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The paper outlines an ongoing longitudinal study (2018-2026) in a Swedish municipality, examining the relationship between the physical learning environment and teaching practices within an Innovative Learning Environment (ILE). Emphasizing student-centred learning, it acknowledges the complexity of translating physical design features into effective teaching practices. The study employs the Typology of Teacher Power and Control (TTPC) as a theoretical framework and a convergent mixed-method design to collect various data types, including classroom audio, teacher interviews, and questionnaires. The analysis demonstrates two distinct clusters of student-centred learning practices, differentiated by how symbolic power and control are either retained by the teacher or dislocated to the students. 

The aim of this study was to explore, analyse, and critically discuss conditions for Swedish ICT coordinators working on school digitalisation in a local municipal school context. More specifcally, the study draws on findings from interviews with 13 Swedish information and communication technology (ICT) coordinators working in eight municipalities that have adopted two contrasting approaches to school digitalisation. One is a general approach with a strong element of individual within-school accountability in the work, and the other a specifc approach in which such work is addressed more as an organisational process with involvement of municipal governing officials. Findings show that the two approaches set different conditions in terms of how and with whom the ICT coordinators work and the foci of their efforts although both are framed by the same national educational policy. A conclusion is that the ICT coordinators' role, function, and responsibility should be considered in parity to the level of support, in-school resources, and mandate given to them, not least when organisational instability and reorganisations hamper the work in progress.

This study explores practitioners’ beliefs and experiences of education, socialisation and care and their impact on the introduction of a software application for quality work in early childhood education. Based on field notes, audio recordings and follow-up semi-structured interviews in four Swedish preschools, it explores how teachers’ beliefs and experiences frame and are framed by the introduction of a software application by an EdTech company. The findings show that preschool teachers perceived the software as disruptive to their established beliefs and practices, despite efforts to align it with the preschool curriculum’s goals. It also highlights the challenges that practitioners faced in understanding and implementing the software, the importance of peer discussions and time for reflection. The study’s conclusions emphasise the importance of a thorough introduction, peer support and opportunities for reflection when introducing software in preschool settings. It also stresses the need to align software implementation with practitioners’ beliefs and experiences to facilitate a successful adoption. In addition, the study highlights the role of ongoing professional development in managing technological change in early childhood education.

Research topic: Swedish teacher education programs comprise a coherent practicum period for 12 weeks (30 ects) at local schools. Under supervision of a local experienced teacher, student teachers’ practicum involves to plan, carry through and evaluate teaching and learning with pupils. The role of the local supervisor involves support for teacher educators’ assessment of student teachers’ abilities (e.g. subject didactical skills), which has become a burden due to heavy written analogue documentation. When the documentation fails, student teachers feel the feedback as non-relevant, vague, or as low-quality supervision. The supervisors have for a long time requested a digital version of the analogue assessment document, and in parallel, the teacher education institution has sought ways to develop opportunities for equal and high-quality supervision of student teachers. Taken this background into account, this study aims to explore change regarding opportunities and challenges of digitalising student teachers’ evaluation of practicum.  

Theoretical framework: Cultural Historical Activity Theory is applied to analyse this change and the expansive learning such a change result in (Engeström & Sannino, 2016). Expansive learning is based on a 7-step cyclic process where the first four steps include the collective learning actions of 1) questioning, 2) analysing, 3) modelling a new solution, and 4) examining and testing the new model. In accordance with these four steps, the supervisors questioned the analogue assessment document, teacher education sought ways to develop equal and high-quality supervision, and the municipality asked for quality in student teachers’ practicum (1). The concept and the digital service Teaching Analytics (TA) was seen as mean to digitalising student teachers’ evaluation of practicum (2). Teacher educators held workshops in TA with supervisors and student teachers and presented a time frame (3). In practicum, student teachers and supervisors were asked to use TA (4). These four steps are further scrutinized through the concepts of stimulus, contradictions, and agency. 

Methodology: The study was based on a single case study design of 8 invited student teachers practicum at upper secondary school in a municipality and 8 supervisors. Three types of data were collected: (i) interviews with the supervisors regarding use of TA and with one school leader at municipality level, (ii) a questionnaire to student teachers, and (iii) visualisations of student teachers’ evaluation of practice.  

Expected results: The preliminary findings indicate that the digitalisation of student teachers’ evaluation of practicum provide opportunities and challenges. Municipality stakeholders indicate a vision of good and equal supervision for student teachers due to a standardised language in TA. Student teachers indicate challenges based on contradictions about the threshold for learning Teaching Analytics and limited skills about the approach and vocabulary to analyse lessons. A second challenge concern a teacher education perspective and the perception what could manifest a digital service of the analogue assessment document. Hence, contradictions emerge between the analogue assessment document and TA.  

Relevance to Nordic educational research: Few studies have used software as a service in the evaluation and analysis of student teachers’ practicum.

Teachers in three schools in a community in the northern part of Sweden tested prototype classrooms designed as innovative learning environments. This was an introductory step before merging the schools into one new school building, whose architecture was “new, innovative, modern, and flexible”. Our study spans six years of following this process with regard to how the aimed concept of student-centred learning develops during this time. The results presented here are based on data from the prephase, while the teachers explored the prototype classrooms to learn how these facilities created new preconditions, but also for preparing students for the move. The mixed data consist of both audio recordings of nine teachers during classes and retrospective interviews with the same teachers.

The analysis is based on our theory-driven framework, the Typology of Teacher Power and Control (TTPC) (Bergström & Wiklund-Engblom, 2022), derived from Bernstein’s (2000) theory of power and control. In TTPC, Bernstein’s concept of framing is interpreted as teacher’s use of control in communicative practice, while the concept of classification represents teacher’s power distribution regarding classroom organisation. Each of the two dimensions include several subcategories, which are our evaluative tool to identify variation of emerging teaching practices. 

In the first analysis, three clusters of teacher practice emerged, ranging from teacher-centred teaching to student-centred learning. These clusters were used in an integrated analysis with interview data, thematically analysed, to illuminate how teachers themselves reasoned. These results show differences in beliefs about power and control distribution in the classroom. The cluster of increased student-centredness had dialogical and relational approaches and beliefs, in contrast to the teacher-centred cluster, which discussed their choices in their practice in relation to controlling students and student behaviour in the environment. 

This chapter focuses on a local school development project initiatedby teachers who experienced students’ lack of engagement, passive learning, andabsence from school. In order to achieve more active learning among the students,the teachers built an active learning classroom and set out to develop teaching methodsappropriate for the new classroom. This process turned out to be more complex thanexpected and raised questions not only about the teachers’ teaching, but also abouttheir learning and more specifically about how they as a collective created transformative agency. In this chapter, we highlight how the teachers gained transformativeagency and the situations that characterized this process. Inspired by cultural historical activity theory, we pay attention to stimuli that helped the teachers to bring forthand deal with conflicts of motives that led to break-outs from the teacher-centeredteaching and thereby created transformative agency toward a classroom practicecharacterized by students’ active learning. 

This paper reports on a school development project of an innovative learning environment (ILE). Staff and pupils from two traditionally build corridor schools have merged into a new build school, whose architecture is described as new, innovative, modern, and flexible (OECD, 2017). Instead of having one classroom with a standardised size of 60m2, the ILE consists of different rooms both regarding size and furniture. Another change was that teachers had to be prepared to go from the traditional practice of individually teaching a class with approx. 25 students to the practice of team teaching with 2-5 teachers teaching a whole grade with approx. 60-100 students. The narrative of the project focused on the shift from teacher-centred teaching to student-centred learning, which in previous research have been a challenge due to well established teacher-centred methods (Cardellino & Woolner, 2019; Sigurdadottir & Hjartson, 2016; Gislason, 2010). 

The present research project started two years before the teachers moved into the new ILE. During these two years, school leaders prepared teachers for the new practice. Among these preparatory activities, one core activity consisted of prototype ILE classrooms where teachers could practice student-centred learning methods. In our research, the materiality of the new classroom and teachers’ played-out practice are operationalised as two dimensions (Bergström & Wiklund-Engblom, 2022; Bergström, 2019). The first, a vertical dimension, concerns preconditions of the physical learning environment embodied through the arrangement of desks, use of teachers’ and students’ areas, relations between learning resources, and selection of software applications. The second, a horizontal dimension, includes teachers’ communication in practice pertaining to their selection of content, sequence, pace, and speech space (cf. Bernstein, 2000). The combination of the two dimensions creates a theoretical framework for an ecology of teacher practice as an “emergent phenomenon” (Carvalho & Yeoman, 2018, p. 5). This is an illustrative metaphor for the practice that emerge in teacher preparation for teaching in an ILE.

The aim of this study is to examine and unpack emergent and varying practices in the prototype classrooms with regard to the two dimensions. The following research questions were asked: 1) What variations in teachers played-out practice emerge from teachers’ organisation of the classroom space and communication in practice? 2) How can the teachers’ reasoning further explain the variation of these emergent ILE practices?

Theory: One outcome of our prior studies is the development of a new theory-driven analysing tool, the Typology of Teacher Power and Control (TTPC) (e.g., Bergström & Wiklund-Engblom, 2022, Bergström, 2019), constructed from Bernstein’s (2000) theory of power and control. In the vertical dimension of the TTPC-typology, Bernstein’s relative concept of classification is used to analyse how power emerge from the relationship between objects in the classroom. In short, strong classification keeps things apart, which indicates a strong symbolic power relationship. The opposite is true for weak classification. For example, desks in rows keep students apart and indicates a strong classification and teachers’ power. In the horizontal dimension of the TTPC-typology, Bernstein’s relative concept of framing is used to analyse how control emerge from teachers’ communication in practice. Framing is also a relative concept on a scale from strong to weak. Stronger framing indicates that the teacher has more control in the communication, while weaker framing indicates increased student control. Framing is operationalised as the variation of selection, sequence, pacing, evaluation, and teacher-student and student-student communication. Hence, the concepts of framing and classification represent the two dimensions, which construct a two-dimensional matrix illustrating the emerging teaching practices in the prototype classrooms.

Method: We adhere to a convergent mixed methods design where two types of data (classroom observations and retrospective teacher interviews) were integrated through several steps of analysis, data transformation, and integration (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018; Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Bazeley and Kemp, 2012). The rationale for the approach is that observational data, representing objective, formative data, shows the reality of the classroom activities, while the teacher interview data, representing subjective, formative data, provides insights into how teachers’ beliefs and attitudes relate to the choices made in their teaching practice (Bergström & Wiklund-Engblom, 2022). Thus, the use of both observational data and interview data aims for an integration analysis in which conclusions are drawn based on a broader explanation of the variations found in the emergent teacher practice.The classroom observations were conducted from three prototype learning environments in School A, B, and C. School A is a grade 6-9 school where teachers (N=4) were observed during five lessons. School B is a grade 1-6 school where teachers (N=3) were observed during five lessons. School C is a grade 1-6 school where teachers (N=2) were observed during four lessons. During the observations, the teachers’ communication was recorded and field notes and photographs were taken. The recorded material ranges between 20 and 60 minutes. The retrospective interviews (N=10) comprise nine individual teacher interviews and one group interview with the two teachers at School C. These semi-structured interviews included two themes: the physical learning space and teachers’ communication in practice. The audio recordings from both the classroom observations and teacher interviews were transcribed verbatim.In the first main step, the transcripts and the fieldnotes from the classroom observations were analysed using the TTPC typology as it specifically targets variations in teacher-centred teaching and student-centred learning, i.e., to what extent teachers maintain or distribute power and control in played-out practice. Furthermore, in addition to exploring how typologies vary, we also explore why this could be based on the interview data. Accordingly, an integrative analysis was conducted with the TTPC clusters and teacher interviews by using crosstab queries in the QSR NVivo software.

Exected outcomes: The findings will be presented in two phases pertaining to the two research questions. Firstly, the results regarding variations in teachers played-out practice, are based on a quantification of the observational data and teacher audio recordings. Thereafter, a quantitative analysis using the TTPC framework identified clusters of teacher practice. The preliminary analysis indicate three clusters: i) teacher power and control, ii) mixed distribution of power and control, and iii) student power and control. These clusters are plotted in the TTPC-matrix as a visual summary where each teachers’ emergent practice can be identified. In these preliminary findings, we can see that only one teacher is found in the first cluster pertaining to teacher power and control. This cluster is defined by a strong distinction between a majority of the seven subcategories of the classroom organisation. Hence, this teacher had refurnished the classroom space back to a traditional classroom setting. Furthermore, the teachers’ communication was based on strong control in all six control categories. Moreover, the preliminary analysis indicates that the majority of the teachers are located in the second cluster pertaining to mixed distribution of power and control. Such practice is defined by a blurred distinction between the categories of classroom organisation, as well as the categories of teacher control in their communication.Secondly, in our aim to answer the second research question, the interview data will be analysed using thematic analysis. We expect to find themes related to the physical learning space of the prototype classrooms and other themes on influencing factors regarding teachers’ communication. We expect to find connections between teacher beliefs and choices made in their played-out practice by using both types of data in an integrative analysis.

This study explores teachers’ practice and aims to understand the complexity of and the differencebetween teacher-centred teaching and student-centred learning in the one-to-one computingclassroom. Generally, prior research has examined moving from teacher-centred teaching tostudent-centred learning. Here, we scrutinise one-to-one computing practices in Grades 1–6 inFinland by analysing how power and control emerge from the way teachers organise the physicalclassroom and communicate in practice. We target variations in practical classroom orchestrationas well as in how teachers reason about their practice. A mixed-method analysis was conducted intwo phases, including 15 classroom observations and subsequent teacher interviews. First, aquantitative analysis displayed three clusters of ways teachers distributed power and control intheir classroom orchestration. Second, the clusters were integrated in a qualitative analysis of theinterviews. The findings show that the variations of teacher practice depended on their beliefs andhigher-order learning goals related student autonomy in the use of material resources. It alsoshowed a variation in the way teachers scaffolded students’ individual work and createdcollaborative learning opportunities. In the one-to-one computing classroom, this emerges fromissues that teachers can control inside school regarding the use and organisation of material resources.However, another factor that made teachers adapt their practice was the integration ofheterogeneous student groups into their classrooms.

Although many studies have investigated teaching in one-to-one computing classrooms, not many have considered the material dimension as equally important to the human dimension. Thus, by using a sociomaterial perspective, we aim to broaden the discussion about emergent teaching practices in Nordic classrooms where students use tablets as personal devices. We therefore provide three vignettes from ethnographic classroom studies in Sweden, Finland and Denmark. These illustrate how tablets were used in specific classrooms. In our qualitative analysis of the vignettes, we draw on the concept of patterns of relations to describe the dynamic entanglements of the emergent teaching and learning practices. These are patterns of 1) interrogation, 2) spacemaking and 3) materialisation. Our findings show that tablets do not enter empty learning spaces but are woven into and participate in forming ways of teaching in one-to-one classrooms. Teachers must therefore learn to engage with and manage complex relationships rather than learn how to use an iPad.

This participatory design-based research study addresses the relational character of the physical learning environment and pedagogical practice in the context of a design project carried out at a Swedish upper secondary school. Three teachers initiated the project with the intent to introduce student centred pedagogy and increase active learning. In collaboration with the research team, they designed and furnished a classroom supportive for communication and intense interaction between students, and where students and teachers could work and construct knowledge together. Drawing on observations, video recordings and design conversations with the teachers, the analysis, which is inspired by Actor Network Theory, concentrates on the six month period when the teachers started to teach in the new classroom with focus on their experiences, asking what they experienced as advantageous and challenging. Considering the new learning environment as a network of socio-material relations consisting of a) physical and spatial agents, b) organisational structural agents, and c) teacher/teaching agents, we conclude that whereas some actors corresponded well and contributed to a well-coordinated classroom practice facilitating the project’s intentions, some actors contradicted each other and challenged the same intentions.