In this article, we discuss the views of 117 special education student teachers related to their oncoming profession in the framework of ecological theory. Together, 68 students from Sweden (26 special teachers and 41 SENCo students) and 49 from Finland responded to a questionnaire. We compared the respondents' thoughts about their future work content, the focus areas of special education and inclusion. According to the expectations, the main task for these future special educators is to work with pupils and adults at school. The focus areas of their future work included co-operation and consultation, more so in Sweden. In addition, excellent interaction skills were central. The Swedish respondents supported full inclusion to a greater extent than the Finnish respondents. Finally, no critical aspects of resource allocation or conditions to ensure the child's right to adequate support within the existing school systems were emphasised by the respondents. The results and the differences among the various respondents are discussed.

Scholars in the field of conflict resolution in schools theoretically argued that minor distractions and disturbances are conflicts. In the present study, we refer to them as emerging conflicts. The study has been carried out within the phenomenographic research tradition and used semi-structured interviews. We addressed the professionalsthe teacherswho deal with emerging conflicts every day, investigating their different ways of understanding an emerging conflict. The 9 different ways we found make the collective and shared understandings of emerging conflicts visible and form a professional language with which to discuss these kinds of conflicts. These nine could be divided into three groups, the social practice of the classroom, something that stems from outside the classroom, and something that characterises all human interaction. The awareness of the existing understandings could further be discussed in relation to what is actually taught in teacher education in Sweden.

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Increasing numbers of student teachers, teachers, and teacher educators require training in research-based knowledge about how to address conflicts in schools.There are also increasing numbers of relevant publications, and hence, a perceived need to map influential theories, methods, and topics that shaped the field of research. To meet this need, a bibliometric study was conducted.The reviewed literature, 608 publications referring to studies by 197 influential authors, was subdivided into two periods: 1996-2010 and 2011-2015. The intellectual structure was examined by author co-citation analysis. The findings indicate seven clusters of authors from period one and four from period two.

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