The aim of this collaborative project with Swedish school-age educare (SAEC) teachers was to understand and develop teaching, focusing on games, physical activities, and outdoor excursions. Children's insufficient physical activity is a societal problem, and because most Swedish students age 6 to 9 are enrolled in SAEC, this can be a critical educational arena. The concept of powerful knowledge is used to emphasize knowledge that can help students handle contemporary and future challenges, operationalized here by using a typology of roles students are invited to enter by doing activities. The findings show that some roles are more frequent than others, often connected to voluntariness, free time, and teachers' relational approach. The findings also show that in the transformation of teaching, the how question seem more of a dilemma to the SAEC teachers than the what and why questions. We argue that SAEC teaching offers great possibilities to combine different student roles in a way that is more likely to connect knowledge about games, physical activities, and outdoor excursions to their own or others' lives and society. At the same time, teachers experience great challenges in how to teach in a way that meets the specific goals of SAEC education.

Societal changes during the last few decades have given rise to the expansion of extended systems in nations across the world. Despite differences regarding age groups and relations to compulsory school, the task of extended education is primarily to provide participants with possibilities to learn general or specific content and foster their' socioemotional and academic development and learning. In Sweden, the great majority of the younger pupils attend extended education in terms of the school-age educare centres (SAEC), where they meet teaching connected to four different central content defined in the curricula, of which one relates to games, physical activities and outdoor excursions. This study aims to explore and understand how outdoor excursions in school-age educare can be understood in terms of human practising. Based on observations and the philosophy of human practising four themes are discussed: meaningful challenges, content to learn, standards of excellence and time.

Drawing on sociological perspectives on literacy in which reading is viewed upon as a social and cultural practice, situated in the specifics of time and place (Barton & Hamilton, 2012) this symposium will address the significance of volitional reading in peoples’ lives across life stages and diverse national contexts. It attends to an expanded definition of the concept of reading which acknowledges the social, affective and relational dimensions of reading alongside cognitive dimensions (Cremin & Scholes, 2024). The first paper, Informally Talking about Books and Reading (Teresa Cremin & Helen Hendry), will share insights from two studies of UK classrooms that explored children’s book conversations and the social connections among  communities of engaged readers. The second paper, Lived Experiences of Young and Working Adults’ Print and Digital Recreational Reading (Chin Ee Loh), examines Singapore adults’ reading preferences to understand when, why and how they read for leisure, and the platforms through which reading is done. The third paper, Practical performative reading practices in rural woodlands (Stig-Börje Asplund, Birgitta Ljung Egeland, Gabriel Bladh & Martin Stolare) will present results from a three-generational study on rural working-class males in Sweden and their local, place-based reading practices. The symposium constitutes a theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution to contemporary reading research by facilitating nuanced and in depth descriptions of peoples’ volitional reading practices in relation to local and global changes in schools and society.

This paper explores the significance of reading in the lives of three generations of working-class males in four families living in the Swedish rural woodlands. By adopting a life history approach and taking an ecological perspective on reading that links narratives of reading experiences to places, times, and historical changes, the paper addresses how rural males’ reading practices intersect with ways of living in Swedish rural woodlands, and in what ways they have been maintained and changed across generations. Findings show that the males engage in practical performative reading practices where reading is transformed into embodied activities in which knowledge practices and embodied skills, entangled with socio-material and historical cultures, are constructed and reconstructed through intergenerational repetitions. In this way, reading emerges as an essential, community-building, and situated social practice through which the males, across generations, construct and reconstruct place-based knowledge practices vital for creating a sustainable lifestyle in the Swedish rural woodlands. The paper contributes insights into the role of reading in the construction of rural places, in formations of rural masculinities, and for the practices of staying, as well as how reading is influenced by the specific socio-cultural, historical, and material spaces available. 

International migration creates a need for second language (L2) education in majority languages. The language programme Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) offers basic education in Swedish as an L2 to newly arrived adult migrants in Sweden. The aim of the study presented here is to explore the stability and dynamics of teachers’ beliefs about the education offered to students studying Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is part of an action research project that included teachers and students at four SFI schools. This sub-study builds on individual and focus group interviews with teachers from these schools, which are analysed though content analysis. The theoretical base for the study is the beliefs of teachers and the stability and dynamics thereof. For these teachers, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic meant an abrupt switch from in-person instruction in the classroom to various combinations of digital education and in-person instruction in smaller groups. The beliefs of these teachers remained stable concerning their students’ needs, such as the importance of social interaction, varied exercises and frequent feedback. At the same time, they showed creativity in developing new forms of teaching. The situation was stressful for teachers and a higher level of stability could have allowed them to prioritise in other ways. In these politically and economically challenging times, LESLLA students are in even greater need of efficient and empowering education, not least access to digital tools and competence of high quality. We conclude that the possibilities for the schools of handling the crisis that the pandemic caused depended on the professional competence of individual teachers as well as their ability to act independently. 

This study investigates how language requirements for residency and citizenship influence the professional identities and sense of agency of introduction program language teachers throughout Scandinavia. While Denmark introduced formal language requirements two decades ago, language requirements were effectuated in Norway starting in 2017. In Sweden, requirements have been proposed, but not introduced. The data comprises narrative interviews with 24 experienced language and literacy teachers. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy theory and narrative positioning analysis, the study shows that the introduction of formal requirements represents a turning point in teachers' professional narratives that are recognized as a gradual reduction of agency and a narrowing of the space where professional identities can be negotiated. Whereas the Swedish teachers largely identify as students' agents, Norwegian and Danish language teachers to a larger extent, yet partly unwillingly, negotiate their professional roles at the intersection between policy and professional standards and in dialog with the policy demands.

This paper explores the ethical challenges and possibilities of conducting responsible and transformative translanguaging pedagogy in adult education for second language learners with limited previous experience of schooling. We identify and explore ethical dilemmas in teachers’ interaction and multilingual teaching practices. The data was produced in a linguistic ethnography and action research project. It consists of classroom observations and interviews with teachers who teach in the programme Swedish for Immigrants (SFI). The teachers express and embody ambivalence in relation to the students’ use of their whole linguistic repertoires and the students are not always treated as competent to make informed decisions about their own use of linguistic repertoires. This touches on issues of citizenship and democracy and here the framework ethics of care offers context-specific ways of understanding and responding to the ethical challenges of multilingual teaching.