This study investigates older persons engagement with digital interfaces as one important way to social inclusion. Digital exclusion and social exclusion are intrinsically intertwined, which put older persons at risk for exclusion. To construct meaningful educational practices for inclusion, more insight is needed to understand consequences of low…

With the unprecedented worldwide refugee crisis, to what extent can music play a role in welcoming? In particular, how does choral music have a role in mobilising communities, generating intercultural understanding, and lifting some of the barriers that confront refugees and asylum seekers? How can such activity be seen as a benefit to the…

This article analyzes the Swedish Strategy for Roma Inclusion. Drawing on interviews and documentary materials produced around the Strategy by official sources and Roma organizations, we describe its background, rationale, and evolution, as well as the rifts it has revealed around the issues of minority representation and the framing of inclusion.…

Previous studies indicate that ideas related to special education could influence the way arts education is performed and motivated in schools. Further investigation is therefore required in order to raise awareness of how perspectives on inclusion can serve as a starting point for arts education, and vice versa. This article takes it starting…

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,…

In Sweden, teachers in mainstream schools show frustration and insecurity about how to organise education for inclusion and diversity. This article contributes to the understanding of how they articulate their view of the advantages and disadvantages of including students with EBD in mainstream classes. To study teachers' understanding, an…

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…

In Sweden, tutoring in the mother tongue is a special support measure primarily intended for newly arrived students to facilitate their transition into the Swedish school system. Tutoring is premised on the collaboration between the class teacher, responsible for subject-related expertise, and the tutor, who contributes with knowledge of the…

What can we learn from and with the body in order to understand more about the (lived) experiences of newly arrived students in schools? This question has hitherto been given little attention in relation to the field of migration and education. Using the perspective of Ahmed's critical feminist phenomenology, this article aims to explore the…

This article reports and discusses findings from an ethnographic case study, aiming to gain a deeper understanding of how different children perceive their learning environment in the first grade of primary school, with regard to social as well as academic aspects. The theoretical framework is based on an interactional perspective, where…

In this article, we explore the narratives of 10 doctoral alumni from Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) who underwent graduate training in Sweden. The narratives identify challenges encountered by the alumni but more importantly reveal the agency by which these challenges were overcome. The most important strategy was that of collaborative…

This study focuses on teachers in schools with large numbers of new arrival immigrant pupils in a provincial school district in mid-Sweden. Drawing from focus group interviews and examples from the teachers' lessons, we examined the views of the teachers regarding the challenges experienced in responding to the pedagogical needs of new arrival…

Taking as its vantage point a citation from the critical educationalist Thomas Popkewitz, "double gestures of inclusion and exclusion," the aim of this article is to describe and contextualize the project of inclusion in Swedish educational and vocational guidance, and to identify and to analyze the potentially excluding discourses that…

The last 40 years have seen great political attention paid to issues of inclusion in education, both from international organisations and also individual nations. This flexible concept has been adopted enthusiastically in education reforms concerned with increased standardisation of teaching and learning, decentralisation of education management,…

This study examines the concept of inclusion and the degree to which it is being practiced in Swedish municipality schools and tries to draw some conclusions about the nature of pedagogy practiced in Sweden. This is a qualitative case study where primary data are collected from only five facilitators of children of special needs in one school in…