This article deals with the question of what has happened to 'the public' in the Swedish education system during the last three decades. In our search for an answer we illuminate and discuss how the process of marketisation, together with the learnification and individualisation of education, replaced 'the public' from public education with the…

The concept of differentiation holds immense significance in education, touching upon aspects like access, inclusion, justice, and equality. However, it is also a complex and elusive notion, which acquires different meanings across historical and cultural contexts. This article explores the shifting reasoning about differentiation in the Swedish…

The design research programme learning by imitative and creative reasoning (LICR) studies whether, how and why tasks and teaching that enhance creative reasoning lead to a more productive struggle and more efficient learning than the common but inefficient task designs based on imitating given solution procedures. The purpose of this paper is to…

This article addresses the conceptual question "what is lesson study?" as an issue that arises in the context of the globalisation of lesson study as a method for improving teaching and learning beyond its presumed origins in the Japanese education system. To what extent can adaptations of the method in different national settings be…

This paper focusses on the relatively new international phenomenon of therapeutic education. Taking on the fact that this phenomenon is part of the schools' assigned in relation to the formation of young people, the aim of this paper is twofold: to highlight what rationales emerge in the formation of young people's emotions in school, and to…

This article examines how the concept of active citizenship has been given a neo-liberal character by examining practice in three different educational contexts in Sweden. The concept of active citizenship has become influential in educational policy and practice throughout the European Union. The aim of this article is to highlight concerns at…

From 2012 to 2016 all teachers of mathematics, in primary through to upper secondary and adult education, in Sweden are to be given the opportunity of receiving state-coordinated professional development (PD), generally involving around one meeting per week for a year. We examine the ways in which this programme and its content are research-based…

In November 2010 the authors finished the writing of a manifesto for education. The manifesto was an attempt to respond to a number of issues concerning education, both in the field of educational research and in the wider socio-political environment. This is the text of that manifesto followed by two commentaries in which the authors try to…

Proliferating excellence gold standards in the global academic system tend to obscure the far-reaching diversification of academic missions, practices, ambitions and identities brought by massification. This article approaches this topic by a review of theory on academic scholarship and how it has changed in the wake of academic massification and…

The focus of this study is gendered differences and similarities in the distribution of individual education plan (IEP) targets given to pupils in Swedish schools. IEP writing is seen as part of teachers' formal assessment practice. Through qualitative content analysis of data, two main target types emerged: "learning targets," related…

This study reports on a large-scale implementation of Assessment for Learning (AfL) in a Swedish municipality. The implementation was founded on two principles: (1) teaching should be informed by educational research; (2) to be successful teachers' professional development needs to be based in everyday classroom practice. From these principles,…

The role of languages is a central issue in deaf education. The function of sign languages in education and deaf students' opportunities to develop linguistic abilities in both sign languages and the dominant language(s) of a society are key considerations (Hogan-Brun 2009; Reagan 2010, 53; Swanwick 2010a). Accordingly, what Kaplan and Baldauf…

This paper explores and challenges the rationale for current, mainstream approaches to teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) within schooling systems. Such approaches are significantly influenced by neoliberal and managerial pressures, evident in advocacy for generic, individualistic models of teacher learning, often focused on…

The author, a former headteacher and now a county councillor, argues that the structural changes to the education system put in place in the first weeks of the new government in the summer of 2010 will exacerbate the gap between the highest and lowest achieving schools, will destabilise the state-funded education system, will expose it to…

This article seeks to contribute to the idea of "posthumanist education" by unfolding an educational situation where an assemblage of two humans and 33 former battery hens is gathered to carry out a so-called cognitive bias experiment for two days. A Deleuzian repertoire is set in motion to configure the dynamics of hens intervening in…