Det finns många krav och förhoppningar på skolan. Ett väl utbildat folk och professionella yrkesutövare ses ofta som en vaccination mot en antidemokratisk samhällsutveckling. Det kan också ses som en investering för konkurrenskraft och ekonomisk tillväxt. Lösningar på både stora och små problem pekar också ut rektorer och lärare som viktiga yrkesprofessioner och aktörer. De förväntas ha en roll när det gäller saker som att utveckla bättre matvanor, trafikkunskaper, sexualvanor och folkvett. 

Länge sågs trygghet och studiero råda i den svenska skolan och våra elever presterade i topp på internationella kunskapsmätningar. I början av 2000-talet började rapporterna om läget i den svenska skolan handla mer om sjunkande kunskapsresultat och ökad otrygghet och studieoro. Ett stort ansvar i att återskapa den svenska skolans goda anseende lades på skolans personal. Speciella förhoppningar ställdes på att stärka rektorers professionaliseringsprocess så att de skulle utvecklas i sitt yrkesutövande för att bättre kunna leda skolans förbättringsarbete. Välutbildade rektorer sågs som en framgångsfaktor och 2010 genomfördes en reformering av skolledarutbildningen. Utbildningen är en obligatorisk befattningsutbildning på tre år som omfattar 30 högskolepoäng. Det finns en förhoppning att det som rektorerna lär sig inom rektorsprogrammet ska leda till att de utvecklar sitt professionella yrkesutövande och att en logisk följd är att skolors måluppfyllelse förbättras.

This paper presents an empirical study on leadership actions related to education for sustainable development, i.e. education that embraces ecological and socio-economic perspectives to foster students’ awareness of the importance of long-term sustainable development. The aim is to identify leadership actions that enable or constrain permanent implementation of such educational perspectives. Empirically, the study is based on data acquired in a school improvement project on sustainability, involving five schools in a Swedish municipality during the years 2016 to 2021. Data were collected in two rounds, in 2018 and 2020, through interviews with school leaders. A theoretical framework including the coupling mechanisms concept and previously identified organizational routines is applied in analysis of the rich data acquired to explore the school leaders’ reported actions, associated routines and their outcomes. The results reveal leadership actions that enable, and others that constrain, long-term establishment of education for sustainable development. The study confirms the importance of early establishment of a holistic educational idea embracing education for sustainable development, and both communication and feedback systems for leaders on its compliance. The study also shows the value of collegial structures and transformational leadership actions that prevent the fading or failure of intended implementation.

This study examines how communication is formalised and enacted in two Swedish schools that have succeeded in their ESD implementation processes. Although schools are widely recognised as key drivers of sustainability, integrating Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into school practices remains challenging. Previous research has addressed leadership and whole-school approaches, but the communicative dimensions of ESD implementation are still underexplored, particularly from the perspective of middle leading. Drawing on secondary analysis of three empirical studies conducted between 2023 and 2025, this research is conducted from a middle leading perspective, studying teachers in their roles as ESD facilitators. The analysis focuses on both the organisation of communication and the communicative qualities that support ESD practices. The findings show that a successful ESD implementation process is closely linked to formalised communication at multiple levels and in various formats. Broader inclusive conversations help establish shared understanding across the school, while smaller recurring communication sites provide spaces for deeper engagement and teaching transformations. This study underscores the critical role of communication in enabling ESD. It contributes to research on professional learning by showing how teachers in middle leading positions can drive sustainable change through intentional and structured communicative practices.

This study investigates the experiences of teachers in middle leading positions who worked as ESD facilitators during a three-year whole school approach project designed to implement education for sustainable development (ESD). Five schools in a Swedish municipality participated in the project to integrate ESD into their organisation and teaching practice. Project activities involved school leaders, teachers, and ESD facilitators, with the facilitators taking part in the design of the development process, workshop activities and content, and facilitating their school’s internal work. The aim of this study is to generate insight into their roles as facilitators of transformation in line with ESD, and how they can be supported to fulfil their roles. The analysis used a framework of sustainability change agents, identifying that approaches to change aligned with technician, mediator, convincer, and concerned explorer types. The findings highlight the importance of contextual factors–specifically, a shared vision, collaborative culture and organisational structures, and active school leadership in shaping ESD facilitators’ ability to fulfil their roles.

It is widely accepted that professional learning is a crucial aspect of the ongoing professional practice of educators. But how should this professional learning take place, and what arrangements enable and constrain practices associated with educator learning? In this article, we explore two case studies of action research projects: one undertaken with Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) teachers, and the other undertaken with Swedish principals. Using the theory of practice architectures and the Professional Learning Framework (see text), we consider what action research team members identified that they learnt through the action research projects, and what enabled and constrained that learning. The findings highlight five key themes that enabled and constrained educator professional learning and supported educators in making positive changes in their professional practice: power and solidarity, trust, recognition, agency and time. Further, reflection and collaboration were also highlighted as important factors in supporting educator professional learning. We conclude that action research can enable educator professional learning, can support the contextualised understanding of what works, how it works and for whom it works, and can enable educators to make positive changes in their professional practices

The aim of this study is to explore what happened – and why – in a collaboration between ourselves as researchers and school leaders from two different schools in Sweden. The theory of practice architectures is used to frame the study. The goal of the collaboration was to enhance the scientific foundation of school practices, which motivated the use of action research as the methodological approach for designing the collaboration. The results allow us to propose a number of critical aspects to take into consideration when establishing a collaboration between researchers and school leaders. The first aspect concerns aiming for co-ownership and an equivalent collaboration. These involve trustful and respectful relations, empowering individuals in their professional roles. The second aspect is linked to attention to local infrastructures and the importance of organisational settings that facilitate a holistic approach and a shared understanding of the aims of both the research and the collaboration. The third and final aspect is related to school leaders’ legitimacy to organise research-based school improvements. School leaders are responsible for educational quality in schools, and this makes them best suited for leading school improvements. However, theoretical frameworks and methods introduced by researchers can support the ambition to enhance the scientific foundation of school practices. We advocate the development of practices inhabited by school practitioners and school researchers within the educational complex. In addition, we promote the creation of healthy environments in the form of arrangements that create spaces where equivalent collaborations, shared responsibility and co-ownership may grow.

Pedagogical leadership is increasingly emphasised in education policies and leadership standards. Yet conceptualisations of pedagogy and pedagogical leadership vary, from a focus on compliance that operationalises the role of formal school leaders, through to notions of pedagogical leadership as a praxis-oriented practice. This paper focuses on pedagogical leading practices in school settings in Sweden and Australia. Utilising the theory of practice architectures, it explores how historical notions of pedagogical leadership have changed over time in the two countries.

Findings show that there are different depths of pedagogical understanding and differences between understandings of individual and collective pedagogy in policy, school leadership and practice in Australia. The traditional way of understanding pedagogical leadership in Sweden is being challenged with ideas that focus on efficiency and student outcomes and where the school’s principal is foremost seen as the school’s pedagogical leader. There is a decentering of pedagogy in both countries in which pedagogy is viewed as a model of individual attainment over the collective moral responsibility of education.

Both cases raise questions about the state of educational leadership and pedagogical leadership globally and the decentering of pedagogy from students, the ultimate purpose of pedagogical practice. Educators need to reclaim the original meaning of pedagogy in order to reclaim the core purpose of education for shaping human society. How pedagogy and pedagogical leadership is understood in context will determine the extent to which they are seen as praxis-oriented practices. Properly understanding pedagogy is one way of decentring the popular role title ‘pedagogical leader’.

This paper aims to examine principals’ emotional, and often invisible, work (cf. Wilkinson, 2021). Recent studies undertaken in a long-term network collaboration, between school principals in low socioeconomic status (SES) Swedish communities and educational researchers, show how leadership is learned and shaped in and by context specific circumstances, entailing several challenges. The most prominent challenges are connected to a) high population mobility, b) comprehensive linguistic and cultural diversity, c) comprehensive knowledge diversity, and d) an intense problem complexity; a dense flow of extraordinary incidents in and around the schools (Hirsh et al., 2023). Although not explicitly elaborated on in these studies, the results also indicate that emotions are a prominent, albeit often unspoken, part of the principals' work.

 A practice architectures lens is here combined with the notion of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983). Principal leadership i.e., leading is here explored as a practice that consists of sayings, doings and relatings conditioning and conditioned by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements (Kemmis et al., 2014). From a practice perspective, emotions ‘do not belong to individuals but – in the form of knowledge – to practices’ (Reckwitz, 2002 p. 254).  

We used the above-mentioned findings (Hirsh et al., 2023) and carried out a re-analysis of the same data, this time specifically aimed at finding discursive manifestations of emotional labor. Additionally, the new analysis is directed towards understanding and explaining principals’ emotional labor in the light of the practice theory.    

The empirical data consists of 20 principals’ peer group-dialogues over three years. The conversations of their everyday practices were recorded and examined (Hirsh et al., 2023). In this paper, five audio-recorded sessions (each approx. 2h from 2020, 2021) were analyzed.   

Our preliminary results show how the intertwined site-specific arrangements conditioning the leading practices became visible, challenged and re-negotiated in the principals’ peer-dialogues, and how the principals navigate and learn ‘how to go on’ based in the emotional labor. These results suggest that emotional labor can be understood as multi-dimensioned conditions of educational leading practices, sometimes perceived as a burden for the individual but indeed also as important, site-based practice knowledge that gives principal work joy and meaning.   

Further, the methodological approach in the seminar series - the peer-dialogues – seems to empower principals to (propose) educational changes to politicians and municipality organizer (cf. Hirsh et al, 2023), a contribution to both (Nordic) research and practitioner communities. 

References 

Hirsh et al., 2023 Far from the generalised norm: Recognising the interplay between contextual particularities and principals’ leadership in schools in low-socio-economic status Communities. Educational Management Administration & Leadership. 1-18. 

 Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.  

Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing Practices, Changing Education. Springer.  

 Wilkinson, J. (2021). Educational Leadership through a Practice Lens. Springer. 

This paper examines principals’ emotional, and often invisible, work (Hochschild, 1983; cf. Wilkinson, 2021). Recent studies undertaken in a long-term network collaboration between school principals in low socioeconomic status Swedish communities and educational researchers, show how leadership is learned and shaped in and by context specific circumstances, entailing several challenges. The most prominent challenges are connected to a) high population mobility, b) comprehensive linguistic and cultural diversity, c) comprehensive knowledge diversity, and d) an intense problem complexity, i.e., a dense flow of extraordinary incidents in and around the schools (Hirsh et al., 2023). Although not explicitly elaborated on in these studies, the results also indicate that emotions are a prominent, albeit often unspoken, part of the principals' work. In this study, we re-analyse the same data that led to the above-mentioned findings, with specific interest directed towards finding discursive manifestations of emotional labour. Additionally, the new analysis is directed towards understanding and explaining principals’ emotional labour through a practice architectures lens. Principals’ leading is explored as a practice that consists of sayings, doings and relatings conditioning and conditioned by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements (Kemmis et al., 2014). The empirical data underlying this study consists of five audio-recorded peer group dialogues between principals (N=20), conducted within the framework of the longitudinal R&D collaboration mentioned above. Our preliminary results show that some site-specific conditions in particular involve emotional labor: Work intensification, clearly connected to the context-related challenges that the previous study made visible and navigating the local policy context. We suggest that understanding emotional labor as an essential and demanding aspect of principals' work is necessary for the building of support structures around them, which in the long run can counter the impact of work intensification. Preliminary analysis also makes visible how the intertwined site-specific arrangements condition the principals' leading practices, and how they navigate and learn 'how to go on' based in the emotional labor. This suggests that emotional labor can be understood as conditions for educational leading practices, sometimes perceived as a burden for the individual but indeed also as important, site-based practice knowledge that gives principals’ work joy and meaning. Further, the methodological approach in the R&D collaboration, i.e., the peer-dialogues, seem to empower the principals and trigger agentive action in terms of proposing and initiating educational and workplace changes (cf. Hirsh et al, 2023).

References:

Hirsh, Å., Liljenberg, M., Jahnke, A., & Karlsson Perez Å. (2023). Far from the generalised norm: Recognising the interplay between contextual particularities and principals’ leadership in schools in low-socio-economic status communities. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 1-18. DOI: 10.1177/17411432231187349

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, Changing education. Springer. Wilkinson, J. (2021). Educational leadership through a practice lens: Practice matters. Springer.