Being a professional teacher involves developing professional agency. Among the important standards of professional agency is the ability to justify classroom practices in light of conceptual knowledge and transformative reflection and clarify personal commitments and intentions in decision-making processes. This study explored how 12 student…

This study investigates school segregation for newly arrived adolescent students (aged 16-22) in Norway. Based on an interview study in two Norwegian adult education establishments and drawing on a sociocultural framework, the article highlights the students' experiences with and perceptions of school segregation. More specifically, it analyzes…

This study explores how early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) is directly framed in the Nordic curriculum. The study's theoretical background builds on theories and research viewing ECEfS as a comprehensive approach which integrates the three pillars of sustainability. To explore the status of ECEfS, Nordic curricula were analysed…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to gain insight into and understand the authentic lived experience of the processes of collaborative inquiry in teamwork from the perspective of teachers. Design/methodology/approach: Data comprises stimulated recall interviews and semi-structured interviews. Seventeen teachers from four different teams in…

Teaching and learning of quantum physics at secondary level is an active field of research. One important challenge is finding ways to promote understanding of quantum concepts without the mathematical formalism that is embedded in quantum mechanics but unavailable on the secondary level. We investigated Norwegian secondary students' (N = 291)…

Trust is essential in any kind of peer-based mentoring. Taking a sociocultural view, this study focuses on how trust emerges relationally in a higher education context where colleagues observe and give feedback on one another's teaching. The term peer mentoring refers here to a collaborative approach in which faculty staff observe and give…

This paper addresses peace education focusing on how place-based experiences and collective memories stimulate local mobilisation for refugees fleeing from war. The Arctic Migration Route, located above 69th degree north, became an alternative to dangerous boat trips on the Mediterranean Sea, for people seeking safety and protection in the fall of…

Background: While much literature has argued for the value of carefully designed instructional units building on student resources, less work details how students' own invocation of experiences and ideas from their everyday lives plays out in naturalistic classroom dialogues. Employing a sociocultural and interactional approach, this article…

Language and sociocultural practices in transnational families have attracted considerable scholarly attention over the last decade. Adding to this research, the present article explores the perspectives of two Polish teenage siblings living in Norway on the projected language and sociocultural practices in their future families. The data for this…

From a socio-cultural perspective, language offers a means for children to communicate with and learn from others through interaction: language is the medium through which young children are provided cognitive, social, and emotional support in interactions with caregivers, siblings, and peers; and children characterized as dual language learners…

Many students do not experience usefulness in mathematics. To address this problem, we offered them a mathematical tool, Sankey diagrams, which is a flow chart appearing in news media to visualize social, industrial or environmental processes. We carried out an Educational Design Research (EDR) to develop and evaluate lesson materials about…

The purpose of this study was to explore how teachers in friluftsliv (the Scandinavian equivalent of outdoor education and outdoor recreation) reflect upon their safety strategies in relation to pupils' friluftsliv abilities in the upper secondary school 'Sport and Physical Education programme'. This article is based on six focus group interviews…

The work presented here is a qualitative study of socio-cultural approaches to literary texts in a selection of upper secondary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Norway. The article explores opportunities and challenges related to the fostering of competent "intercultural readers" in foreign language (FL) educational…

In this article, we use a model for games and literacy to explore how one FIFA gamer worked across contexts. Previously, this model has been used to address the role of computer and video games in the teaching of literacy in the subject of English. In the current article, we combine this model with a learning lives perspective, which builds on the…

This article reports on a study investigating the role of scientific concepts in the metapragmatic awareness of Norwegian primary EFL learners following a four-week instructional intervention on requesting informed by sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 2012/1934). Through introducing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions of requesting, the…