School lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have forced teachers around the world to quickly and unexpectedly shift from face-to-face to distance teaching. The struggle with the forced transition has been even more severe in the lower levels of schooling than in higher education institutions, which had already established online course delivery…

The rise in the use of scientific evidence as a basis for educational policymaking has been a noticeable feature globally. In this study, we describe and discuss how educational research is used to make policy and governing evidence-based. To illustrate this, we use the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (SSI) as a case and focus on two of the processes…

This study examines newly qualified teachers' (NQTs) understandings of research-based teacher education practices by looking at two cases in Finland and Norway. The NQTs were interviewed after they had finished their master's degrees and before they started their careers. The results of the individual semistructured interviews and a thematic…

School shyness may have immediate and long-term detrimental effects. Drawing on cultural-historical understandings of motivated actions and conceptual and material tools, the study examined how ten school leaders in three Norwegian elementary schools interpreted and responded to the demands on the school in their work with shy children. Data…

This article explores how current legislation addresses adolescents' need for support in upper secondary school through school-home collaboration and introduces the framework of collaborative autonomy-support as the pivotal approach for analyses. Self-determination theory is used to describe adolescents' need for competence, relatedness and…

This article examines program development in teacher education, with an emphasis on how teacher educators pursue coherence. The analysis contributes to existing literature by investigating how coherence is pursued as part of program development and by analytically situating coherence as an emergent achievement that requires the alignment of…

Worldwide, scholars and policymakers emphasise the importance of basing teacher education in practice. Scholars have therefore suggested to extend the amount of fieldwork. Still, research has shown that the fieldwork component in teacher education of variable quality. During the last 10 years, an increasing body of research has thus emphasised…

This paper addresses national concern about teaching in preschool, building on the challenges, opportunities, and requirements facing today's preschools due to the higher expected level of preschool assignments. The aim is to build knowledge of how preschool teachers and managers from 10 Swedish municipalities characterise preschool teaching. The…

While a number of studies have established the growing role impact PISA has had on national education policy, much less is known about the global-local recontextualization of policy transfer, and the role of national policy officials. Through interviews with key policy officials in Norway and New Zealand, the study revealed a growing…

Critical educational literature suggests that an increased reliance upon neoliberally inspired management technologies transforms the very foundations from which images of the ideal teacher are constructed. The purpose of this paper is to add to this literature by (i) identifying and analysing a number of "theoretical qualities"…

The aim of this article is to discuss how to interview to investigate the practice of school organizations. The research question is: What are the activities the interviewer uses to capture improvement practices in school organizations? We apply a self-assessment method to examine two former projects. We argue that a practice lens is required and,…

Worldwide, scholars and policymakers have called for teacher education to link fieldwork and coursework. This article examines teacher candidates' opportunities to talk about field placement within their campus coursework as one way of doing so. It reports on survey data (n = 270) and observation data (n = 52 hours) from 3 teacher-education…

It has been a key goal to achieve equity in education in Australia and Norway over the last 50 years. This article offers a historical case-oriented comparative analysis of the promotion of equity in education in these 2 countries. While equity in education is primarily understood as students' learning outcomes in national and international tests,…

Under a recent national curriculum reform in Sweden within a highly decentralised, competitive, and marketised education system, access to post-16 education is restricted. In this study, we map and analyse the early onset of new preparatory programmes. We draw on interviews with local politicians and school staff in six different municipalities,…

Borrowing the lens of Finnish education policymakers, this article aims at dissecting the Finnish conception of inclusion and its approach in constructing an inclusive "special" education system as set against the wider debates and practices that shed different lights on the meaning and viability of inclusion. The discussion explores the…