This article focuses on student teachers' professional development and explores how the students connect theory and practice in these processes. Data consist of 17 talks during weekly seminars with 15 preschool student teachers and a group of researchers both at campus and at the practicum placements during their first term. Initially, the researchers introduced discussions with an aim to challenge the students' views on general societal issues as well as specific issues related to the preschool practice. Eventually, the seminars changed toward student and researchers being more equal interlocutors. Experiences were discussed and relations between theory and practice were elaborated. Analyses from an ecological perspective of teacher agency show that the student teachers' agency develops from a naïve to a proactive understanding of the profession. The early practicum period in combination with regular seminars was important for the student teachers' developing profession. The practicum period provides practical challenges, and the seminar discussions with researchers provides theoretical challenges. Implications for teacher education are discussed, such as offering horizontal teacher networks where students get support to be able to develop their professional agency.
This article aims to gain knowledge on how gender and profession are accounted for and expressed in leisure-time teachers' (LtTs) work in Sweden, with a specific focus on the caring aspects of the profession. Our results show that LtTs take up various positions in navigating between aspects connected to managerialism and external auditing as well as trust and internal valuation. We argue that the need exists for an expanded understanding of care in order to recognise and reward various gendered actions and activities in teachers' caring orientation. The article provides knowledge to both researchers and practitioners on gendered nuances of care that by tradition have been connected to women.
This article explores how preschool teachers, over time, collectively manage teaching as a new part of their mission. The study's empirical data consist of two related but temporally separated sets of data containing collegial discussions among preschool teachers; talks during a development process and group interviews with the same preschool teachers six months later. Through a theorydriven analysis, using the theoretical concept of teacher agency, different ways of achieving teacher agency are brought into light. When tensions appear, the preschool teachers achieve teacher agency by using professional core values in order to make adjustments, additions or changes to school policy. These professional core values consist of for example, sensitivity to the interests and needs of children, the ambition to perform a pedagogical practice for the greater good of children and the professional tradition of preschool teachers and child minders working together in teams.
This is the published version of a paper published in Journal of Curriculum Studies.
Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Bergh, A., Löfdahl, A., Englund, T. (2018) Local enactment of the Swedish 'advanced teacher reform' This article focuses on a new form of governing that targets a selected group of teachers. Specifically, it analyses how the Swedish so-called advanced teacher reform is enacted at the local level and discusses its implications for teachers' professionalism. The methodological approach enables a local analysis in a broader international policy context. Using characteristic elements from curriculum theory to analyse the relationship between different levels and elaborating on the linguistic turn of curriculum theory, three concepts are central in the analysis: enactment, linguistic criteria and professionalism. Empirically, the study draws on material from a two-year application process in a medium-sized municipality. The result demonstrates that the local enactment process is clearly influenced by transnational policy trends and that less allowance is made for teachers' own experience-based knowledge in the second studied year. The linguistic analysis shows how the applicants using the 'right concepts' were selected to become 'advanced teachers' . As complex and qualitative aspects disappeared from the agenda, this type of governing, with its standardized use of language, may reduce schools' educational potential. Changes like this raise new questions about how schools can maintain and develop democratic and professional values whilst being exposed to new policy trends.
Journal of Curriculum
The study focuses on dilemmas in storied experiences of everyday after-school care arrangements among Swedish and Finnish mothers. Finland and Sweden, which share a history of strong labour market attachment among women, arrange institutional after-school care in similar ways. The data consist of interviews with three Swedish and six Finnish mothers. A positioning analysis of four stories shows how decisions related to children's after-school hours were allocated among different actors. Two reoccurring dilemmas, Competent-dependent child stories and Unburdened-deficient mother stories, emerged from the data analysis as related to prevailing moral discourses on childhood and motherhood.
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