Including students with emotional and behavioral difficulties (EBD) in general education is one of teachers' greatest challenges and make the dilemma of inclusion displays its most difficult side. This article contributes to the understanding of how teachers in Swedish mainstream schools understand the concept of inclusive didactics for students with EBD. This article employs a directed qualitative content analysis supplemented with descriptive statistics related to the categories of inclusive didactics. Didactic theory was the basis of the predefined categories by which the analysis was completed. Empirical data were collected through 6 focus-group interviews and 37 individual follow-up interviews. The findings indicate that three didactic aspects were dominant in teachers' understanding of inclusive didactics: Student(s), Methods, and Teacher. Less accentuated were Subject, Rhetoric and Interaction. Thus these teachers' understanding and previous research is not consistent. The overall conclusion is that the concept of inclusive didactics is complex, complicated, and difficult for teachers to relate to. The descriptions are both vague and simplistic and therefore difficult for teachers to implement. This article clearly highlights that teachers often feel frustrated and inadequate, and blame themselves for the students' deficiency and failure, thus concluding that strategies for distinct descriptions and teacher practices are needed.

Abstract. Previous research reviews on teachers' attitudes towards inclusive education have shown that students' types of special educational needs influences teachers' attitudes; these reviews have also indicated that, in terms of the inclusion of various groups, teachers are most negative about including students with behavioural problems. This article is a review of the research on teachers' attitudes towards inclusion with regard to students who have special educational needs. It specifically identifies evidence regarding teachers' attitudes towards the inclusion of students with emotional and behavioural difficulty (EBD). For this review, 15 studies, measuring teachers' attitudes from 15 countries, met the inclusion criteria. The results of this synthesis confirmed that most teachers hold negative attitudes towards the inclusion of students with EBD; however, this was not true in all countries. The results also highlight specific explanations for why teachers hold negative attitudes towards including students with EBD in their classrooms. The implication of this synthesis is that teachers feel that their prerequisites for successfully including students with EBD are not being met; this impracticability is most impactful when the teachers nevertheless try to include these students.

This article presents a literature review focusing on international research concerning distance education and students’ study strategies during the last 20 years. As distance education in higher education is a steadily growing trend and in particular because the COVID-19 pandemic has escalated the transition from campus education to different forms of distance education, knowledge about students’ study strategies and appropriate teaching strategies has become highly important. With this research review, we aimed to identify patterns and trends in research on distance education focusing students study strategies before and after the pandemic. The research synthesis identified and interpreted similarities and differences in the studies’ designs and findings, which we analyzed using integrative thematic analysis. Students’ study strategies seem to have changed to some extent during the pandemic, with more emphasis on their own responsibility and the need for a developed teaching strategy to align with the changing framework related to the emergency provision of distance education. We concluded that students have to develop metacognitive strategies, because self-regulated learning and a more flexible pedagogy seem to be important in teachers’ transitions and competence in digitalization. Therefore, more research targeting these aspects is needed.

No abstract

In Sweden, many students start but do not graduate from upper secondary school despite preventive efforts. The reasons for students dropping out of school have been examined and opposed, but there is still more to be done. The overall aim of this study was to contextualise and understand teachers’ and students’ experiences and perceptions of relational pedagogy in a vocational upper secondary programme in Sweden. The theoretical framework was relational pedagogy to investigate theoretical knowledge of pedagogical relations. The data for this qualitative study was collected through two focus group interviews with 10 teachers and 10 individual student interviews. Directed content analysis was used to analyse the data in order to pay attention to the core concepts of relational pedagogy as a theoretical encoding scheme. The findings show that teachers and students find their working and learning atmosphere much safer and more secure compared to earlier; both groups mentioned relational pedagogy as promoting student participation, engagement, and motivation in school. This study contributes with knowledge of how vocational teachers and students perceive working with relational pedagogy to promote learning and school attendance, but there is still a need to find out more about how teachers’ relational competence is acquired.