Silvia Edling

• PhD in Curriculum Studies
• Professor at University of Gävle

A positive school climate is characterized by a higher degree of well-being among students, reduced bullying, and improved academic performance. While many initiatives are aimed at creating a positive school climate, discussions in both research and theory frequently fail to acknowledge the essential role of school personnel. This study examines a...

Sweden is a country with a long history of peace and liberal democracy. In the post war period, history education has been given a core position as a moulder of democratic citizens in Sweden. Since the 1990s, historical consciousness intertwined with democratic values has been used as a scientific grid for shaping citizens, not just in history educ...

The aim of the theme issue is to provide analysis of intersections of historical and democratic consciousness expressed in official curriculum documents such as syllabuses that focus on history in eleven countries. Each of the nation states were selected for their diverse trajectories of democratic developments and political cultures. Drawing on co...

While some researchers argue that theories and abstract knowledge are unreliable bases for teachers' work, a wide range of research stresses the need to overcome the gap between theory and practice, or abstract academic knowledge and experience‐based knowledge. Here, Silvia Edling maintains that it is relevant to ask why the relationship is necessa...

Approaches to human and children’s right are in many European countries politically interlinked with human rights and democracy. Human rights are considered as an essential ethical tool to secure sustainable democracies through enhancing cultures where people protect the rights of others. However, the relationship between rights and democracy in ed...

This paper explores the conceptions of critical thinking in national and local policy documents for teaching placement, using the case of teacher education programs at a Swedish university. The concept under scrutiny is based on three contemporary theoretical models of critical thinking in education: critical thinking movement, critical pedagogy, a...

This study, using a socio-ecological model of bullying, examines how school staff, in a Swedish municipality, identify and deal with cyberbullying among primary school pupils, focusing on gender differences to better inform staff participation in the municipality’s anti-bullying strategy. Twenty-five (25) semi- structured interviews were conducted...

The aim of the current study was to examine whether students’ perceptions of teacher support at an individual-level, teacher support and well-functioning class climate at classroom-level, and teacher support and well-functioning class climate at school-level were associated with peer victimization. Data were obtained from a Student School Survey ad...

A pedagogy of vision and seeing has a long history. Teachers’ professional vision, seeing and noticing are today regarded as important factors that affect the quality of their teaching and are considered important to develop. The article argues that there is a need to gain a deeper understanding of teachers’ professional vision, seeing and noticing...

Hur vi orienterar oss i världen är intimt sammanflätat med våra tolkningar av historia, samtiden och våra perspektiv på framtiden. Vårt historiemedvetande påverkar hur vi förhåller oss till samhället och till andra människor. För historielärare är det viktigt att få en uppfattning om elevernas historiemedvetande eftersom detta speglar elevernas tä...

We are at a time in world political history that seems to be on a precipice. Over the past decade, it is difficult to ignore the global growth in popularity for autocratic governments, also in some countries which for decades were either strong democracies or moving towards stable democratic governance. The current Russian attack on Ukraine brings...

We were delighted to accept a recent invitation by the prestigious publisher Routledge (London and New York) to share by video key ideas and concepts in our book Democracy and Teacher Education. The platform has eight short videos of us discussing an overview of the book and ideas presented in each of the chapters. We take a historical consciousnes...

The article explores ethical conceptualisations of time that take the existence of the embodied Other in education into consideration. Kristeva’s time/memory paradox is discussed with regard to teachers’ everyday judgements in relation to student learning. In conclusion, learning as an unruptured endeavour is impossible when the time of the embodie...

Using the history classroom as a context for ethics and moral education is a long, but also contested, tradition. Recently, more emphasis has been put on how to incorporate ethics education, with this paper exploring the spaces of ethics and moral education in the history classroom. It is argued here that insights from moral philosophy and theories...

The purpose of this article is to provide a unique overview of how third-order concepts, linked to moral consciousness, are expressed in research articles on historical consciousness related to education, as well as to document how frequently the concepts are applied between 1980 and 2020. A count of word frequency says something about how popular...

Starting from a child rights-based approach to sustainable development, this contribution underlines and compares the discourses in selected Spanish and Swedish migration and education policies on the rights of unaccompanied minors to education and discusses their impact on the enactment of the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals in both co...

This chapter provides with in-depth profiles of teachers from unique sociocultural contexts that can raise thoughts of patterns and connections that can help enhance teacher judgment and professional development all over the world. Research shows that teachers’ competences hold a key position to increase students’ achievements. Approaching the teac...

Research in teacher education has drawn attention to the role of situated learning processes in teachers’ professional development (Korthagen, 2017). In this regard, the link between the formation of teacher identities and professional learning patterns has become a key area of emphasis in the field of teacher education (Kelchtermans, 2009; Vermunt...

This book explores the reflective potentialities offered by analyses of teachers’ professional learning narratives. The book has a specific focus on narratives on professional learning and professional identities emerging from different contexts and gives a deeper understanding of successful teachers’ narratives globally. Diverging from universall...

History is often invested with moral messages. When asked what history for them is, 15-year-old Europeans have strongly supported the option that history is instructive stories of good and evil, right and wrong. But what do they actually think of the potential of history as a moral guide? Do they think history can communicate what was, or would hav...

This article highlights how migrant childrens’ rights to, and within, education can be negotiated at the national level. The aim is to underline and discuss the discourses that appear in selected Swedish legal and political documents relating to unaccompanied Afghan minors. Drawing on critical discourse analysis ( cda ), this research shows the co-...

Historical consciousness and moral consciousness as a joint, or intertwined, concept is relatively new in the history education context of Australia. While it has been used for a longer period in research internationally, it is only in the past decade that is has gained momentum and popularity in the Australian research context. This paper examines...

History education comprises moral issues and moral aspects, often perceived as an important and meaning-making foundation that makes learning relevant and interesting. The interrelationship between time layers fuels historical interpretations and facilitates perceptions of moral issues. This article focuses on a study investigating how secondary sc...

Historical consciousness is regarded as an important means to stimulate moral citizens through history education. This article conceptually examines the moral dimension associated with historical consciousness by revisiting the paradigm wars between natural science based on positivism and human and social sciences during the 1960s–1990s as expresse...

In light of current tendencies, where appreciating plurality and uphold everyone’s equal value is being questioned from different directions, there is arguably a need to revive the ethical dimension of history education as a way of learning about difficult histories, including traumatic pasts. Since the 1970s historical consciousness has played an...

The purpose of this text is to highlight and discuss some of the aspects of uncertainty that exist in all forms of teaching and the importance of allowing for some degree of uncertainty for ethical reasons. More specifically, the text focuses on the ethical dimension of democracy, which politically provides a space for dealing with the relations, d...

En los últimos años, las demandas de enseñanza basada en la evidencia han aumentado, resultando a su vez en una disminución del uso de las teorías en la enseñanza en, entre otras partes, en Suecia, mientras que la investigación sobre la violencia ha mostrado la necesidad de que los profesores interactúen en su práctica escolar con el apoyo de una o...

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to research on the media’s role in naming and framing the debate about teacher education using Sweden as a case study. This is done by analysing how articles published in four major Swedish newspapers from 2016–2017 define: a) the challenges/strengths of current teacher education and b) the kind of teacher...

Questões ligadas a como democracia e emancipação fazem parte da educação de professores ainda são pouco estudadas e há uma escassez de estudos transnacionais examinando o problema. Neste estudo, partimos de várias estruturas teóricas que se posicionam discursivamente em relação a democracia e emancipação na formação de professores e no que estamos...

The education system is still important for establishing and maintaining democracy in society. In relation to this, it is reasonable to suggest that teachers' different interpretations of their mission to teach for democracy will influence their teaching practices. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on student teachers' task perceptions as...

The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers’ role in stimulating democratic spaces. We have termed this Teachers’ Democratic Assignment. We examine changing notions of teachers’ democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using a Critical Di...

How questions concerning democracy and emancipation thread through teacher education is currently under theorized and there is a paucity of cross-national studies examining the problem. In this study, we draw from a number of theoretical frameworks for their discursive positioning of democracy and emancipation in teacher education and what we are c...

In the Convention of the right of the Child (CRC) it is stated that all children should be protected from all kinds of violence. However war, social conflicts and climatic catastrophes have placed immigrant children at risk to object for violence. The purpose of this paper is to study how Sweden politically advice actors within the educational fiel...

In the light of current tendencies where the fear of foreigners is increasing in seemingly stably democratic societies. This paper aims to revive the presence of the body as a central condition and experience for human interaction. The body as an inevitable source for conscious/unconscious responses to others helps to understand how various forms o...

This special issue is the result of the workshop, Towards an integrated theory of historical and moral consciousness, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) and Suomen kasvatuksen ja koulutuksen historian seura (The Finnish Society for the History of Education) and held at the University o...

The European Convention on Human Rights has been signed by both the UK and Sweden as well as other European states, providing legal justification for accommodating the educational needs of religious minorities. This legal entitlement is explored in the paper, with particular reference to parental choice for schools based on an Islamic ethos. How th...

There is an abundance of cross-national quantitative studies of ‘what works’ in education and teacher education in the international literature. However, there is a paucity of cross-national studies in relation to ideological governing forms in education and teacher education, what is perceived as worthwhile and desirable. This study seeks to addre...

Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the article highlights various conceptions of violence at a Swedish boarding school and is based on a critical discourse analysis of different educational and media documents. The investigation indicates that ambitions to protect children from violence need to overcome the dichotomy of private a...

The purpose of this article is to theoretically discuss how teacher professionality, as an aspect of teacher professionalism, can be understood in relation to the notion of sensing within the ethics of alterity and the ethics of dissensus, both of which express a desire to contest the various forms of violence in society. Subsequently, in this case...

In this chapter, the issue of social justice in teacher education is addressed from a Swedish perspective. The chapter begins by briefly describing the Swedish educational context in schools and teacher education, with a specific emphasis on the task of educators and teacher educators to promote social justice and as a consequence to this counterac...

Um aspecto no currículo nacional de Formação de Professores na Suécia é a base democrática que determina os pilares para organizações e condições humanos. Neste currículo se dá, indiretamente, um papel central à pluralidade e, como consequência, à importância de contestar várias formas de violência, como discriminação ou outras violações. Baseando-...

Link to full text available. http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pdf/freetoview.asp?j=csee&vol=13&issue=3&year=2014&article=1_Editorial_CSEE_13_3_web

Drawing on ambitions to contest violence in education, this article challenges ideas that student teachers only need to rely on evidence-based theory in their future profession. This is accomplished by analysing and comparing theories of plurality as described in three texts used in courses at one teacher education institution in Sweden. The texts...

Abstract: The paper highlights four tendencies in the media reporting of teachers and education: a) recurring patterns of defining education in crisis, b) mantling responsibility as exterior spokespersons for education and teachers, c) excluding teachers’ and educational researchers’ knowledge and experiences in the media, and d) simplifying the no...

The overall purpose of the symposium is to problematize the increasing assumptions within the field of education that evidence based research carries the solution to the crises of education and hence should be the sole base for Teacher Education. In particular, issues related to social justice are addressed. Five researchers from three different co...

The purpose of this study is to theoretically discuss a specific aspect of teachers responsibilities: their responsibility for pupils or childrens well-being. We ask two interrelated questions: firstly, how might (Swedish) teachers sense of responsibilities for their pupils well-being be understood in relation to ethical theory? Secondly, what does...

De internationella studierna PIRLS, PISA OCH TIMMS har fått stort genomslag i skoldebatten och det förs en diskussion om vilka effekter dessa undersökningar har. Men det finns även en mindre känd studie, ICCS 2009 (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study), som har mätt 14-åringars medborgerliga kompetens i 38 länder. Maria Olson, Silvia...

De internationella studierna PIRLS, PISA OCH TIMMS har fått stort genomslag i skoldebatten och det förs en diskussion om vilka effekter dessa undersökningar har. Men det finns även en mindre känd studie, ICCS 2009 (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study), som har mätt 14-åringars medborgerliga kompetens i 38 länder. Maria Olson, Silvia...

Curriculum guidelines in many democratic countries argue for the need to practice tolerance as a means to creating peaceful relations. Through moral education, young people are believed to be able to develop a way of being that respects plurality and decreases interpersonal violence in society. But where do students’ personal involvements or the is...

The intention with this article is to contribute to discussions regarding the role of education to combat different forms of violence towards others, such as discrimination, bullying, oppression and so forth. This is done by exploring the relationship between how young people describe their everyday responses to other people’s life circumstances an...

Boken, som bygger på författarens avhandling, baseras på intervjuer med unga människor och syftar till att ge stöd och inspiration för alla som vill motverka diskriminering och kränkningar i förskola och skola. Ett sätt att närma sig detta uppdrag är att ställa sig frågor som: Hur kommer det sig att vissa människor särbehandlas på ett negativt sät...

Education has been given the role to contribute to the aspiration of a socially just society, which includes countering various forms of oppression in society. Teachers are thus given the responsibility for preparing their students not only to be aware of oppressive structures and practices, such as those related to gender oppression, but also to a...

”I was never actually mean”. The aim of this article is to discuss the implications of using theories related to moral progression as tools for conquering problems of oppression. Inspired by the story of a sixteen year old young woman (Amanda), I pose two questions: How is education to conceive of the tensions between ideals of goodness and the rea...