Given that the School-Age Educare (SAEC) received an enhanced teaching mission and its own part in the elementary school's curriculum in 2016, with science, technology, and mathematics explicitly highlighted as the focus of teaching (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2024), questions arise regarding how this teaching is intended to be carried out. This presentation aims to explore and contribute knowledge on how STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) - based teaching can be realized in SAEC's practice. In this presentation, inspired by ethnographic methods, primarily video observations, I discuss the commonalities between leisure time pedagogy and STEM-based teaching, and how leisure time pedagogy can promote students' STEM learning. The theoretical framework of the study combines critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1993) with systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994). The study was conducted in SAECs in Sweden across two different types of schools: a primary school and a compulsory school for pupils with intellectual disabilities.

The results indicate that despite the differing conditions and knowledge levels of students at the two SAECs, there are significant similarities in the SAEC teachers' approaches to subject-related teaching. Cross-curricular teaching is prevalent, as is the SAEC teachers' holistic view of students and their learning. Even when SAEC teachers plan to focus on science, elements of mathematics, technology, or other subjects are often integrated. Based on the study's findings, questions arise about how leisure time pedagogy can be utilized to promote students' STEM learning in a playful manner. The results also contribute to the discussion on the potential of SAEC to support school learning, particularly in STEM subjects, and to the discussion on SAEC's democratic mission and students' rights as future citizens to access relevant knowledge, regardless of the type of school they attend.