Drawing from an ethnographic project on the subject of "Swedish as a second language" (SSL) in three linguistically diverse upper secondary schools, the aim of this study was to investigate how three SSL teachers, one from each school, discursively constructed SSL, and whether and how they legitimated their role as SSL teachers, in…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present and develop models of educational approaches to entrepreneurship that can provide complementary analytical structures to better study, enact and reflect upon the role of entrepreneurship in higher education. Design/methodology/approach A general framework for entrepreneurship education is developed…

Purpose: The goal to stimulate perspective taking and inference making on social phenomena, such as gender roles in society, has proven to be difficult to achieve in general and in particular for primary school students. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop creative models and concepts for learning that provide guidance addressing these…

Socio-culturally formed collegial contexts in the midlevel of higher education organizations have attracted increased attention from higher education researchers. It is assumed that development, change and stability are dependent on norms, habits and traditions in these contexts. This text introduces a framework useful for identifying and…

This article's purpose is to examine, on the basis of Bernstein's theory of classification and framing, how teachers express the concept and content of entrepreneurship in classroom practices in two Swedish lower secondary schools. The study is part of a national school improvement program aiming to better understand, develop and encourage…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…

Understanding today's Vocational Education and Training (VET) systems requires a comprehension of the rise and development, i.e. of the foundations of topical VET. This book provides a comparative view of its development in Europe. The contributions of renowned authors give insight into conceptual questions, cases, and challenges in this field.

In this article, different inspection models are compared in terms of their impact on school improvement and the mechanisms each of these models generates to have such an impact. Our theoretical framework was drawn from the programme theories of six countries' school inspection systems (i.e. the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Ireland, the province…

In this paper we focus on variation of the design and the implementation of a specific task during three mathematics lessons in the 8th grade in a learning study (Marton & Tsui, 2004; Runesson, 2008). The theme of the lesson was division, with a denominator between 0 and 1. The teachers wanted their students to understand that when dividing…

Educational leadership practice is embedded and shaped in its own context. However, contemporary policy makers are keen to use research findings from multiple educational systems to produce overall, generic models of best leadership practice. Therefore, research needs to encompass analyses of the political, societal, cultural, and institutional…

Gränsöverskridande Nordisk Undervisning/Utdanelse (GNU, meaning Cross-Border Nordic Education), the larger Nordic project, under which this case study was carried out, aims at developing innovative, cross-border teaching models in different subject domains in elementary school, including mathematics, language, science, social studies and history.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of blogs as part of a formative assessment practice, to report how reflective peer-to-peer learning can be designed and provided in online higher education. Design/methodology/approach: The research relies on a qualitative approach. The empirical setting comprised an online higher education…

After briefly summarizing major policy concerns and different perspectives on the relationship between training and work, this report discusses three main modes of vocational training: school-based training, apprenticeship, and training of employees. The goals and ideologies connected with these modes and the national systems that exemplify them…

A conceptual framework for the study of education is proposed and then used in case studies which examine education and educational change in Australia and Sweden. There are three main aspects to the study of education and educational change: (1) the social-structural framework, which includes both the structure of society as a whole and of the…

These proceedings of a workshop designed to test a model for a seminar to train adult educators and to discuss the characteristics of adult education in Nordic countries (with special attention to underprivileged groups) consist of a general report and syntheses of two group sessions. Discussed in the general report are the background and…