computing into the classroom. Variations in teaching resulted in a shift of symbolic power and control from teachers to students, which exploit the potential of using one-to-one computing in the classroom.

This paper reports on teacher practices in tablet-based Finnish one-to-one computing classrooms in grades 7-9. The aim of this study was to increase the understanding of teacher practices by illustrating and analysing the relations of power and control in Finnish teachers' one-to-one computing classrooms. The study applied methods based on classroom observations, photographs and audio recordings of the teachers' communication. Within the context of this study, the results indicate two theoretically distinct, but varying, forms of teaching practice. These teaching practices demonstrate contrasts with regard to how the classroom spaces were organised, including one-to-one computing, as well as the teacher-enacted communication with students. Based on how power and control either was retained by the teachers or distributed to the students, this paper highlight how different meanings were constructed in student learning.

This paper reports on a study about teachers’ practice in one-to-one computing classrooms in Social Studies in upper secondary school. In the study, two teachers were followed in their daily practi ...

This paper reports on a research study conducted with a group of nurses in Sweden enrolled in a newly developed blended learning master's programme to become advanced practice nurses (APNs). As background, the paper presents the regional needs the programme is intended to address and describes how the programme was designed. The aim was to understand how, from students' perspective, the nurse master's programme structured knowledge for their future position as APNs. The research question focuses on how the master's programme prepares students by meeting their diverse needs for knowledge. Empirical material was collected at two times during the students' first and second years of study through semi-structured qualitative interviews. The findings highlight the process in which these master's students gained a more advanced identity of becoming APNs. This process demonstrates how students perceive their current position as nurses based on a discourse of knowledge in relation to the practical and theoretical knowledge they encounter in the master's programme. This article concludes by recommending that attention should be paid to developing APN role models in the current Swedish healthcare system.

This paper reports on a research study that scrutinised the student perspective on teachers’ different didactical designs from lessons in the one-to-one computing classroom. Specifically, the aim was to describe and understand three different clusters of didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom from the student perspective. Each of the three clusters represents different interactions between teachers and students. The research questions embrace how the teachers or students, through the didactical design, will have an advantage over the other. The empirical material was based on student focus groups interviews, enhanced through the method of stimulated recall where different photographs of teaching and learning situations from the one-to-one computing classroom were shown to the students. The results demonstrate three empirical themes: students’ learning in class, students’ learning outside class, and classroom assessment. From a theoretical lens of power and control, the students’ reasoning demonstrates approaches to how teachers regulate students and to how students can make decisions in their learning process. For handling students’ demands, specifically in pedagogical plans, the one-to-one computing classroom becomes one component for making students’ learning processes smoother regarding when to study and how to study.

This paper reports on a research study about principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of schools within established tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives. The aim was to investigate how principals lead and guide one-to-one computing initiatives in K–12 education. The research questions focused on principals’ expressed intentions and their strategic leadership and organisation when implementing tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives in Swedish schools. The empirical material was collected through semi-structured interviews with seven principals in five municipalities where the schools had used tablets for more than six months within a one-to-one computing initiative. The findings are organised by themes concerning one-to-one computing as a strategy to change teaching and working methods, using technology for adapting teaching and learning to every pupil’s needs, and strategies for organisation. The findings show that marketisation of schools (e.g. the school-choice reform) in combination with the annual presentation of national rankings have had an impact on the financial situations of schools because they receive a voucher for every attending pupil. The participating principals’ strategic leadership concerning their intentions and applied strategies on how to lead and organise the digitalised school are an attempt to meet the demands that the marketisation and digitalisation of Swedish schools requires.

Research question and theoryThis study is part of a larger Nordic research project, including a series of substudies with a common research objective of examining teachers’ didactical design in one ...

A.I.D.A. the digital receptionist – An Artificial Intelligent Assistant solution for Dental HealthcareSwedish dental healthcare is facing several challenges that are shared with the rest of the wes ...

In this research, the design of teaching and learning with web-enabled technologies, such as iPads, in 64 one-to-one (1:1) Nordic classrooms was explored using the Digital Didactical Design (DDD) framework. DDD focuses on both teachers' activities and students’ learning activities in the classroom and how web-enabled technologies are integrated into teaching, learning, and assessment. Semi-structured classroom observations were conducted to investigate how teachers apply the elements of DDD in their classroom practice, and what kinds of learning they support. The analysis resulted in three clusters: Cluster A demonstrates integration and alignment toward meaningful learning; Cluster B shows the potential for deep learning but a semi-alignment of teaching, learning, assessment, roles, and technology; and Cluster C indicates non-integration of the five elements. The findings point out that tablet integration needs the alignment of all five DDD elements to achieve meaningful learning. Pedagogy has to evolve to include new uses of the technology: it is a co-evolutionary growth of the five DDD elements together. DDD can be used by teachers for planning, self-assessment or reflective collaboration with peers and by schools to plan, document, evaluate, and rethink the interwoven pedagogy-technology relationship in tablet classrooms.

This paper reports on the first year of a two-year study in Finland about Finnish teachers didactical design in one-to-one (1:1) tablet classrooms. In it's simplest form 1:1 means that each student ...