The present study focuses on challenges to the work of teachers as a result of a Swedish educational reform that mandates schools guarantee pupils receive early learning support concerning reading, writing, and number sense. The outcome of reforms is connected to how teachers achieve agency in their work , and we use the ecolo- gical model of teacher agency as an overarching theoretical frame- work and analytical dimension. The study involved interviews with 14 teachers, and the focus was on a) how teachers identify pupils in need of support and how this support is carried out, (b) how teachers would like this identification to be carried out, and how teachers would like to support pupils with weak number sense. Teachers described a ‘dilemmatic space’ (cf. Fransson and Grannäs 2013), which affects how they achieved agency in developing pupils’ num- ber sense. The dilemmatic space described by teachers in this study is framed by necessary priorities pertaining to the cultural, structural, and material conditions of the current situation. According to the study’s results, whether teachers should perform the assessment merits discussion. The study concludes there is a risk that conducting assessments and offering support risks cancelling each other out.

Specialpedagogens uppdrag och roll innefattar många olika ansvarsområden och arbetsuppgifter. Rektor är den som sätter ramar och därmed också skapar förutsättningar för hur det specialpedagogiska arbetet ska utformas på den skola där specialpedagogen är verksam. Det verkar vanligt att specialpedagoger själva är med och skriver sina egna arbetsbeskrivningar. Specialpedagogers uppdrag kan därmed komma att bli format i förhandlingen som sker mellan rektor och specialpedagog. Denna artikel tar utgångspunkt i ett examensarbete av Franzén och Ek Andersson (2023) för att diskutera rollen som en specialpedagog kan få på en skola.

Early career teachers have been discussed as being particularly vulnerable to stress and emotional challenges. Even though there has been an increased understanding of the practice shock, and utilization of mentors during the beginning for early career teachers, the start of the profession for early career teacher is still considered as filled with stress and emotional challenges. Kelchtermans (2019) describe the deficit-thinking about early career teachers, as they are considered not capable enough. Instead, Kelchtermans propose early career teachers should be considered not from what they lack, but rather from a perspective of their strengths and potential. This relates to the ongoing identity processes of early career teachers that they find their sense of themselves as teachers in the working conditions that the experience. The ongoing identity process and consistent dilemmas of early career teachers influence the early career teachers coping strategies.The aim of the following study was toinvestigate how challenges of beginning teachers in their second year, with a focus on their continuous teacher identity development. In the study, I adopted Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT), as this together with symbolic interactionism offers a theory-method package with a focus on social processes, and participants perspectives. In addition, CGT engages in understanding the participant as an agentic person, resolving problems in relation to their main concern.Methodological designIn the study, 23 early career teachers were interviewed. The interviews focused on challenges the early career teachers experienced during their second year of teaching. The interviews were analysed utilizing CGT methods.Expected conclusions/findingsThe findings show consistent dilemmas of continuous teacher identity construction, where the participants describe two main dilemmas that they needed to work with. These were boundary demarcations as well as settling for less. Boundary demarcations focused on not engaging too much in pupils, as well as finding a role where challenges did not affect the participants. Settle for less involved lowering expectations of the influence they wanted to have over pupils. To regulate to need for boundary demarcations the early career teachers described wearing a mask, creating a professional self that was not as affected by events as the personal self. In relation to settling for less, early career teachers described needing to regulate their will to get across to pupils. This means that they thought they should not blame themselves too much if the pupils did not care to listen to what they had to say. These strategies to regulate are discussed as a way of coping with experienced challenges and what this means to the teacher identity, moving from an ideal position into being a little more experienced teacher. The reported research is relevant to Nordic Educational Research since it addresses the challenges of new teachers, and is of use to understand how subjective interpretations of the professional role is influenced by experienced challenges.

The Education Act in both Sweden and Norway stipulates that schools must enable all pupils to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes that form the basis for continued learning and active participation in working life and society (Opplæringslova, 1998; SFS 2010:800, 2010). 

In a report of Scandinavian research published between 2008–2017, Kermit (2018) concludes that children and adolescents with HL perform below peers in school, and that they often struggle with social relationships in kindergarten and school, thus running a higher risk of psychosocial problems compared to peers with typical hearing. It has been found that children and adolescents with HL are not involved in making decisions about their learning environment, including special needs education support.

We conducted a pilot study using the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), investigating how psychosocial health in children who are deaf/hard-of-hearing (D/HH) in Norway, was related to peer relationships and educational support as reported by their guardians.

As a follow up to the surveys, we will conduct focus group interviews with teachers of children who D/HH to investigate their experiences of the educational support for, and psychosocial health of, these children.

Preliminary results from the surveys showed that guardians reported significantly higher SDQ scores (M= 10.5) than the normative data (M= 5.8). Descriptive data for our sample showed that children in compulsory integrated school scored higher on both internal (emotional, hyperactivity) (M=6.20) and external (peer problems, conduct) (M=5.12) scales than children attending school for hard-of-hearing (Internal M= 3.83, External M= 3.67). 

Additional statistical analysis will be presented and discussed within Bronfenbrenner’s Socio-Ecological Framework as a sensitizing concept. Further implications and future research will be discussed.

Student teachers commonly report encountering emotional chal- lenges in work placements during teacher education. Even so, the perspective of mentoring teachers has been given little attention regarding the student teachers’ emotional challenges. In this study, the authors’ aim is to investigate what mentoring teachers perceive to be the emotional challenges student teachers face and what support they think they can offer student teachers. A sample of 25 Swedish mentoring teachers participated in an interview study. According to the findings, the mentoring teachers reported three main emotional challenges that they perceived that student tea- chers encounter: conflicts with/among pupils, encountering diverse pupil populations and dealing with failure. Mentoring teachers’ reports can be understood in the light of their idea of what work placement should be. Their rationales included the need for stu- dent teachers to be either exposed to ‘reality’ or protected from worst-case scenarios.

Denna rapport är en del av Skolsamverkan Öst, Mottagningssamverkan, där LiU Skolsamverkan tillsammans med kommuner i Östergötland har tagit fram och prövat en kommunövergripande vägledning inklusive självskattningsformulär (ett för grundskollärare och ett för förskollärare). Självskattningsformulärens avsikt är att fungera som ett verktyg för att hitta de nyutexaminerades styrkor och utvecklingsområden under deras första år i yrket den s.k. introduktionsperioden. Tidigare studier har pekat på en del svårigheter i början av lärares yrke, samt fokuserat på mentorers stöd till nyblivna lärare. Det visar sig i forskning att det är viktigt att inte bara fokusera på vad nyblivna lärare inte kan, utan att arrangera samtal som fokuserar på utveckling och därmed att ge nyblivna lärare stöd att utforska arbetet som lärare. Därtill kan en mentor vara värdefull för att skapa en stöttande kollegial struktur som består av mer än en enskild mentor, med fokus på utbyte i en kollegial miljö. Syftet med rapporten är att undersöka erfarenheter från alla som är inblandade i introduktionsperiodens upplägg dvs. utbildningschefer, rektorer, mentorer och nyblivna lärares erfarenheter. Mer specifikt undersöks i rapporten vilka förutsättningar som finns för genomförande av introduktionsperioden. Slutligen undersöks hur de verktyg som finns framtagna i Mottagningssamverkan beskrivs med fokus på att synliggöra de nyutexaminerades styrkor och utvecklingsområden. Rapporten baseras på data som har samlats in via 41 enkäter i tre deltagande kommuner, på förskolor och grundskolor i årskurs F-9. Resultatet visar att samtliga mentorer och nyutexaminerade är positiva till introduktionsperioden. En mentor skriver att det är “viktigt att vi tar om hand våra nyutexaminerade kollegor, så vi får behålla dem i yrket”. Rapportens resultat diskuteras utifrån de förutsättningar som verkar ha störst betydelse under introduktionsperioden: vikten av central styrning, förutsättningar med fokus på tid och ekonomi och sist men inte minst mentorns viktiga roll där stödmaterial i form av kommunövergripande vägledning och självskattningsformulär ingår.

Vocational training programmes in higher education encompass, as learning objectives, the development of relational skills and professional judgement, especially in welfare professions such as policing, teaching and healthcare, where know-how about managing close contact with people is a prerequisite. Based on a cross-professional analysis, the current article explores how students from three different professional education programmes – teacher education, police training and medical education – construct professional judgement in group discussions and interviews. The results show that participants construct professional judgement as relationships between three different dimensions: personal ethics, educational standards, and professional practice. When discussing professional dilemmas, students utilise these three different dimensions to argue for the moral or ethical soundness of their choices. The results of the study shed light on the importance of providing students with opportunities to reflect openly on professional judgement in different ways, even though such reflections may not always be formally assessed. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates similarities between the three programmes that we analysed, as well as similarities in students’ reflections regarding essential aspects of the professions.

Mentor teachers have a prominent role in teacher education as they work in close cooperation with student teachers during their work-based education. Research has shown that mentor teachers rarely focus on student teachers’ coping strategies (Heikonen et al., 2017) and issues related to power imbalances (Lilach, 2020), which in turn may impede the relationship between the mentor and student teacher. Nonetheless, when the relationship between them is set on cooperation, there are numerous studies pointing to the importance of the mentor teacher.  This study aims to explore the mentor teachers’ perspectives on having challenges creating positive relationships with student teachers. In this process, mentor teachers judge the student teacher’s suitability for working as a teacher in both a formal and informal manner. Thus, we explore mentor teachers’ meaning-making of how they approach student teachers if they judge that they are not making any progression during the work-based education.  We adopted symbolic interactionism and constructivist grounded theory as a theory-methods package (Charmaz, 2014). GT is a flexible, systematic and iterative approach from which we used coding, memo-writing and constant comparison to guide data collection and analyse the data.  The study builds from two sets of interviews, exploring the emergent categories of suitability and distance in these interviews. In total, 25 mentor teachers were interviewed during the first interview, and after approximately seven months 22 of the mentor teachers were interviewed again. The findings show that mentor teachers engaged in a suitability judgment of their student teachers that focused on (1) compliance of the student teacher to school-based norms, and (2) how they perceived that student teachers engaged in using their experiences to progress. This suitability judgment was used to develop actions meant for the student teacher to use in developing their practice as teachers. A reported concern was when mentor teachers perceived that student teachers did not follow their instructions and thus, according to the mentor teachers, did not progress. This lack of progression was found in relation to student teachers’ teaching and ability to act socially with pupils and colleagues.  This study is relevant to Nordic Educational Research since it addresses mentors’ perspectives on establishing co-operative relationships with student teachers. We hope this might be of use in the discussion about ways to support mentor teachers when they face problematic situations with student teachers.