Digitalization in Sweden has been promoted for six decades through national policies aimed at integrating technology into education. However, this ambitious effort has often faced a gap between political goals and actual classroom practices. After the significant “back-to-basics” movement following 2022, which included removing digital requirements and encouraging printed textbooks, this study explores the underlying epistemological and ideological conflicts that emerged. The main goal of the study is to analyze how different perspectives on technology and knowledge are expressed and addressed within the core legal documents of Swedish compulsory education. The methodology employed is Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), emphasizing the macro-level social, structural, and ideological roles of the curriculum language. The corpus includes a deliberately chosen collection of Swedish compulsory education curricula (Lpo94, Lgr11, Lgr22) and their legislative amendments (SKOLFS regulations), from 1994 to 2025. The study traces the policy development through three conflicting discursive phases: the Technocratic-Instrumental discourse, the Digital Competence Hegemony, and the final Recenterment Counter-Discourse. Findings reveal a clear discursive shift, where technology moved from being a practical tool to being an abstract, systemic necessity, culminating in its dramatic legislative removal by the state. The final policy reversal is seen as a direct ideological critique of the previous policy, fundamentally questioning the value of digital resources and re-centering traditional, material knowledge sources, like textbooks. This highlights curriculum law as a key arena for high-stakes political conflict over core educational values.

Our chapter draws attention to (i) the relevance of netnographic work that is framed through a loitering, wandering stance and (ii) the work that contemporary K-12 educational institutions do through their digital presence. Netnographical approaches enable researchers to more freely inquire into the “what” and “how” issues regarding educational institutions presentations of themselves and the “who” that is included/excluded in this work. This means that we highlight the relevance of researching schools’ websites as their windows to the world that are simultaneously windows that shape the world netizens, i.e., citizens who inhabit the internet, meet. Our analytical-methodological points of departure build on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives, SWaSP, framing that brings together entangled sociocultural, dialogical perspectives on learning and communication and decolonial, southern framings on communication and identity. Transcending mainstream analysis (for instance, multimodal and linguistic landscape analysis), we illustrate the potential of doing netnography in non-conventional ways by focusing on the mapping of contemporary schools in terms of the following: the what of education that is made relevant, how this information is presented and the who that educational webpages target and/or make invisible. Given the access anyone anywhere potentially has to schools’ websites, such a point of departure illuminates how educational matters are communicated in the contemporary digital-analogue world. The chapter illustrates a curiosity-driven netnographic research stance through data generated in a specific project during the COVID-19 pandemic and against the backdrop of our long-term engagement in the domain of digitalization processes. Given Swedish national digitalization initiatives (that have seen major shifts since 2017), this chapter uses an analysis of 11 compulsory and upper-secondary schools’ websites—undertaken strategically—based upon the extensive digitalization of schools in one of Sweden’s larger municipalities.

The study presented in this paper aims to map and illuminate theoretical, methodological, and thematic areas that mark the existing scholarship related to the digital presence of higher education, mainly through universities own websites. 118 articles were identified for further in-depth analysis based on an overarching first-level analysis of over 700 articles through systematic searches in early 2023. Data-sessions across three primary analysis phases enabled understanding the benefits and conundrums of using ai (Rayyan) in (n)ethnographic analysis work where the data constitutes of existing scholarship. Our analytical-methodological points of departure for carrying out this study build on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing that brings together (i) sociocultural, dialogical perspectives on learning and communication and (ii) decolonial, alternative framings on communication and identity. Results of the digital communication by educational institutions through their websites highlights a paucity of engagement with or a lack of explication regarding theoretical framings in the existing scholarship and an alignment with a “market turn”. Other findings highlight that the existing scholarship needs to connect more clearly with global-centric perspectives, not least to attend to contemporary challenges.

In teacher education mentoring pre-service teachers is a critical factor. With background in research around mentoring pre-service teachers in connection to a training school project, this study aims to contribute knowledge about and identify mentors' experiences of mentorship in the setting of a training school. Through focus group interviews and semi-structured interviews, foregone by a survey aiming at identifying general views of mentoring, helping to create interview guides, data has been collected for 11 months. Through an interpretative phenomenological analysis, the results show two key themes emerging from mentoring in a training school where the first is strengthening the role as a mentor through three distinct experiences: collegiate learning, structure, and competence development. The second theme, challenging in the role as a mentor, involves four distincttdslevelions of experiences: assessment, planning (linked to the mentoring situation), workload and diversity. The conclusions show that the general experience is positive, but that there are some factors concerning stress and workload; a reworked structure that need to be put into consideration.

The study presented in this paper maps schools through their digital presence, in terms of the “what” of education that is made relevant, “how” this information is presented (i.e., communicated) and “who” their webpages target. This mapping considers the “languaging landscape” of the webpages. The study aims to illuminate how educational matters are communicated digitally engaging with local government and independent contemporary schools’ digital presence. The findings are based upon the analysis of 11 compulsory and upper-secondary schools’ websites from one of Sweden’s ten largest cities. This region was strategically selected to create a diverse dataset based upon the extensive digitalization of schools since the turn of the century based upon the explicit 2017 national digitalization initiatives. Our analytical-methodological points of departure build on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing that brings together (i) sociocultural, dialogical perspectives on learning and communication and (ii) decolonial, southern framings on communication and identity. Our preliminary findings indicate that there is a discrepancy between local government and independent compulsory schools in how they position themselves in comparison to the upper-secondary local government, regional, and independent schools. The latter’s digital presence is similar across the formal domains of institutional presentations and their online social media presence. Marginal differentiation has been noted between local governmental and independent schools’ strategies for recruiting pupils. This, we argue, relates to the specific Swedish educational organization and management ethos wherein public resources are allocated to all schools based on the volume of pupils they successfully recruit.

This pilot study’s aim is to understand how teaching and learning, in the nation-state of Sweden, is organized and carried out in 2022, with focus on the use ofdigital technologies in the classroom. The pilot has been conducted through an ethnographical and phenomenological approach. Participant observation, alongwith natural conversations and individual interviews constitutes the data in this study. Four teachers and seven different classes (175 students) have beenincluded in this study and a total of 20 hours have been spent in the classroom, observing, and talking to both teachers and students. Six hours of semistructured interviews have been conducted with the four different teachers divided into eight different interviews. The conclusions state that technology exists inthe classroom and is utilized by both teachers and students if the infrastructure is in place. Albeit as to what purpose digital tools are used, is not always well-defined. Moreover, there are obstacles to cope with regarding infrastructure, time, and resources. The organization of teaching and learning does not seem tohave changed albeit the tools might have. 

Although work placement mentoring has been examined extensively in research, there are no studies drawing on critical discourse analysis combined with discourse theory, aiming to examine the discursive construction of quality aspects. Seven mentor pairs in Swedish teacher training schools were interviewed individually during student work placement. Focus group interviews were conducted with eleven student teachers. The results reveal a consensus on a general level. The significant discrepancies are intertwined to different subject positions among student teachers and mentors, thus linked to different role expectations. A likely explanation can be found in the differences between professional and academic knowledge traditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has elicited a shift from campus classrooms to distance education in higher education worldwide, shaping not only students’ experiences, but also those of teachers, especially those who never have taught online. In addition, the pandemic created a meta-context that has positioned distance education as something different from previous efforts. This study aimed to investigate higher education teachers’ experiences during the transition from classroom to online teaching by using a collective auto-ethnography method based on 13 personal stories from Swedish faculty. For the abductive approach in the analysis, a framework that combines lifelong learning theory with the context collapse concept has been applied. The disjuncture that the pandemic has elicited created a situation in which teachers had to make sense of the fact that their previous experiences did not completely fit the new situation. Context collapse, a term used to describe encounters with many audiences in social media, has been introduced to highlight the clash between professional and private contexts in online educational platforms. Based on lifelong learning theories, we suggest that context collapse should be examined in terms of how it can help improve higher education, as it holds the potential to include the entire person – body and mind – in education.

The transition from analogue campus-based learning to digital distance learning during the Covid-19 pandemic affected our society in many ways. This study set out to explore the experiences of 30 pre-service teachers when transitioning to digital distance learning. The pre-service teachers (PSTs) participated in a series of focus-group interviews that were subsequently analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results indicate that the transition to digital distance learning worked well and that the technology that was used performed satisfactorily. However, the PSTs experienced both opportunities and obstacles with respect to distance learning. The opportunities associated with digital distance learning were reported to be instantiated by teacher-led ‘flipped classroom’ teaching sessions and the additional freedom that was enjoyed by the PSTs (in both space and time). An obstacle associated with digital learning was the feeling that important aspects of interpersonal interaction disappeared. The PSTs remained sedentary and isolated at home, and the learning experience became somewhat dysfunctional when the teaching was not clearly structured and teacher-lead. The study concludes that it is not possible to replace IRL (‘in real life’) teaching entirely with digital distance learning. However, the results suggest that a hybrid form of teaching or elements of digital teaching can work well as a complement to future campus-based courses.