Powerful knowledge equips students with the capacity to engage with systematic, disciplinary thinking, to imagine futures that are not yet conceived and think what is yet to be thought. Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms explores how teachers develop such knowledge in classrooms by transforming disciplinary understandings through subject teaching that responds to the educational needs of society.

Drawing on Bernstein’s concept of recontextualisation and theories of teacher agency, the book examines how teachers navigate the boundaries between academic disciplines, school subjects and everyday knowledge. Through empirical case studies from England, Finland, and Sweden, it illustrates how teachers’ decisions are shaped by national expectations, institutional frameworks and classroom dynamics. Combining Anglophone and Nordic traditions in subject teaching with curriculum theory and classroom research, the book offers a theoretically grounded yet practical account of how teachers recontextualise knowledge. It develops new insights into teacher agency and recontextualisation which are highly relevant to teacher education, curriculum design and educational policy. By focusing on real-life teaching across a range of subjects, the book deepens our understanding of how powerful knowledge is brought into classrooms and how teachers can be supported in this vital work.

This article aims to contribute to an in-depth discussion about what teachers' educational videos on social media mean from the students' perspective and to explore further questions related to the broader purposes of education. Based on a student survey, in which a total of 1065 lower and upper secondary students participated, we analyse usage patterns and students' understandings of teachers' educational videos on social media as resources for learning. Based on Drotner's work on discourses about informal learning, students' answers to open-ended questions about educational videos on social media were analysed, using thematic content analysis. Four main themes were found, concerning positive and negative aspects in relation to individual learning, social media versus regular teaching, student diversity and a connected generation. The analysis shows how a functionalist discourse is dominant, where the use of educational videos is seen as a means of achieving better results. The findings highlight that teachers' educational videos have implications for the individual student, for the relationship to teaching and regular education and to broader societal implications as pedagogical relations become embedded into social media's platform economies.

With connected screens, human sociality and digital technology has hybridised in most domains of everyday life, including education. This article addresses methodological and ethical challenges in investigating hybrid situations containing students' screen-mediated communication, both within and beyond the classroom. Drawing on two-year long fieldwork in a multi-sited participatory research project involving students aged 14-16 at four lower secondary schools in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, we employ a participatory hybrid ethnographic approach. Three different but intertwined student positions in relation to the research task emerged: as co-researchers, as informants and as learners, contributing to insights from the students' perspectives. The study highlights the importance of continuous informed consent, student agency, and context-sensitive methods in ethically sustainable research. We argue that methodological flexibility is essential for capturing the complexity of hybrid social practices and for developing participatory research practices that are responsive to both student perspectives and diverse educational settings.

Student access to digital writing technology has become increasingly prominent across various school subjects and education levels. Promoting a techno-optimist approach to solving pedagogical challenges, access has predominantly been foregrounded as something that students are 'provided', that is, access is to be uptaken by human individuals. In this article, we trouble this notion through exploring the affective potentials of access to writing technology. Advocating relational thinking, access is understood to hold multiple potentials in students' writing practices. We focus on students' task-related writing on screens, in the school subjects L1 (Language and Literature) and Social Studies in lower secondary classrooms in Finland and Sweden. Drawing on video-data, the analysis shows how access holds the potential of becoming sticky, slippery, and smooth in students' writing, further engaging students and teachers in sociotechnical care work in classrooms.

This article examines, from a comparative subject didactic perspective, the use of digital platforms in Swedish upper secondary schools, focusing on the significance in three school subjects: Swedish, mathematics, and history. Based on video recordings from 47 lessons, the analysis compares recontextualization of subject knowledge across the three subjects. Departing from Bernstein’s concepts of the pedagogic device and horizontal versus vertical knowledge structures, the analysis focus on how dimensions of textualization and templatization play out differently in the three subjects. The analysis reveals that the learning platforms become integrated into the established subject practices of Swedish, mathematics and history respectively and is thereby shaped by the different subject traditions. At the same time, the platform structure in itself also influences how knowledge can become organized, accessed, and presented. Findings point at similarities and differences in relation to planning and expectations of school performance, classroom interaction, text practices, and the broader digital context in relation to the learning platform. The results emphasize the importance of teacher agency in platform-based subject teaching, where platforms seem to push toward increased individualization of school work that might constrain deeper explanations and support for students’ critical thinking. 

This study focuses on the distribution of agency in software-based spell checking in L1 (Language and Literature)teaching. Drawing on video-ethnographic data from a Swedish-medium school in Finland, the research shows thatbuilt-in spell checkers can both afford and constrain students’ digital writing. Through examining the micro-dynam-ics between human and material agency in use of spell checking, the analysis illustrates that the software does notalways work as expected from the user’s perspective, and hence becomes framed as a ‘trouble source’, assigned ‘lin-guistic authority’, and held accountable for not meeting human intentionality. We argue that technology’s inherentfunctions and properties play a central role in the co-constitution of agency in digital writing practices, and call for agreater awareness of generic spell checkers’ opportunities and limitations in teaching and learning.

The aim of this study is to investigate multilingual students’ identity constructions in their participation in different digital literacy practices. Theoretically, we depart from a translanguaging perspective and a social understanding of literacy from the field of New Literacy Studies. The data was constructed through qualitative interviews with eleven multilingual students in Sweden, and analysed through positioning analysis. The results show that the students use their multilingual repertoires in a variety of digital contexts for entertainment, learning, and socialising purposes. From the positioning analysis, three recurring themes emerged: positionings in relation to i. their heritage, ii. notions of ‘Swedishness”, and iii. transcultural identities. However, there is a range of variations in students’ approaches to their linguistic repertoires, which is further discussed in terms of identity constructions, as well as what teachers in monolingual schools settings can learn from the students’ everyday digital literacy practices and identity processes.

Lärares undervisning sker idag inte bara i det fysiska klassrummet eller genom digitala lärplattformar. Lärare vänder sig också till elever på olika digitala arenor som Youtube och Tiktok. Inom ramen för VR-projektet ”Lärare och influencer? Sociala medier som arena för yrkesutövning” (VR 2021-03948) undersöker vi elevers användning av material som lärare publicerar på sociala medier, vilket lärandeinnehåll som erbjuds samt vilka mål och motiv lärare har för denna yrkesutövning. I föreliggande rapport redovisas projektets första delstudie, en enkätstudie som besvarats av 1 156 elever på mellanstadiet, högstadiet och gymnasiet. 

Fyra av fem elever på mellanstadiet och högstadiet uppger att de tar hjälp av material som lärare publicerar på sociala medier för sitt skolarbete. På gymnasiet är motsvarande andel nio av tio elever. Cirka 20 % av eleverna använder material som lärare publicerar på sociala medier dagligen eller varje vecka. Dessa elever betraktar vi som höganvändare. Gruppen höganvändare tar hjälp av denna resurs i betydligt fler ämnen än vad gruppen låganvändare gör. I båda grupperna dominerar ämnet matematik och framförallt anser sig eleverna få hjälp med att förklara någonting på ett tydligt sätt. Vi ser inga stora systematiska skillnader i användningsmönster mellan flickor och pojkar i enkätsvaren, bortsett från att andelen pojkar är något högre än andelen flickor bland höganvändarna på högstadiet och gymnasiet. Av de lärare som namnges är de flesta män och merparten finns inom matematik och no-ämnen. Ett tiotal namn och konton återkommer i elevernas svar. Vi menar att dessa lärare kan betraktas som influencers inom sitt ämnesområde.