D Beach
Biographic Data
| ID | 41642 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Beach |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Beach |
| SIGNATURE | BEACH D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gothenburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5970-5556 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 148 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Sweden’s just education reforms: Perpetuating cultural domination
Using political text analysis and meta-ethnography, this article develops an immanent criticism of Sweden’s education reforms from 1940 onwards from the perspective of two main goals of education justice and equality. Addressing political texts and ethnographic research, it identifies a discourse of just reform but also material conditions that contradict the realisation of this discourse in terms of fostering an inclusive and equitable society. …
Teaching for Community Sustainability: Opportunities and Limitations as Seen from a Cross-analysis of Teachers Teaching in Schools in Rural Areas in Spain and Sweden
Education policy is always at risk of working at cross-purposes toward education goals. Using a meta-ethnographic methodology and Massey’s geometry of space theory, the present article addresses this in relation to a particular policy realisation problem of teaching for sustainability in schools in depopulated rural areas with identified population challenges. Specific attention has gone to research addressing the enacted curriculum and teachers’…
Schooling for integration? Reception of refugees in discourse and practice in Swedish rural municipalities 2015–2022
This study explores the integration of migrants in education and the labour market from the perspectives of professionals working with young migrants in Swedish rural municipalities. It compares interview data referring to the situation during the refugee crisis in 2015 with data referring to the period 2019–2022. It addresses the organisation of teaching, how professionals talked about integration in relation to the local labour market and how i…
Why initial teacher education does not prepare preservice teachers well for inclusive education
Global education policies make a commitment to inclusive education, yet initial teacher education seems to struggle in preparing teachers for this task. We explore this matter in the present article. Life stories, participant observation and individual interviews over a period of two years with 28 preservice specialist teachers in an ongoing ethnographic study provide the data. The findings describe the presence of hegemonic ways of thinking, inf…
The myth of community value: The enacted curriculum function in schools in rural communities in Spain
Using meta-ethnographic synthesis, the present article asks if schools in rural areas fulfil an educational function in the interests of rural community sustainability. It identifies some positive features and causal mechanisms, but also some conditions that seem to be destructive towards this function. They appear to be due to decentralisation, school choice and market accountability (i.e. commodification) encouraging school leaders and teachers…
Educational stakeholders’ perspectives on educational transitions and future careers for young refugees in rural areas undergoing depopulation
There are high hopes that young refugees will help to counter population decline in Sweden’s rural areas. However, there is a need to better understand the factors and processes that facilitate or hinder their persistent integration and continued presence (including further education and work preparation). This article therefore explores the prevailing refugee reception practices and their consequences during and after the major refugee wave in S…
The SEN industry and teachers’ CPD: Ideal elements of teaching and enabling arrangements
In this study, we explored the special educational needs (SEN) industry in relation to teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) by analysing invoices generated by CPD providers in Sweden. Guided by the theory of practice architectures (TPA), we examined the characteristics of the offered SEN content, focusing on the implied elements of ideal teaching practices and the arrangements that have led to SEN becoming a key component of the te…
Troubling rurality and rural schooling: A qualitative meta-synthesis of research in rural schools in three European national school systems
This qualitative meta-synthesis collects and analyses the multiple and many-faceted understandings, experiences, practices, and school to community or individual relationships described in qualitative research on rural education and schooling in three European national contexts (Sweden, Northern Ireland, and Spain). Our aim was to generate and present a simplifying analytic synthesising narrative about the politics, practices and outcomes for and…
Engineering comments in doctoral student appointments: Biased fabrications and revolving door governance practices in STEM subjects seen from gender equity and academic justice perspectives
This article derives from ongoing higher education governance research in Sweden using a mix of ethnographic methodologies and data to explore and analyse patterns of gender and class inequality and injustice. The article has very specific data comprising two STEM doctoral appointment procedures together and uses a particular methodology called Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA). It raises questions relating to potential discrimination and injust…
Researching in solidarity with marginalised groups: A meta-ethnography about research for educational justice and social transformation
This article uses meta-ethnography to identify the challenges of working in solidarity with the experiences and interests of marginalised and exploited social groups.It focuses on what the main challenges seem to be, and on how to overcome them in struggles to change education in just directions by means of educational research.It is therefore a paper of interest from a methodological and a research political perspective relating to how critical …
Sense of place in providers’ perspectives of school placement policies in relation to refugee settlement in rural Sweden
Researching for justice: Using meta-ethnographic synthesis to develop knowledge for research for social transformation
In a special issue article on ethnographic synthesis from 2017, Karen Borgnakke addressed some of the challenging methodological questions and dilemmas associated with meta-ethnography by ethnographic researchers. The article compared meta-ethnography with evidence-based models for measuring learning effects in education, but highlighted that the founders of meta-ethnography, Noblit and Hare, described the methodology and its aims quite different…
Las escuelas rurales ante las políticas de mercado: Un análisis meta-etnográfico
La aplicación de políticas de mercado competitivas en diferentes contextos nacionales ha convertido las características geográficas, económicas y sociales de la ubicación de la escuela en un objeto de valor de mercado. Esto tiene efectos que pueden ser positivos o negativos en los discursos y prácticas de los maestros/as rurales sobre la participación de la familia y la comunidad. Utilizando un diseño metodológico meta-etnográfico, el objetivo de…
The domination and exploitation of working class values, identities and labour-power in Sweden’s comprehensive school extension and neo-liberal market reforms
Questions about Sweden’s education system often consider the extent to which educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 contributed to social justice, equity and equality, and the extent to which neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards have reversed this tendency. Using Young’s model of structural injustice, Wodak’s critical discourse analysis, and a historical materialist research outcomes analysis relating to investigations of edu…
On Developments in Ethnographic Research: The Case of Two Swedish Universities
The past 40 years have formed a transitional period in Sweden's education and political history. The social democratic reforms from the 1940s that aimed to create a centralised, expanded and integrated comprehensive education system came to an end. Decentralisation, neoliberal governance and the introduction of new public management with the creation of private schools and competition have shaped the policy regime since then. Ethnography emerged …
Critical Ethnographies of Education and for Social and Educational Transformation: A Meta-Ethnography
In a 2016 special issue on the relationships between ethnography of education and social, economic, and material precarity, Geoff Bright and John Smyth were critical of ethnographic researchers, for concentrating on discourses and discourse production only, rather than on material conditions to develop activism and processes of transformation against oppression. Instead of only identifying and critiquing precarity, and deconstructing taken-for-gr…
Teacher Educators in Neoliberal Times: A Phenomenological Self-Study
In Sweden, and most Western countries, pervasive neoliberal policies have dramatically transformed the entire education sector in a matter of decades. As teacher educators, we have experienced how neoliberal currents have pushed Swedish teacher education towards a teacher training paradigm which may risk undermining the foundations for professional judgement. Moreover, the Bologna Process and the introduction of New Public Management have had sig…
Introduction: Cultural sedimentations – ethnography on the materiality and historicity of aesthetic practices
The importance of materiality in learning and education processes has been emphasised in numerous empirical studies (e.g. Tervooren and Kreitz 2018) and theoretical argumentation (Thompson, Casale
Maybe one in a hundred or one in a thousand in the neoliberal, new-managerial university! Aesthetics of experience and the question of transgressive critical thinking
Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separate apparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples are categories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with such transgressions related to the evolution of class consciousness transgressive critical thinking. It is said to be particularly important and at risk in higher education today, as performativity refor…
Community and the education market: A cross-national comparative analysis of ethnographies of education inclusion and involvement in rural schools in Spain and Sweden
Ethnography, materiality, and the principle of symmetry: Problematising anthropocentrism and interactionism in the ethnography of education
In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces are as equally necessary as and possess an agency equivalent to, human forces: the principle of symmetr…
Stigmatisation, identity, and educational exclusion in postindustrial societies: A qualitative synthesis of research from UK, Germany, and the Nordic countries
From existing research, we know segregation in poverty-intensive and immigrant-dense suburban spaces cannot be easily dissociated from educational inequality and exclusion. Our aim in this paper is to explore the link between urban segregation, social deprivation, migration and education by bringing together the findings from several ethnographic studies conducted in Europe. The starting point for our discussion is the findings from one meta-ethn…
The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education
Access and stratification in Nordic higher education. A review of cross-cutting research themes and issues
The purpose of this review is to investigate cross-cutting research themes and issues related to access and stratification in Nordic higher education (H.E.) (Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden). We synthesise how recent changes in H.E. policy, practise, and appropriations have influenced educational opportunities along social class, gender and age. In this review we highlight results and conclusions shared by various recent Nordic studi…
Educational and spatial justice in rural and urban areas in three Nordic countries: A meta-ethnographic analysis
This article is based on a meta-ethnographic analysis of educational research from rural and urban areas in Finland, Norway and Sweden following the reorganisation of educational supply there in line with market policies. Edward Soja’s concept of spatial justice shapes the analysis. Using meta-ethnography, we try to present a contextualising narrative account of spatial justice and injustice in the education systems in the three countries. Thirty…
Community and the education market: A cross-national comparative analysis of ethnographies of education inclusion and involvement in rural schools in Spain and Sweden
Dividing academic work: Gender and academic career at Swedish universities
Recent changes within the higher education system have affected the balance of academic labour. This article is based on interviews with 25 women lecturers in Education Faculties at Swedish Universities. It specifically addresses the shifting balance in terms of the increased separation between teaching and research in relation to gender, and the relationship between career advancement and gender this promotes. Distinctions concerning gender and …
The Exploitation of Academic Work: Women in Teaching at Swedish Universities
Phenomenography - a "good-for-nothing brother" of phenomenology? Outline of an analysis
This article will argue that five different ways of doing phenomenography can be found amongst the works of Gothenburg phenomenographers: Discursive, Experimental, Naturalistic, Hermeneutic and Phenomenological. Commenting on an earlier version of phenomenography, Jacob Needleman stated that it was "a 'good-for-nothing' brother of phenomenology". We will argue that it is not. It is productive research, even if at times the degree of methodologica…
Identifying and comparing Scandinavian ethnography: Comparisons and influences
In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the volume of research production in education ethnography in Scandinavia due partly to a regionally financed network. The present article makes some comparisons between Scandinavian and other education research contexts in relation to aspects of general ethnographic design to try to analyse this production. It suggests some typical points of identity for Scandinavian educational ethnography…
Changing teacher education in Sweden: Using meta-ethnographic analysis to understand and describe policy making and educational changes
Institutional discrimination: Stereotypes and social reproduction of “class” in the Swedish upper-secondary school
From learning to labour to learning for marginality: School segregation and marginalization in Swedish suburbs
In this article, using data from ethnographic research, we try to present some glimpses of the way education is described as an experience and possibility ‘from below’, by pupils who grow up and study in schools in the most segregated and territorially stigmatized suburbs on the outskirts of our major cities. What we feel they describe is an experience of schooling for surviving the social and economic consequences of curtailed citizenship in a p…
Academic work on a back-burner: Habituating students in the upper-secondary school towards marginality and a life in the precariat
This article takes its point of departure in ethnographic data from what in Sweden is called the Individual Programme (IP). This programme was for upper-secondary school pupils who were not eligible for one of the country's academic or vocational programme. Its main formally expressed goal was to enable students to become eligible for these programmes. Our data show that this aim risks going unfulfilled as attending the kind of programme represen…
A Problem of Validity in Education Research
All forms of capitalism involve economic accumulation for one small group of individuals at the expense of others in processes that are therefore completely antithetical to equity and solidarity. For a sense of fairness to be maintained under these circumstances, strange things must happen to what are termed as common life values. They must begin to operate instrumentally according to principles of the market, where monetary forms of value predom…
Ethnography, materiality, and the principle of symmetry: Problematising anthropocentrism and interactionism in the ethnography of education
In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces are as equally necessary as and possess an agency equivalent to, human forces: the principle of symmetr…
Educational and spatial justice in rural and urban areas in three Nordic countries: A meta-ethnographic analysis
This article is based on a meta-ethnographic analysis of educational research from rural and urban areas in Finland, Norway and Sweden following the reorganisation of educational supply there in line with market policies. Edward Soja’s concept of spatial justice shapes the analysis. Using meta-ethnography, we try to present a contextualising narrative account of spatial justice and injustice in the education systems in the three countries. Thirty…
From learning to labour to learning for precarity
A demand on national economies in the 1970s was that they should begin to increase their labour market flexibility, which came to mean transferring risks and insecurity onto workers. Education was one way to prepare future workers for this new situation. The present article examines this preparation of learning for precarity some 40 years on. It is based on long-term ethnographic research in the Swedish upper-secondary school sector in particular…
Ethnographic investigations of issues of race in Scandinavian education research
In this article we aim to present an overview of some of the ways in which issues of race and ethnicity are represented and researched in educational ethnography in Scandinavia. Several things are suggested. Amongst them is that educational ethnographers in Scandinavia rarely use the concept of race. The term (im)migrant(s) is used instead and the relationships in education between Scandinavians and (im)migrants and between educational results an…
The paradoxes of student learning preferences
Creativity is part of a current global policy paradigm in education. The present article examines aspects of one national version of this policy in practice, by looking at the ways student preferences for different types of classroom teaching in different subjects with different ‘spaces for creativity and self-realisation’ are socially constructed and subjectively understood and valued. The analysis is developed from comparisons between teaching …
On Developments in Ethnographic Research: The Case of Two Swedish Universities
The past 40 years have formed a transitional period in Sweden's education and political history. The social democratic reforms from the 1940s that aimed to create a centralised, expanded and integrated comprehensive education system came to an end. Decentralisation, neoliberal governance and the introduction of new public management with the creation of private schools and competition have shaped the policy regime since then. Ethnography emerged …
Maybe one in a hundred or one in a thousand in the neoliberal, new-managerial university! Aesthetics of experience and the question of transgressive critical thinking
Trangression is an act of challenging boundaries that separate apparently distinct oppositional categories objects. Examples are categories such as such as civilised/primitive, male/female, master/servant, Lordship/bondage. The article deals with such transgressions related to the evolution of class consciousness transgressive critical thinking. It is said to be particularly important and at risk in higher education today, as performativity refor…
Changing higher education: Converging policy-packages and experiences of changing academic work in Sweden
The past two decades of international higher education reform are often described by researchers as having produced new managerial and neoliberal policy turns that have brought about a fundamental global shift in the way institutions of higher education are defined, run and justify their institutional existence and practices. Universities in Sweden were felt able to offer some possible resistance and based on ethnographic research at three Swedis…
Predicting the use of praise among pre-service teachers: The influence of implicit theories of intelligence, social comparison and stereotype acceptance
This investigation concerns feedback praise (person and process praise) and how it relates to implicit theories of intelligence (entity and incremental theories) among pre-service teachers. In the first study 176 pre-service teachers participated, while in the second study 151 of such teachers participated. Two new measures, one of feedback praise and the other of social comparison, were found to be reliable and valid. In the first study, process…
Learning Processes and Social Mobilization in a Swedish Metropolitan Hip-Hop Collective
Based on ethnographic research on the encounter between local culture and schools in multicultural suburban areas, this article explores possibilities suggested by autonomous learning activities in a hip-hop collective that may have a potential to break urban segregation patterns. The collective’s artistic production raises questions that have not been answered in schools, such as how the increasing class divisions between different parts of the …
Humanism and creativity in restructured adult education in Sweden
Education restructuring is often based on the claim that markets have been shown to efficiently distribute goods to individuals who need and desire them, and that services should therefore be altered so that the market can also become the ultimate arbiter of what is included in them as well. However, restructuring has also been said to have negative effects on education values such as humanism and creativity. The present article has been develope…
Stigmatisation, identity, and educational exclusion in postindustrial societies: A qualitative synthesis of research from UK, Germany, and the Nordic countries
From existing research, we know segregation in poverty-intensive and immigrant-dense suburban spaces cannot be easily dissociated from educational inequality and exclusion. Our aim in this paper is to explore the link between urban segregation, social deprivation, migration and education by bringing together the findings from several ethnographic studies conducted in Europe. The starting point for our discussion is the findings from one meta-ethn…
Ironising with intelligence
This article is part of a project that seeks in part to explore how students understand and use the concept of intelligence. It is based on an ethnographically contextualized study of linguistic events and was conducted in an inner-city upper secondary school in Sweden. The article shows that the concept of intelligence is not spontaneously used by students but is given meaning by them when they are asked, and that this meaning is given in relati…
Neoliberal Restructuring in Education and Health Professions in Europe: Questions of Global Class and Gender
This article is based on a meta-analysis of previous research on restructuring in relation to education and health professions in Europe and more globally. It highlights common developments and signals the significant and important role of specific cycles of public to private transformation in production relations in these professions over the course of the last century and a successive movement of labour from the domestic sphere of the home to p…
The SEN industry and teachers’ CPD: Ideal elements of teaching and enabling arrangements
In this study, we explored the special educational needs (SEN) industry in relation to teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) by analysing invoices generated by CPD providers in Sweden. Guided by the theory of practice architectures (TPA), we examined the characteristics of the offered SEN content, focusing on the implied elements of ideal teaching practices and the arrangements that have led to SEN becoming a key component of the te…
Phenomenography - a "good-for-nothing brother" of phenomenology? Outline of an analysis
This article will argue that five different ways of doing phenomenography can be found amongst the works of Gothenburg phenomenographers: Discursive, Experimental, Naturalistic, Hermeneutic and Phenomenological. Commenting on an earlier version of phenomenography, Jacob Needleman stated that it was "a 'good-for-nothing' brother of phenomenology". We will argue that it is not. It is productive research, even if at times the degree of methodologica…
A Problem of Validity in Education Research
All forms of capitalism involve economic accumulation for one small group of individuals at the expense of others in processes that are therefore completely antithetical to equity and solidarity. For a sense of fairness to be maintained under these circumstances, strange things must happen to what are termed as common life values. They must begin to operate instrumentally according to principles of the market, where monetary forms of value predom…
History and the Other: Dussel’s Challenge to Levinas
Is history a product of human thought that betrays the lived uniqueness of persons, reducing ‘otherness’ to the categories of the understanding and to its historical consequences? Or is history too ‘thick’ to be synchronized in memory and historical consciousness? The article, taking its inspiration from Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation and particular moments of Latin American history, develops the notion of the proximity of history, phenome…
The problem of how learning should be socially organized: Relations between reflection and transformative action
Within critical theory progressive relationships between reflection and action involve confronting contradictions within practice artistry from a dialectical view of practice as praxis and as the means whereby one can move in the direction of positive change or social transformation. Freire captures this idea of reflective praxis in his pedagogical approach to conscientization, a form of codification and the encouragement of human agency, but it …
The deceptive imagination and ethnographic writing
Humanism and creativity in restructured adult education in Sweden
Education restructuring is often based on the claim that markets have been shown to efficiently distribute goods to individuals who need and desire them, and that services should therefore be altered so that the market can also become the ultimate arbiter of what is included in them as well. However, restructuring has also been said to have negative effects on education values such as humanism and creativity. The present article has been develope…
The paradoxes of student learning preferences
Creativity is part of a current global policy paradigm in education. The present article examines aspects of one national version of this policy in practice, by looking at the ways student preferences for different types of classroom teaching in different subjects with different ‘spaces for creativity and self-realisation’ are socially constructed and subjectively understood and valued. The analysis is developed from comparisons between teaching …
The relationship between ethical positions and methodological approaches: A Scandinavian perspective
In this article, based on reading ethnographic theses, books and articles and conversations with nine key informants, we have tried to describe how research ethics are approached and written about in educational ethnography in Scandinavia. The article confirms findings from previous research that there are different methodological forms of ethnography there. It adds that although ethical descriptions can of course be described by using formal-phi…
Identifying and comparing Scandinavian ethnography: Comparisons and influences
In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the volume of research production in education ethnography in Scandinavia due partly to a regionally financed network. The present article makes some comparisons between Scandinavian and other education research contexts in relation to aspects of general ethnographic design to try to analyse this production. It suggests some typical points of identity for Scandinavian educational ethnography…
Neoliberal Restructuring in Education and Health Professions in Europe: Questions of Global Class and Gender
This article is based on a meta-analysis of previous research on restructuring in relation to education and health professions in Europe and more globally. It highlights common developments and signals the significant and important role of specific cycles of public to private transformation in production relations in these professions over the course of the last century and a successive movement of labour from the domestic sphere of the home to p…
Education Science in Sweden: Promoting Research for Teacher Education or Weakening its Scientific Foundations
Certain common elements can be identified regarding teacher education development in advanced knowledge-based economies. One of these is the attempt, up until relatively recently, to develop a solid foundation of scientific professional knowledge for what Basil Bernstein called the teacher education Trivium: roughly speaking, pedagogical sciences: approximately the psychology, sociology and philosophy of education. Another more recent development…
Ethnographic investigations of issues of race in Scandinavian education research
In this article we aim to present an overview of some of the ways in which issues of race and ethnicity are represented and researched in educational ethnography in Scandinavia. Several things are suggested. Amongst them is that educational ethnographers in Scandinavia rarely use the concept of race. The term (im)migrant(s) is used instead and the relationships in education between Scandinavians and (im)migrants and between educational results an…
From learning to labour to learning for marginality: School segregation and marginalization in Swedish suburbs
In this article, using data from ethnographic research, we try to present some glimpses of the way education is described as an experience and possibility ‘from below’, by pupils who grow up and study in schools in the most segregated and territorially stigmatized suburbs on the outskirts of our major cities. What we feel they describe is an experience of schooling for surviving the social and economic consequences of curtailed citizenship in a p…
Predicting the use of praise among pre-service teachers: The influence of implicit theories of intelligence, social comparison and stereotype acceptance
This investigation concerns feedback praise (person and process praise) and how it relates to implicit theories of intelligence (entity and incremental theories) among pre-service teachers. In the first study 176 pre-service teachers participated, while in the second study 151 of such teachers participated. Two new measures, one of feedback praise and the other of social comparison, were found to be reliable and valid. In the first study, process…
Learning Processes and Social Mobilization in a Swedish Metropolitan Hip-Hop Collective
Based on ethnographic research on the encounter between local culture and schools in multicultural suburban areas, this article explores possibilities suggested by autonomous learning activities in a hip-hop collective that may have a potential to break urban segregation patterns. The collective’s artistic production raises questions that have not been answered in schools, such as how the increasing class divisions between different parts of the …
The Professionalization of the Field of Education in Sweden: A Historical Analysis
This article analyses the professionalization of the education field in Sweden from a historical perspective by tracing efforts towards professionalization of teaching from a clerically consecrated to a scientifically grounded praxis. Some of these efforts seem to be fairly typical for welfare states like Sweden. However, others are more unique, such as the state ambition to create a unified teacher profession based on a scientific knowledge base…
Changing higher education: Converging policy-packages and experiences of changing academic work in Sweden
The past two decades of international higher education reform are often described by researchers as having produced new managerial and neoliberal policy turns that have brought about a fundamental global shift in the way institutions of higher education are defined, run and justify their institutional existence and practices. Universities in Sweden were felt able to offer some possible resistance and based on ethnographic research at three Swedis…
Identifying Scandinavian Ethnography: Articulating Notions of Theory and Objectivity in the Ethnography of Education
Academic work on a back-burner: Habituating students in the upper-secondary school towards marginality and a life in the precariat
This article takes its point of departure in ethnographic data from what in Sweden is called the Individual Programme (IP). This programme was for upper-secondary school pupils who were not eligible for one of the country's academic or vocational programme. Its main formally expressed goal was to enable students to become eligible for these programmes. Our data show that this aim risks going unfulfilled as attending the kind of programme represen…
Making sense of iconic symbols: A study of preschool children conducting a refuse-sorting task
This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they encounter when interpreting these symbols. Video data were collected with 30 children between four and f…
Changing teacher education in Sweden: Using meta-ethnographic analysis to understand and describe policy making and educational changes
Ironising with intelligence
This article is part of a project that seeks in part to explore how students understand and use the concept of intelligence. It is based on an ethnographically contextualized study of linguistic events and was conducted in an inner-city upper secondary school in Sweden. The article shows that the concept of intelligence is not spontaneously used by students but is given meaning by them when they are asked, and that this meaning is given in relati…
The Politics of Representation
Changes in teacher education in Sweden in the neo-liberal education age: Toward an occupation in itself or a profession for itself
In the last two decades, the Swedish welfare state has been radically transformed in a neo-liberal direction, including extensive decentralisation and marketisation of the education sector with significant consequences for the work and professional identities of its teachers. Teacher education has also been directly included in this transformation. The present article addresses the changes that have been introduced. We are concerned that key elem…
From learning to labour to learning for precarity
A demand on national economies in the 1970s was that they should begin to increase their labour market flexibility, which came to mean transferring risks and insecurity onto workers. Education was one way to prepare future workers for this new situation. The present article examines this preparation of learning for precarity some 40 years on. It is based on long-term ethnographic research in the Swedish upper-secondary school sector in particular…
Sociology (48 works) · Political science (35 works) · Social science (30 works) · Ethnography (23 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (23 works) · Pedagogy (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Anthropology (17 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (17 works) · Law (17 works)