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Sustainability and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are evolving concepts shaped by varying interests, influencing perceptions of sharedvalues and future visions. This chapter examines ESD policy and its integrationinto teacher education (TE) curricula and university policy discourses in Sweden. Using a discursive institutionalism approach, the study explores the content of policy ideas and the interactive processes of policy coordination and communication. Despite Sweden’s long history of ESD engagement, the interpretation and enactment of the ESD framework remain sites of compromise and negotiation. Higher education institutions (HEIs) face challenges in conceptualising and evaluating ESD, with limited representation in course syllabi. International research also highlights that climate change education frameworks are the weakest in teacher training. Focusing on TE in Sweden, the study explores: What are the policy ideas on ESD as formulated in TE curricula? How are ESD policy ideas discursively constructed and communicated across different institutional policy discourses? The analysis uses data from two Swedish universities, including 52 syllabi and six key policies. Findings suggest that while ESD ideas are well elaborated in university policy discourse, their representation in the TE curriculum is narrower. The social dimension appears to stand out, while the action competence domain and transformative education are not highly noticeable. Meanwhile, there exists some degree of tension between interdisciplinarity and specialisation, and international and local outlooks, mirroring conflicting priorities between academia, the economy, society and global and local needs. The chapter provides insights into how ESD is interpreted, negotiated and communicated in Swedish TE.

This chapter analyses policy learning about higher education (HE). It draws on Dunlop and Radaelli’s typology of learning and the use of policy knowledge that contributes to the diffusion of HE policies within and across countries. It develops an account of learning through a comparative analysis that examines the implementation of the Bologna Process, internationalisation policies and legal provisions for the recognition of qualifications, with examples from Sweden and the UK. The chapter argues that reflexive and hierarchical learning have both soft and hard versions which can overlap and be linked over time. While reflexive learning is associated with the development of HE policies at a national  and primarily education institutional level, hierarchical lessons, are accepted by national policy makers and resemble policy transfer. 

This article presents an analysis of responses to some of the mutually reinforcing challenges facing European higher education (HE) systems. In a context of ‘polycrises’, defined by European Commission President Juncker (2016) along the lines of economic, financial, social, and security challenges across different policy domains, HE responses have been varied and reflecting the peculiarities of national contexts. We focus on Swedish shifts in discourses and practices in relation to HE internationalisation, as a response to the perceived geopolitical and security threats. These crises have produced policies with distinct effects on universities, and on individual academics. The article does two things: First, it presents a critical analysis of the crisis context across European HE policy and in the national and HE context of Sweden. Second, drawing on large qualitative research, it discusses the consequences of these crises on academic identities, with a particular focus on academic mobility. The article contributes to knowledge on the experience of individual academics who develop careers in often difficult circumstances and highlights the need to integrate individual experiences and perceptions with HE-wide policies and discourses. 

Across Europe, young people and older adults are experiencing lengthy and increasingly complex transitions to the workplace, building and changing careers. Guidance interventions aim to help them navigate their trajectories through education, life, and work, in processes that reflect the deep integration between the public and the private, the individual and social, the emotional and the cognitive. Career guidance has attracted high levels of international and national policy attention, in what Sultana (2022) calls ‘policy busyness’ to respond to expected (lifelong) transitions of individuals to a knowledge-based economy. Such policies often draw on concerns around mismatches between people’s education and training choices and the needs of the labour market, as well as assumptions about the young people’s knowledge of career alternatives. National-level policies often design career guidance that aims to address social justice concerns but, instead, end up pursuing liberal models of guidance that responsibilize the individual, or allow large scope for interpretation and local implementations that end up exacerbating inequalities between regions and schools. This collection consists of articles attempting to redress gaps in research knowledge around governance of career guidance in comparative studies that map the field and generate theorized accounts of systems and their effects.

Private international education is on the rise, but we still have limited knowledge on how different commercial actors operate in this field and how it affects local teachers and their work in the schools abroad. Swedish school companies have been active in exporting schooling in the international arena, including “Swedish” education models. In this article, we examine one company and their operations in India. We explore the interpretations of the company education model by teachers in the Indian schools, and how this affects their professional capacity. Mixed qualitative methods of interviews, on-site school visits and documentary reviews, were used to examine the possibilities for teachers to exercise professional agency within their working environment. Our findings show that teachers operate within a highly structured pedagogical environment characterised by a given curriculum, a centralised learning platform and training programme, and a set of dominant discourses around values and teaching practices. Teachers are expected to embrace a new professional identity in a process of discarding past experiences and adopting the new professional language given by the company's particular education model. In willingly embracing the company discourses and expectations, teachers’ agency tends to be constrained.

This article explores the themes of academic mobility/immobility in Swedish higher education. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, we provide an analysis of mobility decisions and experiences, across disciplinary fields and career stages. We identify narratives of transformative and pragmatic mobility experiences, and the (often high) costs involved in (im)mobility, in relation to career progression, emotional and relational dimensions of academics’ lives. We highlight the significance of university and national contexts for successful career construction.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is changing across Europe, reflecting multiple policy intentions and assumptions about education in early years, and the role of the state in supporting, funding and regulating its institutions. In this article, we examine the evolution of ECEC comparatively in Finland and Sweden, and we explore the shifts in goals, governance mechanisms and policy ideas that have characterised reforms in the sector. We draw on an analysis of policy documents, and argue that the incremental changes achieved over the last 50 years have been in response to changing goals assigned to ECEC and ideas about its roles and functions as part of the welfare and education sectors. The power of ideas in effecting policy change is tempered by established institutional framings, yet is visible in the early dominance of child-centred ideas, and the later controversies over the emergent labour-market and education-driven rationales of the post-2010s.

Preparing student teachers for work in increasingly diverse Nordic schools has brought attention to thevalue of internationalisation that, until recently, was debated primarily in other disciplinary contexts withinhigher education settings. In this article, we examine how internationalisation is introduced and integrated in two teacher education providers in Finland and Sweden. Drawing on internationalisation as a policy idea with distinct cognitive and normative properties, we explore rationales, values and attitudes that underpin internationalisation positions and practices. The comparative study identifies different ways that the two providers introduced internationalisation into their existing practices, and, to some extent, different meanings and emphases internationalisation has in the two institutional settings. In both cases, the filtering ofthis policy idea and its embeddedness into teacher education is contingent upon curricular and organisational structures; university and faculty leadership; attitudes and commitments of academic staff. 

Die zunehmende Diversität nordeuropäischer Schulen, für die Lehramtsstudierende ausgebildet werden,lenkt die Aufmerksamkeit auf den Wert von Internationalisierung, die bis vor Kurzem vor allem in anderendisziplinären Kontexten der Hochschulbildung diskutiert wurde. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir, wieInternationalisierung in zwei Lehrerausbildungsinstitutionen in Finnland und Schweden implementiert wird.Unter Rückgriff auf den Begriff der Internationalisierung als Policy-Konzept mit spezifischen kognitiven undnormativen Dimensionen untersuchen wir die zugrunde liegenden Begründungen, Wertvorstellungen undEinstellungen, die Internationalisierungsstrategien und -praktiken prägen. Die vergleichende Analyse zeigt,dass die beiden Institutionen Internationalisierung auf unterschiedliche Weise in ihre bestehenden Strukturen integriert haben und dass dem Konzept in den beiden institutionellen Kontexten teilweise unterschiedliche Bedeutungen und Schwerpunkte zugeschrieben werden. In beiden Fällen wird die Einbettung diesespolitischen Konzepts in der Lehrerausbildung durch curriculare und organisatorische Strukturen, die Führungsstrategien von Universitäten und Fakultäten sowie die Haltungen und das Engagement des wissenschaftlichen Personals bedingt.

In this article we examine the European Semester as an innovative form of policy coordination, with distinct effects on education and skills policies for Member States. We analyse the Semester's framing of education policy, and examine its manifestations in Spain and Sweden, two countries considered to be different in their approach to education. Drawing on a policy instrumentation approach and interviews with policy actors and documentary analysis, our research suggests that while the Semester has given education policy a significant place within the EU's governance, economic rationales for education are clearly dominant in the process. Still, we identify underpinning logics that strengthen the social and educational perspectives represented in the Semester, although these are still treated as productive forces for labour market integration. In addition, there is a strengthening of collaboration between the European Commission and Member States, but also tensions between different parts of the Commission over the definition and direction of education policy.

Debates around internationalisation-at-home (IaH) focus on the benefits accrued to students from the integration of internationalisation dimensions in their studies, curricular developments and interactions with international students, but, with scant attention to how these vary in different subject areas. In this article, we focus on the disciplinary experiences and framings of internationalisation from the perspectives of students in two Swedish universities. Drawing on 67 interviews with students sampled across different subject areas, we examine how the disciplinary definitions of study objects and pedagogic approaches filter the students’ experiences and shape their views around IaH, and their ambitions for the future. Our findings suggest first, a discipline-specific set of positionings regarding the nature of subject areas as lenses through which internationalisation is understood. Second, the students hold strong views around the contribution of IaH in strengthening the disciplines themselves. In addition, the student voices paint a dynamic picture of internationalisation positions, not always consistent with disciplinary stereotypes.