Conference Agenda

This presentation describes a descriptive study of literacy practices in Singapore and proposes utilising a similar model to examine and document the diverse ways families use and develop literacy in communities in international contexts. This would help educators align their own practices to meet their students’ varied ways of practicing literacy.

Literacy is most often understood to be a set of skills required for reading and writing (Keefe & Copeland, 2011). However, Knoblauch (1990) argued that literacy goes beyond reading and writing skills, and that defining it as such encodes sociocultural judgements. This is well demonstrated in Heath’s (1982) ethnographic study of the literacy practices of three communities– Middle-income white families, working-class white families, and working-class black families. Because the literacy practices of the working-class families differed from those in their mainstream schools, these children quickly fall behind in their grades with no way to keep up.

As such, Heath (1982) cautions against “a unilinear model of development in the acquisition of language structures” (p. 73) because when schools are not culturally responsive, they risk perpetuating socioeconomic inequalities. There are diverse ways of using and developing literacy, making it vital for educators to, firstly, understand the literacy practices of their communities and in their own sociocultural contexts, and, secondly, to align their own literacy practices with that of their communities’ to stem the reproduction of systemic disadvantages.

Singapore is perhaps best known worldwide for its economic prosperity and multi-ethnic population. These socioeconomic successes have been attributed to its meritocratic system that promises equality of opportunity. Consequently, educational achievement is highly sought after, with parents striving to give their children a head start through each stage of the educational system, from as early as preschool, to primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Unfortunately, unequal socioeconomic and academic outcomes expose the systemic inequalities in Singapore, especially along ethnic and socioeconomic lines. This further emphasises the need for models of development to meet the needs of diverse contexts.

However, few studies have described literacy practices in the Singaporean context. Most of the reviewed studies have taken correlational approaches, examining the relationships between specific practices and literary outcomes. Fewer still have examined the complex interplay between ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and literacy practices. The literacy practices of the minority populations of Malays and Indians have received little to no research attention, while it remains unclear if literacy practices are ethnically (Dixon, 2011) or socioeconomically (Aman et al., 2009) determined. There is a need for more descriptive studies of literacy practices in the Singaporean context, especially in the ethnic minority populations.

The study presented sought to describe and explain the literacy practices of six low-income earning, ethnic minority families of preschool-aged children in Singapore. The questions that guided this study were:

1. What are the literacy practices of low-income earning minority parents of preschool children in Singapore?
2. Why do parents choose these literacy practices?

The study utilised the Social Theory of Literacy (Barton, 2007; Barton & Hamilton, 2000, 2012) as its theoretical framework. This theory defines literacy as a set of social practices, and exists simultaneously in the relationships between people and within individuals. Literacy practices, which include observable activities and intangible attitudes and values, are “the general cultural ways of utilizing literacy which people draw upon in a literacy event” (Barton, 2007, p. 37). These practices exist within domains, structured contexts, most common of which are homes and schools. Literacy practices are also shaped by cultural and historical factors.

Research Questions

Race and racism remain largely unspeakable topics in China, partially due to the Chinese party-state’s denial of the existence of racism (Cheng, 2019). However, race plays a vital role in China’s education field, particularly in the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry. My study examines Chinese women teachers’ struggle to establish their legitimacy in the ELT industry where whiteness is the norm. The study finds that the ELT industry is more than a field of language teaching and learning. It is a field that commodifies whiteness, asserting a workplace racial hierarchy that affirms the racialised and gendered subordination of Chinese female teachers in relation to White male teachers. This study highlights a need to theorise race and English language education in China, given the growing role and impacts of European migrant teachers in China’s flourishing ELT industry. It also enables greater dialogue with the global English-language education community on the challenges and possibilities of diversity and inclusion.

The global spread of English as a lingua franca is historically associated with Western imperialism and colonialism (Phillipson, 1992) and shapes a ‘common sense’ that English is the property of white people (Jenks, 2017; Kubota & Lin, 2006; Rivers et al., 2013). Over the last two decades, China has become the world’s largest ELT market (Sohu, 2019). The intertwining of English and whiteness has translated into a massive demand for foreign teachers, particularly White people from Euro-American countries, to teach English in China, regardless of their professional backgrounds (Leonard, 2019). The industry accommodated over 400,000 foreign teachers in 2017, but two-thirds were reported unqualified who cashed in on their perceived closeness to White native English speakers (Pan, 2019). The racial hegemony in the ELT field formed by linguistic differences (Curtis & Romney, 2019; Von Esch et al., 2020) marginalises qualified teachers of color who are stereotyped as “inferior linguistically, economically and culturally due to their non‐white skin colour” (Author, 2019).

Race is not the industry’s only distinct category but also intersects with others, including gender and class, when constructing teachers’ subject positions. This study therefore explores Chinese women’s intersectional racialised experiences in China’s ELT industry. More specially, the study asks the following research questions:

1) How do Chinese women teachers describe and interpret their intersectional experiences in China’s ELT industry?

2) How do Chinese women teachers construct themselves in relation to other stakeholders in China’s ELT industry?

3) What are the affective dimensions of intersectional experiences on Chinese women in the ELT industry?

Theoretical Framework: Women of Colour Feminism

Following women of colour feminism (Hooks, 2000), this study develops theoretical concepts grounded in Chinese women teachers’ lived experiences. I employ intersectionality as a ‘sensitising concept’ (Blumer, 2017) to explore the complexity of interconnected identities and power relations that shape ELT teachers’ marginalisation and agency. I use interdisciplinary theoretical tools to place indigenous theoretical concepts, developed from teachers’ accounts, into academic conversation on affect theory, racial capitalism and possessive investment in whiteness. This allows for a greater insight into Chinese women teachers’ encounters with whiteness, revealing how race, gender class and the English language intersect to contribute to the inequalities present in ELT. For example, since intersectionality has been criticised for neglecting to consider factors that cannot be seen or heard (Falcón & Nash, 2015; Puar, 2020), this study uses affect theory along intersectionality. ‘Affect’ is not a personal emotion but a ‘felt’ power relationship (Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2013) involved in producing actions (Bogic, 2017; Puar, 2018), and this study use affect to understand what are the conditions that are producing certain emotions that reflect the ‘structure of being’ (Puar, 2018, p. 207) for Chinese women English-language teachers.

Youth mental health has become an increasing concern in public discourse, especially during the covid pandemic. With a growing number of courses and guidance related to emotional support and self-management, emotional wellbeing has also become a significant focus of education in Finland (Ahonen, 2020; Brunila, 2012b). However, the connections between mental health and social structures, such as masculinity ideals, remain understudied in Finland and educational contexts globally. In my research, I examine young Finnish men’s views of the connections between masculinity ideals, public mental health discourses, and young men’s mental health.

The basis for this research is the understanding that gender is socially constructed and that gender, and other identities, are relational and performative, constituted in discourses producing gendered conditions of possibility for individuals (Butler 1988; 1990/2006). I follow Foucault’s theorisation (1982) on power and discourses, in which discourses are understood as power-knowledge systems. The mechanics of power produce different types of knowledge, which in turn reinforce the power-knowledge systems by defining “normal” or ideal codes of conduct. These norms constitute our lived experiences and gendered subjectivities, governing and regulating the way we express ourselves and our gender (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016; Davies & Gannon, 2011). This research focuses on masculinity ideals, understood as contextual set of characteristics often associated with the behaviour of men, setting a standard for what is seen as appropriate behaviour (Brunila, 2019; Francis, 2008; Hyvönen, 2021). The first objective of this research is to examine what kind of masculinity ideals young Finnish men identify in their lives, how they align with these ideals, and how they view these ideals to be connected to their mental health.

The second objective is to analyse what kind of public mental health discourses young men produce and how they understand their mental health through these discourses. Following McLeod and Wright (2016), instead of defining what mental health is, the emphasis is on what the concept of mental health does, how is it talked about, and with what kind of consequences. Like gender, mental health is understood in this research as a socially and discursively constructed concept. Several scholars argue that mental health has become kind of “empty signifier” - a multifaceted concept with several cultural meanings attached to it, acquiring many meanings in everyday discourses, and used to justify many kinds of youth policies and support systems (Aneshensel et al. 2013; McLeod & Wright, 2015). The expanding focus on mental health has raised critical questions about the increasing governing that individuals are subjected to, justified with objectives of wellbeing. The concept of therapeutic culture has been used to describe how therapeutic vocabulary, practices, and “struggling with the self” have become an essential part of society and social life (Brunila et al., 2021; Brunila & Siivonen, 2016; Klein & Mills, 2017; Nehring et al. 2020). Therapeutic culture can also contribute to upholding and dismantling gender ideals by upholding prevailing normativities with gendered emotional practices and discourses but also providing tools to negotiate with these norms (Hyvönen, 2021; Kolehmainen, 2018;2021).

Based on the theoretic framework, my research questions are: i) What kind of discourses of masculinity and mental health do young Finnish men identify in their lives, and how are these discourses constructed? ii) How do young Finnish men align with and understand their mental health through masculinity ideals and mental health discourses? With young men, I refer to individuals who identify as men aged 15-29.

Analysing young men’s views on the masculinity ideals and mental health discourses prevalent in society and education can bring new perspectives to young men’s mental health and deepen the understanding of men’s diverse lived experiences.

Anti-gender discourse was central to the success of the 2019 electoral campaign of Poland’s ruling party, Law and Justice. Since then, the concept of academic freedom has increasingly been mobilized in this discourse as a signifier of priced Polish values, and ultimately, of how national sovereignty is perceived to be under threat. This paper asks, what is the role of the signifier of academic freedom in the anti-gender discourse’s re-articulation of Polish nationalism in the space of higher education?

The political project of the Polish government is broadly speaking based on a narrative driven by anti-liberal ideas that contest the main features of liberal democracy on the backdrop of perceived failed attempts of enacting transitional justice by political and cultural elites after the transformations of 1989 (Coman & Volintiru, 2021). While illiberal and populist radical right parties in Europe and beyond have experienced increasing parliamentary success since the turn of the millennium, Florian Bieber points out that a prevalent perception in public media that “nationalism is on the rise” is not attributable to a global shift of voters’ attitudes but to “the political and social articulation of these attitudes” (Bieber, 2018, p. 520). Andre Gingrich’s concept of neo-nationalism can be understood as one way to conceive of such emergent articulations “in a globalised period of aggressive postcolonial and post-Cold War readjustment” (Gingrich, 2006, p. 200). In his analysis neo-nationalisms in Europe emerge and define themselves against the supranational polity of the EU, and view EU elites as a threat “from above” on the one hand, and migrants and sexual and gender minorities as a threat “from below” on the other. Consequently, a crucial element of these new articulations is the mainstreaming of radical nationalist sentiment in national political cultures transnationally by way of what Grzebalska and Pető call a gendered modus operandi (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018; Paternotte & Verloo, 2021).

In the case of Poland this mainstreaming has been observed over time. Many leading lights of populist radical right parties, who in their youth mobilized fellow skinhead radicals through crude anti-semitic tropes, would later come to rally their voters against so-called “LGBT ideology” and “neo-marxism” in a register that is perceived to be more intellectual, dignified and acceptable (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022; Pankowski, 2010). As analyzed by Szadkowski and Krzeski academic freedom itself, a core liberal principle, has recently been invoked and appropriated by the Polish government to challenge perceived censorship through state assertive policy implementation (Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2021).

It has been noted in the literature that the domain of higher education and research in Poland plays an important role for the mainstreaming of radical national sentiment in two ways: 1) academic spaces and discourse lend legitimacy and mainstream flair to neo-nationalist causes as “politics of knowledge” (Paternotte & Verloo, 2021, p. 558); 2) educational institutions have an instrumental value for the ruling party’s wider political strategy of “counter elite-populism” (Bill, 2020).

Looking at the field of higher education in Syria, the available studies on educational leadership are very few (Abdalla & Al-Hamoud 1995; Dalati 2014; Khalifa & Ayoubi 2015), and the issue of female leadership in higher education institutions is still untackled. Women’s status, education, employment and enhancement in society has been emphasised and endorsed by Syrian governmental legislations and policies (Touchan, 2014). However, these regulations of inclusion and equality does not necessitate commitment and achieving justice (Deem & Ozaga. 1997; Ahmed, 2013). Lack of research does not mean that the problem does not exist; I analysed 22 university websites and found a complete lack of diversity words and speech acts in universities’ mission statements. In some universities, the proportion of female professors in top roles was also extremely low or non-existent. Responding to this issue of inequality and lack of discussion of this issue in Syria, this study aims to investigate the experiences, and perspectives of Syrian academic faculty members in current or previous leadership roles in various Syrian universities with the view to understand the barriers for female academics in career progression and the enablers for those who hold successful executive leadership roles. The research project was guided by the following research questions:

How do male and female academics perceive women and men in leadership positions?

What do female and male Syrian academics consider to be obstacles to their career progression and how these differ by gender?

What are the facilitating enablers that have helped successful Syrian female leaders in Higher Education to reach top leadership positions, and what are the struggle they face in their new space?

In addressing these questions, the study’s objectives are to investigate gender inequality in academia as it manifests itself in various settings, such as homes, society, institutions, employment, as well as the struggle and symbolic violence that female academics face as a result of invading new spaces.

This study utilizes multiple theoretical frameworks. I draw upon Pierre Bourdieu's schematic form: habitus, field, capital, reflexivity and symbolic violence to understand how societal structures and power dynamics shape individuals' perceptions and actions within a given field, and to examine how the accumulation of cultural and symbolic resources by men in academia perpetuates a system of patriarchy, thereby limiting the opportunities and recognition of women in leadership positions (1977, 1984,1986,1990). Additionally, feminist theories are used especially those that re read and analyse Bourdieu’s works in relations to gender, and the concept of reflexivity, and how individuals can change the internalized habitus through their practices (Fraser, 1989; Mitchell, 1991). The results of this change and the struggle female academics face is discussed through the lens of Puwar’s theory of space invaders (2004) and Sara Ahmed's concepts of "feminist killjoy", "the wall of academia" and "the politics of being included" (2010, 2012, 2017) to understand the following:

how women's presence in academia is often perceived as a disruption of the status quo and how they are treated as invaders in the male-dominated spaces and how they can change the space and make it more inclusive.

how the academic institution itself can act as a barrier for marginalized groups and the strategies individuals use to navigate and resist these barriers.

how the act of inclusion is not neutral, but rather it is a political act that perpetuates the power dynamics that lead to exclusion.

The framework also incorporates Connell's concepts of hegemonic masculinity, and gender and power (1987, 1995), which highlight how dominant forms of masculinity serve to marginalize and oppress women, and how the norms and expectations shape the academic career advancement of men and women differently.

This doctoral project is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). The main objective is to understand if and how young people experience with dance in upper-secondary education relate to their well-being and their view of themselves as citizens.

At the level of European policies, there seems to be a normative primacy attributed to a conception of education that prioritizes reason, technical and technological knowledge (EURYDICE, 2009), fostering principles of competition, individuality and increasing socio-educational inequalities. Within a Europe governed by numbers, vehemently market-oriented (Council of Europe, 2019), the relationship between education and the market gets tightened, developing an educational agenda with the main goal to equip young people with skills that allow them to successfully enter the world of work.

This may lead to dehumanization of young people: the devaluation of subjective, expressive, creative, and emotional dimensions, pointed out in academic research as extremely relevant in learning-teaching (Macedo, 2021). This line of concerns with more humane and holistic principles, opens up space for education with arts, notably dance.

This research is developed in a small country in southwestern Europe – Portugal. It departs from the global concern about schooling as generator of learning with real meaning and significance for students, to provide the experience of being citizens in the current time (Macedo, Nairz-Wirth, Araújo, Szalai, 2020) and prepare them for life in society (World Bank, 2018), recognizing the importance of more ethical, aesthetic and solidary dimensions.

The potential of the arts to stimulate expressive, cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, creative and socio-affective is highlighted (Eisner, 2004). The focus on dance is based on the intrinsic relationship between people’s emotional, identity and relational dimension (Alves, 2020), in the framework of citizenship construction in the here and now of young lives in education.

The research argues that dance can contribute to develop body awareness; the construction of a social, cultural and political reality; and expression and nonverbal communication (Duberg et al., 2016; Ramos & Medeiros, 2018); useful in education and society. Moreover, the European action strategy recognizes the transformative potential of cultural practices – like dance – to strengthen democracy (Council of the European Union, 2022). About this, Wise and colleagues (2019) consider that dance-promoting spaces in schools can lead young people to develop inclusive, participatory and empowering spaces.

Already in 2009, one of the main recommendations of the European Parliament was that arts education should be compulsory at all levels (EURYDICE, 2009). In Portugal, the Profile of Pupils Exiting Compulsory Schooling (Martins et al., 2017) seems to consider these concerns, establishing a set of principles that should feature the education of young people, recognizing the importance of artistic, critical, creative and body mastery skills. Also, the National Plan for the Arts (Vale et al., 2019) highlights the need to implement people’s closeness to the arts, continuously providing a diversity of aesthetic and artistic experiences in educational communities and civil society as a whole. However, the analysis of national decree-law on curricular matrices of secondary education, shows that these dimensions tend to fade throughout the educational system. In upper-secondary education, dance is limited to one/two classes of physical education and the other artistic areas are restricted to artistic education courses. We can admit the existence of a discourse that recognizes the artistic potential in the development/training of young people, and a contrasting practice that replaces it with competences for the labour market and country’s economic competitiveness. Young people’s well-being and enactment of citizenship claims for a different approach.

This study presents how humour is used as a strategy to deal with, reinforce or resist racialisation in 8^th-grade classes (14-15 y/o) in Finnish schools. As part of the project RILSE (Racism and antiracism in lower secondary education), it offers an ethnography-based qualitative analysis of the everyday practices, discourses and experiences of racialisation and antiracism in Nordic education. The theoretical framework for this study is critical race and whiteness studies and antiracism approached through an intersectional understanding of power in the context of critical education in Nordic.

School serves as a place of informal racialised segregation; thus, schools are both racialised and racialising places (Phoenix 2008, 27). Several studies of racism in Finland conclude that racism is apparent in education and in schools (e.g., Helakorpi 2019; Non-Discrimination Ombudsman 2020). However, racism in schools is often only acknowledged as physical, ill-meaning violence (Souto, 2011). It might prevent recognising the subtle processes of racialisation, for example how whiteness intertwines in constructing an exclusive category of Finnishness (Hummelstedt et al. 2021). This article approaches racialisation from two different perspectives: first, from the processes of racializing as white, and second, processes of racializing as non-white, other or e.g., as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of colour), as the importance of recognizing both is highlighted by several scholars on the field. Since the processes of racialisation simultaneously occur and are challenged in schools, everyday antiracist strategies contesting racism are developed, especially by pupils racialised as non-white (Vertelyté & Li 2021, 108). One of the possible strategies is humour. The research about humour in schools often approaches it in relation to masculinities. In Finnish schools, humour is studied as the boys’ strategy to gain status and resources in their peer groups (Huuki, Manninen, & Sunnari 2010), a requirement for pupils to tolerate verbal violence and take them as jokes, or at least pretend to do so to avoid risking their position in the classroom hierarchy (Paju, 2011), and as one of the strategies used to construct whiteness, Finnishness, and masculinity (Peltola & Phoenix, 2022). This study aims towards an intersectional reading since different subject positions, e.g., the school hierarchy, gender, and race, affect the available strategies to deal with racialisation. To expand the scope, this study connects to European, particularly Nordic, studies about racialising humour in schools, e.g., in Norway (Johannessen, 2021) Sweden (Odenbring & Johansson 2021) and England (Doharty, 2020).

Humour in relation to racialisation functions in different ways. First, it is used for racist purposes and to minimise racism. For those racialised as others, their role is to “get” the joke and not show any offence (Urciuoli 2020, 118-119). Different youth groups create different rules for what kind of jokes are allowed, and thus it is challenging to recognize jokes from bullying and harassment (Paju, 2011.) Therefore, it is crucial to analyse what kind of racialising discourses are upheld in schools as “jokes”. Second, humour can be used as one of the antiracist strategies for dealing with or resisting racialisation (Weaver, 2010). Verbal identity play with stereotypes may appear to the outside as heavy racialisation but it could be an insider discourse when among peers (Urciuoli 2020, 121). However, the joke is only funny when interpreted and recognized as such by the audience (Johannessen, 2021). The research question emerges from the above-presented as:

How is humour used in schools as a strategy to deal with, reinforce or resist racialisation?

The results of identifying different ways how racialisation is dealt with via humour have significance in recognizing different challenges and possibilities for antiracism and thus reinforcing structures supporting antiracism in education theoretically and practically.

Achievement gaps between students of different family backgrounds have been found in many countries (e.g. Stanat & Christensen, 2006). They are not only based on socioeconomic status or immigration background, but also on home language: If children do not speak the language of instruction at home, they are often disadvantaged in school and perform worse in school performance tests than students speaking the instruction language at home (e.g. Van Staden et al., 2016). Low SES increases the risk that children with an L2 instruction language are disadvantaged (Cummins, 2018). With rising numbers of global migration (Edmond, 2020), these disparities in educational systems can be expected to become more distinct in the future. Luxembourg is a trilingual country with an already highly diverse student population in terms of nationality and language background, with 67 % of elementary school students not speaking the first instruction language Luxembourgish at home (MENJE & SCRIPT, 2022). It is therefore a prime example to study these educational challenges ahead of time. In addition to the “super-diversity” of Luxembourg, students of different language backgrounds have to deal with a highly demanding language curriculum at school, in which the instruction language switches first from Luxembourgish to German and then to French in secondary education. In consequence, many students face challenges in acquiring language and literacy skills (e.g. Hornung et al., 2021) – leading to distinct gaps between students of different language backgrounds.
One possible way to decrease such disparities might be an early and extensive participation in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Participation in ECEC, that is “any regulated arrangement that provides education and care to children from birth to compulsory primary school age” (European Commission, n.d.), has been shown to have positive effects on language development and other cognitive abilities. These effects differ between age groups. For young children from age 0 to 3, a Norwegian study found that scaling up early ECEC improved early language skills at the age of seven (Drange & Havnes, 2015). However, a review also indicated research on this age group was scarcer and produced more varied findings (Melhuish et al., 2015). For children between the ages 3 and 6, effects on language and other cognitive skills were more consistently positive (Melhuish et al., 2015). In children with differing home language backgrounds, this association was stronger than in those who spoke the majority language at home (Ansari et al., 2021). This study aims to investigate if these findings hold in the multilingual and diverse school context of Luxembourg and to analyze the effects of ECEC attendance on language performance, differentiated by the student’s home language background and the particular type of ECEC (non-formal daycare vs formal early education). Based on the presented literature, we hypothesize that (1) participation in ECEC, formal and nonformal, is associated with higher listening comprehension in Luxembourgish (i.e. the first instruction language) in grade 1, that (2) the associations are moderated by the children home language background where greater associations are expected for children who do not speak the instruction language at home and that (3) participation in formal ECEC explains more variance than participation in nonformal ECEC.

This paper calls attention to Cross-Culture Kids’ (CCKs) need for cultural transition care in Lithuania by suggesting a cultural narrative intervention approach.

As student mobility becomes ever more common globally, schools are faced with reconsidering their role in identity curation as part of adolescent well-being, directly affecting student performance and learning outcomes (Mahoney and Barron, 2020). Alongside repeated relocation comes significant personal and social difficulties often overlooked by its benefits to the international mobile youth. Ven Reken (2002) termed Cross-Culture Kids (CCKs) as “(those) who are living/ have lived in – or meaningfully interacted with – two or more cultural environments for a significant period of time during the first eighteen years of life". They experience being transience, or, on the move, and are in the constant status of 'transition', which is the change from one place, state, or condition to another (Pollock & Van Reken, 2017). Many see CCKs as victims of globalisation who is left to deal with the consequences of where culture and identity collide (Carter & McNulty, 2012). As the educational needs of CCKs differing from their non-expatriate counterparts is much acknowledged, scholarship has largely investigated four pedagogical consequences due to social and emotional issues as implications of living an internationally mobile lifestyle: 1) identity, 2) sense of belonging, 3) grief & transition, and, 4) coping strategies. Killguss (2008) found that many CCKs suffer from "authenticity anxiety"- and not having solid definitions of one's identity can cause problems later in life, developmental trauma such as high-risk Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) was evident (Crossman & Wells, 2022).

This is especially true as they are considered alien and abnormal in mono-cultural societies like Lithuania (Garšvė and Mažeikiene, 2019). As a historically emigration heavy country (Eurostat, 2015), the Lithuanian context is specific to CCKs care as only in 2018 did Lithuanian schools first experience receiving a continuation of steep increase of CCKs. This included repatriated Lithuanian pupils post-Brexit or due to the COVID pandemic, and refugee children due to the recent European political climate. As the key agent of socialisation, schools are responsible for providing spaces in mainstream classrooms for multi-contextual narratives of identity to be expressed and differentiated cultural representation to be recognised. Changes have been called for with sensitivity, reflexivity and interdisciplinary collaboration (Bagdonaitė, 2020). Yet, a clear framework to aid the integration of these youth whose lives have been utterly disrupted by mobility has yet to be provided to Lithuanian schools (Chu & Ziaunienė, 2021). This paper proposes a cultural and identity narrative intervention as a pedagogical strategy for school agents to foster identity narrative spaces and to provide language for cultural transition care to be explored.

The research question that this paper looks to answer are:

1. How do narrative interventions aid CCKs in Lithuania in developing their identity, belonging and place?
2. How may narrative interventions facilitate the development of cultural transition awareness in Lithuanian educational settings?
3. What are the implications of narrative interventions for Lithuanian educators to better assist CCKs in the process of cultural transitions?

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UNESCO, 2016), international communities should committ to ensure quality, inclusive and equitable education for every individual worldwide and for life. By 2030, it should be possible that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and nonviolence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development. Moreover, international comparative studies from European countries show that educational systems develop their own strategies for intercultural education and promotion of linguistic and socio-cultural diversity in schools (Allemann-Ghionda, 2002; Bežen, 2013; Gomolla, 2005; Göbel & Hesse, 2004; Kramar, 2022). As part of the german Primary School's general educational mission, Foreign Language Education should also contribute to a fair and positive perception of social, ethnic, national, cultural and linguistic diversity and contribute in terms of development of Intercultural Competence in classes (KMK, 1996, 2013).

The introductory part of this paper comprises international models of Intercultural Competence (Bennett, 1993; Erll & Gymnich, 2007; Allemann-Ghionda, 2014; Göbel & Buchwald, 2017), relevant definitions of curricula and a review of European documents related to the development of Curricula for Foreign Languages. The focus of this research lies on the Qualitative Content Analysis of the Curriculum for German as the first foreign language (2019) in the Republic of Croatia and Curriculum for English at the Primary Schools (2021) in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia from the first to the fourth grade of Primary Schools. The main goal of this research is to present the similarities and differences in the framework of implementation of the Intercultural Competence in the Curricula for the analysed foreign language subjects in two European school systems. This research presents the results of the Qualitative Content Analysis based on Intercultural Competence in three categories: (1) Educational goals of learning and teaching, (2) Educational outcomes and (3) Evaluation.

My research study has a three-pronged focus on the intersection of language, class and ethnicity to understand how equitable education and employment opportunities fluctuate for students in Pakistan. The participants belong to lower socioeconomic backgrounds with varying linguistic identities and are studying in various universities across Karachi, Pakistan. The focus is on their experiences in higher education (HE) institutions as they navigate learning in English, which is not their first language.

While language remains the focal point of my research, it cannot be studied without considering the social, cultural, and educational contexts (Valdes, 2004). This is especially true for the post-colonial relevance of English in Pakistan. Language related research in Pakistan has focused on the medium of instruction (Rahman, 1997), language policies (Shamim, 2008) and women’s education (Durrani & Halai, 2018). However, there is a gap in voicing the experiences of linguistically and culturally diverse students in HE, who struggle with English. My research focuses on this gap.

English plays a crucial role in social mobility in Pakistan, where a socially and economically disadvantaged population struggles to access quality education (Mustafa, 2015). While English is not widely spoken in Pakistan, it is used in education, workplaces, bureaucracy, and courts as the country’s official language (Tamim 2014). Therefore, English acts as a “gate-keeper”, affecting the social mobility of students that are not fluent in English. It is the preferred language of the elite in Pakistan, determining a person’s educational background. The status of English makes one’s class status known, because access to English is a privilege only a few can afford in the country. It therefore becomes significant as linguistic capital which students can aspire to in efforts to attain social mobility. It is the medium of instruction in all elite private schools across Pakistan, thereby creating “hierarchical structures in society” (Tamim, 2014, p.8) and reproducing “class cultural power” (Mustafa, 2015, p.189). Social classes are also understood through cultural and economic capital, and it becomes imperative to understand the relationship between these various forms of capital and linguistic capital, especially in a post-colonial context (Simpson & Cook, 2009).

In order to study the impact of English on student experiences and their access to opportunities in HE in Pakistan, Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and linguistic capital have been used to frame my research angle. Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus shed light, and expand on, how some students may have more privilege than others, what these privileges may look like, and how they may translate to an unfair advantage when navigating HE institutions, based on the intersection of class, ethnicity, and language in Pakistan. The elements of Bourdieu’s theories that frame this research are: (a) habitus, (b) field and (c) capital. These elements are interconnected in how they shape our understanding of social inequalities and disadvantages.

The experiences of these students are being explored as part of my PhD study, currently in its second year, through the following research questions:

1. What roles do the students’ linguistic and cultural capital play in their educational attainment?

• What are the linguistic challenges (if any) that students face during their undergraduate degree programs?
• What are the potential challenges that the students face during their degree due to their cultural capital (particularly looking at social class, ethnicity, and language)?

2. How do other cross-cutting factors such as SES factors and economic precarity affect their educational experience and shape their opportunities during and after their undergraduate programs?

I conducted interviews from October 2022 to January 2023. Students shared their experiences of learning in English and its impact on their education, social life and job applications.

Within Physical Education (PE) and Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) research there has been a recent increase in studies looking into policies – here I use a broad understanding of policy as a “set of ideas or a plan … that has een agreed to officially by a group of people, organisation, government, or a political party” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022) – for instance PE curriculum (e.g., Dowling & Flintoff, 2018; Fitzpatrick & Allen, 2019; Petherick, 2018) or PETE programmes/course syllabi (e.g., Apelmo, 2022; Backman & Larsson, 2016; Philpot, 2017) . Policies are “the operational statement of values”, and they “project images of an ideal society (education policies project what counts as education)” (Ball, 1990, p. 1), in the same way, curricula and syllabi state what is worth knowing and what is not, they prescribe behaviour and action, and create ‘subjects’ and ‘problems’ (Alfrey et al., 2021; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). Since values are always embedded within a cultural context, we need to ask whose values are represented in policies and whose are left out.

In this study I seek to investigate how ethnic and cultural diversity are problematised in PETE policy in three countries: Norway, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Following Carol Bacchi’s (2016) approach for analysing policy ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ (WPR), I take a closer look at programme descriptions and course syllabi from one case PETE programme from each country, additional documents are examined to trace back discourses and examine how a problem is represented as a certain type of problem. The main research question that will guide my investigation is how are ethnic and cultural diversity problematised in PETE course syllabi. This paper is important because it shows how each country’s context can amplify or silence certain discourses and voices (Alfrey et al., 2021) within policy documents. Furthermore, Bacchi’s WPR approach – which is about “teasing out the conceptual premises underpinning problem representations, tracing their genealogy, reflecting on the practices that sustain them and considering their effects” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 17) – stimulates to think about policies in a different way, with a critical perspective, something that can be helpful for teacher educators who have to interpret these texts.

PETE is changing in many countries, while in Norway a new five-year PE specialist programme was introduced last fall, time and courses are being cut from PE in favour of more ‘sport science’ content in Canada and New Zealand. These changes will of course have an effect on PETE. By comparing different national contexts, I hope to highlight contextual possibilities and constraints of how ethnic and cultural diversity are addressed in PETE, as well as commonalities across borders. What the three countries have in common is that they are all getting increasingly more diverse populations and that all three have indigenous populations. Obviously, there are many differences given that each country is located on a different continent, with different historical trajectories of immigration, multiculturalism and the relation with Indigenous peoples. Both Canada and New Zealand are settler countries and historically have been immigrant countries, but while Canada is set in a multicultural framework, New Zealand is officially a bicultural nation, whereas Norway has only recently experienced immigration on a larger scale. Given the global nature of concerns around how increasing diversity should be addressed in teacher education, it is important to explore how these issues are approached in different contexts. According to Broadfoot (1999, as in Afdal, 2019, p. 261), comparative education research can “enhance awareness of possibilities, clarify contextual constraints and contribute to the development of a comprehensive socio-cultural perspective” of educational issues.

This contribution aims to present results from a three-year research project. The theme of the study is how children understand and justifies Human Kinds. For the definition of Human Kinds, we refer to Mallon (2016) for which Human Kinds correspond to various types of human groupings, on the basis of characteristics considered similar.

During childhood, different ways of being, of doing and thinking are progressively acquired and structured (Lignier, Lomba & Renahy, 2012), inside various institutions. More generally, the schemes of classification and categorization of social reality used by social agents (whether adults or children’s) correspond to essential elements through which it is possible to define some aspects of social reality. These schemes contributing to respond to the human need to make order in the chaos of the surrounding world (Lévi-Strauss, 1984). Social agents use these also in order to create Human Kinds.

We consider that this subject corresponds to an important subject that need to be studied. There is also an historical series of studies dealing with the processes of categorization at a more general level (Cousineau, 2017; Edelman, 2018; Hacking, 1986; Jenkins, 2000; Liberman et al., 2017), but, the empirical field relating to how children categorize social reality remains little explored. It is possible to find some researchers carried out on this subject in France (Zarca, 1999; Ligner&Pagis, 2017) and in England (Connolly et al. 2009; Sutton, 2007; Kustatscher, 2017), but, this issue still remains little explored in Italy.

For these reasons, a case study has been carried out in 2019 Italy in order to explore the definition and justification of Human Kinds by children aged seven and by their parents. 96 families have been traced in three contexts, with different socio-economic level (High, medium and low).

One of the objectives of this research project is to observe whether the acquisition of the practice of social categorization (or of making Human Kinds) can be different depending on the socio-economic level of the school context. Secondly, if children practice can be similar to the adult’s one. Another dimension has been that have been studied, is the comparison of the children’s way of justification of Human Kinds with those of their parents.

That is possible to refer to Bourdieu’s (1980) theory of practice, especially his notion of practical sense, to explore what happens when children from different socio-economic and socio-demographic backgrounds bring their dispositions to the description and justification of human kinds.

The practical sense corresponds to the mechanism that underlies the selection of social categories and that becomes tangible when the individual is called to exercise it. The practical sense is configured as a sort of pre-logical thought that orients an individual in the action and in the formulation of judgments on others. The "practical sense" as well as the "social sense" endows social agents with "coordinates" through which to perceive, evaluate and act in the social world.

Therefore, the Bourdieu's notion of practical sense has been intersected with the neurological notions of “automatic cognition” and “deliberate cognition” (D'Andrade, 1996; DiMaggio, 1997; Kahneman, 2011).

At first, some findings will be presented in order to demonstrate how children and adults describe Human Kinds. Secondly, some findings will be presented in order to compare how children’s and parents justify their use of the “automatic cognition” during the social practice of grouping people.

The current educational agenda is highly focused on qualifications and measurable outcomes (c.f. Biesta, 2009). It is argued that this strong emphasis on qualification and measurement culture for preparing the future workforce might hinder students from living meaningfully (c.f. Schinker, De Ruyter, and Aviram, 2016). The assumption that attaining high grades, attending prestigious universities, and securing decent jobs ensures students' good lives appears to be uncritically accepted. Through the process of qualification and neo-liberal discourse, education seems to promote this narrowed concept of valid life. Furthermore, the question of life's meaning has attracted insignificant notice across both educational practice and educational research (c.f. White, 2009; Kronman, 2007; Lewis, 2006). Based on those issues, this research intends to explore the question of meaning in life and how education could help students live more meaningful lives.

In the first stage, I explored the question of what a meaningful life is by investigating key philosophical and psychological literature on life's meaning in the last thirty years. It cements an explanatory framework for the meaning of life by outlining its difference from the meaning of life (c.f. Seachris, 2009), whether it pertains to the subject or the objective (c.f. Wolf, 2015; Metz, 2013), whether life in its totality or elements delivers this meaning (c.f. Kauppinen, 2015; Brannmark, 2003), and the coherence, purpose and significance as three central aspects in sensing meaning in life as argued by psychologists (c.f. Martela and Steger, 2016; Baumeister, 1991; Frankl, 1985). Those theories provide conceptual knowledge about the structure of meaning; however, they might be neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for people to lead meaningful lives and it is difficult to draw meaningful implications for education.

I then consider the Confucian approach as an alternative and explore both the content and the form of the Confucian texts to bring insights into how education could help students to live more meaningful lives. In this section, I explain his key concepts and argue his understanding of education centres on how to live. His concept of Ren (仁) establishes the necessity for developing ideals and an ultimate purpose in life - elements that contemporary education ignores. His concept of Xue (学 learning) indicates the paths to Ren (仁) which is characterized by enactment, embodiment, and a continual and proactive learning process towards Ren (仁). The lifelong learning process for Ren (仁) constitutes a way to live meaningfully. His concepts of Dao (道 the Way), Yi (义 Rightness), and Ming (命 Fate) demonstrate the importance of self-endeavour under the acknowledgement of the limitations of human conditions. In this way, people learn what to be concerned about and what worries could be settled. It is argued that such an education could bring about meaningful lives. It is noticed that Confucian texts differ in style and format from those of analytical philosophers. The use of short, contextual dialogic aphorisms instead of long, clear philosophical arguments create a different relationship between the texts and the reader. It summons the hermeneutics of the reader, speaks to the reader, allows a space for the subject to think and come, and promotes the practical process of realizing the wisdom in the classics in each one's life. The artistic character of the form might inform a pedagogy for cultivating meaningful lives. While the theorising approach focuses on the theoretical question of "what is the meaning in life?" The Confucian approach focuses on the practical question of "how to live?" This raises the contentious inquiry of which of these questions is better to ask to bring about meaningful lives.

Topic: Autistic life trajectories resulting from transition effectiveness

Research Question: Investigating the barriers and facilitators contributing to a successful transition from school to adulthood as an autistic person/student (AP), highlighting gender differences.

Objectives:

1) To investigate and complete a comparative analysis of the roles of transition services in Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), assessing the extent responsibilities are implemented.

2) To examine student and familial expectations/experiences of transition planning/implementation prior, during and post transition from school to adulthood. The trajectory of wellbeing outcomes for students and families (e.g., mental, and physical health, relationships, finance, accommodation, education, and work), with focus on gender outcome differences, will be mapped longitudinally.

My research sets out to compare NI and the ROI (Europe) using a comparative approach. I aim to create a comprehensive overview of the issues related to an AP transitioning to adulthood and the impact of this on their life trajectories, affecting individuals in both countries. The comparison between a European country and one which has since left the European Union will also provide insight on the differences between the two contexts from the policy, legislation, and practice perspective.

Framework:

The impact of gender inequalities/disparities as AP transition to adulthood will be further understood, as an aim of this research and will be underpinned by three main theories. Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory (1) and the related model Process – Person – Context – Time will enable recognition of how trajectories of AP can be predetermined based upon gender-based issues and the quality of their transition process on life outcomes in adulthood. The framework considers developmental outcomes as a consequence of interactions between an individual and context throughout life. The Bioecological systems theory lens aptly supports us to understand the lived experiences and the effects of this most impactful transition, on AP, particularly when underpinned by longitudinal data (1).

The Schlossberg Transition Theory (2) is also pertinent; this theory argues transitions are as such if perceived so by each individual. The negative effects of transitions can be intermediated by the “4 S’s”, situation, self, support, and strategies. Situational supports include prior experience, timing, levels of stress and the duration of the transition. Self-support includes positive individual psychological well-being, emotional resilience, and personal and demographical assets. Access and disposal to external support and effective coping strategies impact the success of this transition. External support in the form of parental involvement is critical to life outcomes (3).

The self-determination theory identifies the necessity of providing opportunities throughout childhood and adolescence for AP to self-advocate developing autonomy. Self-determination should guide the transition process, reducing anxiety (4) and providing people with ownership over their lives. The precursor of self-awareness, that being understanding of one's own strengths, accommodation needs, self-belief, autonomously set goals and supportive parents is significant to transition success. The lens of self-determination theory, values self-determination as the causal link between making choices and those being heard and acted upon which is related to a quality of life, free from external intrusion (5).

Around 50% of young professionals who choose teaching careers around the world drop out within the first five years of school for various reasons. In most cases, young professionals face physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. That is why it is so important to provide help and support to any inexperienced teacher in the early years of their career (McKinley, 2021). The mentoring process is carried out every year in every school in Kazakhstan. However, monitoring how much this process affects the professional development of young professionals at school is neglected. Duse et al. (2017) provide several definitions of mentoring in their article. First, there is the relationship between a teacher with more mentoring experience and a teacher with less experience. Secondly, within this process, an experienced teacher develops certain skills and knowledge to contribute to the professional and personal growth of a less experienced teacher. In addition, Duse et al. (2017) note that mentoring is a major responsibility for schoolteachers and school administrators. The articles on this topic show that the mentoring process has many benefits not only for the mentee, but also for the mentor. Gilles and Wilson (2004) state that the mentor develops confidence and professional courage, opening the way to leadership opportunities, while Lopez-Real and Kwan (2005) note that mentors' professional growth occurs through reflection and mutual collaboration. Hudson (2013) found in her research that mentors can improve their interpersonal skills and pedagogical knowledge in addition to their leadership roles.

This study was conducted in one of the schools in the western region of the country. The mentoring process has been introduced in the school since 2015. Every year, experienced teachers are appointed as mentors for young professionals or new teachers. In general, mentoring is mandatory for all teachers, that is, 90-95% of schoolteachers participate in this process every year. However, over the years,
it began to be noticed that teachers do not take mentoring very seriously. This means that there are situations when mentors do not provide adequate support to young professionals, and mentees do not learn much from them. In order to increase the responsibility of teachers, the school has drawn up a special letter of agreement between the mentor and the mentee. In the agreement letter, both the mentor
and the mentee promised to participate responsibly in the process and even put their signatures. However, this measure did not show any results. The agreement remained only on paper.

Since the beginning of the academic year, 67 senior teachers of our school have worked with 67 young professionals. Throughout the year, the mentors conduct various forms of work with the mentees: professional interviews, feedback, lesson observation and joint analysis of the lesson, counseling and monthly reflection on the experience.

The main goal of this research work is to determine the effectiveness of the mentoring process at the school and to propose solutions to the obstacles encountered during mentoring.

Research questions: 1. What do young professionals learn from their mentors during the mentoring process? 2. What are the barriers to mentoring? 3. What actions should be taken to eliminate the identified obstacles?

The importance of the research work: the lack of research on the effectiveness of the mentoring process in the context of Kazakhstan, the opportunity of the research results to give ideas to mentors and school administrators about the effective organization of the mentoring process in their schools.

The supervision and guidance that student and beginning teachers receive from mentor teachers is a critical aspect of starting in the profession which, when done well, has been shown to lower teacher attrition rates (Geiger & Pivovarova, 2018), and positively impact teacher retention (Cobia, Stephens,& Shearer, 2015).

But how does taking on the role of mentor benefit mentors themselves in a professional capacity?

The purpose of this study is to investigate the knowledge, processes and conditions involved in mentorship practices that lead to professional growth for mentor teachers. We have developed and are in the process of testing a model of mentoring practices and outcomes around these specific research questions:

1.What mentoring competencies (tools) are critical in establishing reciprocal professionally developing mentor-mentee relationship in school practicum?

2.What are the mentorship practices (processes) that lead teachers to deconstructing their own teaching practices?

3.What are the factors (conditions) that support teachers ́ professional growth during mentoring?

4.What professional knowledge (outcomes) does the act of mentoring produce and to what extent does it contribute to teachers professional growth?

Engström’s (1999) “Activity theory” establishes the general basis for our study's conceptual framework within which the “Communities of Practice” perspective (Wenger, 1998) informs mentoring activities and situated learning that occurs in schools amongst groups of teachers. Finally we draw upon Trevethan and Sandretto’s (2017) research on the educative possibilities of mentoring to test our model.

As educational systems around the world continue to seek new approaches to tackle educational inequities and to promote social justice, the role of the university as a 'civic partner' to the communities they serve has become an interesting and potentially important driver for social change and knowledge generation.

In part this has led to the increased interest in developing 'Research Practice Partnerships' (RPPs) between resesarchers and professionals and other stakeholders. Albeit diverse in nature, RPPs have often focused on generating knowledge (for the academy) and improving professional practice (to generate social change). This type of activity is gaining significant interest across many educational systems around the globe including in European countries.

Within the education sector, it is becomming increasingly recognised that school networks and collaboration can play an important role to support the development of practices that promote systemic improvement in schools and education systems (Ainscow et al., 2012; Chapman and Hadfield, 2010; Stoll et al., 2006). Furthermore, in the context of SARS COVID-19, it has been argued that school networks are a relevant strategy to support schools facing multiple challenging circumstances to mitigate the impact of the global pandemic (Azorín, 2020; Chapman and Bell, 2020). Increasingly public educational systems are tending to mandate and promote the development of networked practices among schools, in both competitive and more collabortive contexts across different systems (Pino-Yancovic et al., 2020).

This paper draws on two cases, one from Scotland and the other from Chile. Each case involves school-school networks to support professional learning, build leadership capacity and impact on student achievement in challenging school contexts.

The objective of this paper is to draw on the two cases as diverse examples of RPP school-to-school networks to illuminate the possibilities and pitfalls of university initiated partnerships to initiate and sustain school-to-school improvement networks in contrasting cultural and policy contexts. In doing so, the the paper will unpack the complex intersection between key considerations of leadership, trust and relationships, power, autonomy and collective agency within and across professional boundaries and organisational settings. The overarching research questions that frame the argument are:

• what lessons can be learned from university-initiated RPPs between university and school-based staff?

and

• what do RPPs look like in centralised higher trust settings and in decentralised lower trust settings?

Socio-cultural theory (Douglas, 1982) applied to public service organisations (Hood, 1998) suggests that the Chilean system is primarily characterised by an individualised culture where market-based organisations tend to dominate the educational landscape. Conversely in Scotland hierarchical culture and bureaucratic organisations are viewed as the primary characteristics.

The two cases also have contrasting policy narratives. The Chilean context has a history of a miltary dictatorship in the Pinochet era. Bachelet's two terms of government shifted the political narrative and introduced policies designed to promote collaboration and networks. More recently, government shifted back to a stronger neoliberal agenda until the election of the most recent government that has attempted to introduce a new consitution with education and principles associated with social justice at its core. In Scotland the establishment of a Scottish Perliament throgh the Scotland Act in 1988 signalled further devolution of powers to Scotland to fall behind the Scottish education system.

The Scottish approach to education, and indeed public and social policy has continued to promote universal provision, collaboration and partnership working as key planks of policy policy. In many ways the two systems could not be more different. This is what makes them such interesting cases to explore.

These contrasting positions and their associated policy discourses have significant implications for the development of RPPs and collaborative/networked approaches in diverse systems, not least across Europe.

Although action research has a history of bridging gaps between research and school practice, challenges emerge when aligning a scientific approach with development work in schools and in collaboration between research and school practice. Previous research has problematised aspects such as power relations, epistemologies and changes that might occur in partnerships where teachers collaborate with different partners. However, there is a need to better understand how the process of learning emerges and is affected by the different partners involved in the collaboration. The Swedish Education Act states that all education in Sweden should rest on science and proven experience and this has led to increased demands on schools to undertake research-based activities and apply scientific methods to their development work. However, research show that teachers and principals find it difficult to interpret the policy and struggle to enact it. To facilitate this work, collaboration with and support from researchers and critical friends have been suggested, which in turn pose difficulties in overarching power relations and differences in epistemologies and in what counts as valuable knowledge (cf. Aspfors et al., 2015; Bevins & Price, 2014; Bruce et al., 2011; Olin et al., 2021; Somekh, 1994).

In this study, we follow two teachers conducting action research in an upper secondary school in Sweden, in collaboration with other teachers and a professional development (PD) leader. In this context, teacher learning in situ as teachers develop their classroom practices through action research is explored. Theoretically, a framework about value creation (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2020; Wenger-Trayner et al., 2017) is used to describe and understand teachers’ action research as social learning. With this framework, the values enacted and expressed by the participants come into focus and allow us to create narratives about the learning trajectories that occur in practice. Additionally, Wenger’s concepts of boundary objects and brokering help explain how different participants engaged in the collaboration contribute to the learning trajectories. Our aim is to deepen the knowledge on teachers’ action research as social learning in collaboration with a research-based PD leader. Our research questions are: (1) What are the critical aspects of teachers’ action research as a social learning process undertaken together with a PD leader?, and (2) How do boundary objects and brokering contribute to that process?

The primary focus of the theory of Communities of Practice (CoP) is on learning as social participation, and participation refers in his case, to being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relations to these communities. A CoP can be described and analysed by three dimensions: shared repertoire, mutual engagement and joint domain. The social dimension – mutual engagement – has been further elaborated and “theorized as value creation in social learning spaces” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2020, p. 6). The notion of ”social learning spaces” allows us to study social learning processes where knowledge and competence from multiple CoPs can be found within a specific social structure in a CoP. To understand social learning systems, Wenger proposes three structuring elements, defined as 1) CoPs, 2) identities shaped by participation in CoPs and 3) boundary processes between communities. Boundaries between CoPs can be used to identify differences in ways of working in CoPs and to serve as bridges between them. Boundary objects are characterised by their ability to enable communication and coordination, as well as align activities between practices, not necessarily forcing consensus. Since competence and knowing within this framework are defined by the members of a community, the process of crossing boundaries can be problematic, why we explore brokering taking place that leads to increased possibilities for learning.

This paper reports from a study where a new digital learning design tool (the ILUKS planner) was tested. The ILUKS-project, financed by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, aims to support teacher students’ active learning and productive collaboration during their practicum. The ILUKS planner allows students to plan lessons in a flexible and dynamic way, by constructing and co-constructing knowledge (van Schaik et al., 2019), share designs and receive feedback on their learning designs from school mentors, university supervisors or peers.

ILUKS is designed as a boundary object (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011), where students can work inquiry based, create digital learning designs, and receive feedback on these designs before and after their classroom teaching. We present data from student evaluations and interviews and describe how the tool supports teacher students’ active learning and professional development.

Across Europe, there are different training models for aspiring teachers, such as work placement and training schools and the quality of collaboration between key actor varies (Maandag et al., 2007). Several collaborative models exist, such as clinical partnerships (Potter et al., 2020), Professional Development Schools (Darling-Hammond, Cobb, & Bullmaster, 2021), Research-Practice-Partnerships (RPP) (Coburn, Penuel, & Farrell, 2021), and Professional Learning Networks (Poortman, Brown, & Schildkamp, 2022).

Partnership models in teacher education emerged in the mid-1980s with the intention to strengthen both schools and teacher education institutions. However, a research mapping revealed that partners often struggle, partly due to asymmetric relations (Lillejord & Børte, 2016). Some problems are related to the historic dominance of teacher education institutions, schools do not feel included on equal terms. Studies report disagreements between supervisor and mentor – with the student as an unwilling observer to debates. Characteristics of successful partnerships is that partners have a mutual knowledge interest, shared engagement and/or a joint project that is beneficial for both parties. Ideally, partnerships should aim at counteracting asymmetric relations and identify a shared object of collaboration.

In this paper, we use the ILUKS planner as a joint object for knowledge development. In the design process, teacher students learn how to plan their teaching. ILUKS serves as a model for professional learning dialogue where both school mentors and university supervisors must relate to knowledge from practice (experience) and knowledge from research, as is typically the case in the education of professions (Lillejord & Børte, 2020). This more democratic approach (Zeichner, Payne, & Brayko, 2015) will make teacher education programs more productive, as teacher students learn to produce knowledge with relevance for the teaching profession and expand the profession’s knowledge base.

Digital technology has the potential to facilitate collaboration in partnerships. Online tools, such as wikis allow for dialogue about professional practice (Lewis, 2012) and online backchannel platforms allow for discussion of issues observed during classroom practice (Howell et al., 2017). Research on computer-supported collaborative learning has focused on supporting students as collaborative learners and emphasized the importance of dialogical interactions among learners (Stahl et al., 2014). However, for student dialogues to be productive, the depth and quality of peer interactions, conflict resolution, mutual regulation and explicit argumentation is important (Asterhan & Schwarz, 2016). Therefore, how digital environments are designed to support inquiry, collaborative learning and productive collaborative knowledge building is important (Yang et al., 2022). The present study reports from the first test period of the ILUKS planner where the tool was used as a collaborative digital platform and a joint object for knowledge development for teacher students who learn how to teach. The following research question was formulated:

How can technology support productive collaboration between teacher students, university supervisors and school mentors during student’s practicum?

For elementary teachers, history is only one of many subjects they teach. Beliefs teachers hold about the nature of history and the construction of historical knowledge significantly influence what they perceive as relevant content and how they teach the subject (Stoel et al., 2022). Elementary teachers’ beliefs, mental conceptualisations and constructs of history are usually formed by how history is presented in movies, books, museums and the textbooks they read as a student (Gibson & Peck, 2020). In general, elementary teachers have not engaged in historical inquiry themselves. This is problematic, because history education researchers have emphasized the importance of historical reasoning activities in teaching history (e.g., Levstik & Thornton, 2018). Teachers can only teach students a disciplinary way of working with history if they themselves master these disciplinary skills to a certain extent.

In the Netherlands, historical reasoning is not commonly part of the history curriculum for elementary schools. Teachers teach a ten-era framework illustrated with events and persons from the Dutch Canon (Kennedy, 2020). In schools that experiment with inquiry-based learning in history, a common practice is that students are encouraged to gather information on the internet and present this, but due to no or limited modelling, real historical inquiry and historical reasoning are lacking and students’ understanding of historical events remains limited (Béneker et al., 2021). This can reinforce the naïve belief, both in teacher and students, that history is a single story, based on a series of facts (Van Boxtel et al., 2021).

Helping teachers develop beliefs about history and teaching history that foster inquiry into historical sources and historical reasoning can take place through a professional development (PD) programme in which teachers are informed about and experiment with historical inquiry and reasoning. In their Interconnected model of teacher professional growth, Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) suggest that change in knowledge, beliefs and attitude triggers change in teachers’ practice when they engage in professional experimentation. A reversed influence is also possible: that teacher beliefs change by experimenting with new approaches and reflecting on the effects on student learning and learning outcomes.

In previous research on teacher beliefs about history, attention has been paid to how epistemic beliefs of teachers in middle and secondary schools influence their choices in teaching history (Voet & de Wever, 2016) and how pre-service teachers’ beliefs about history develop (Gibson & Peck, 2020; Wansink et al., 2017). Maggioni et al. (2004) describe developments in elementary teachers’ epistemic beliefs in the course of a PD programme on content and method of teaching American history. In their study, the shifts in epistemic beliefs after the programme were limited and suggested relative stability in teacher beliefs.

To prepare teachers in grade 3-6 (students 8 to 12 years old) to engage students in historical inquiry and reasoning, we developed a two-year PD programme. The programme aims to develop participants’ own historical thinking and reasoning skills and their skills in designing inquiry-based history lessons that encourage students to reason historically. We aim to contribute to knowledge on how participation in a PD programme influences teachers’ beliefs about history and inquiry-based history teaching, and to the discussion of effective elements of teacher PD that enhance development in subject-specific beliefs.

We address two research questions.

1. How does a PD programme, in which elementary school teachers learn to reason historically and develop skills to design inquiry-based historical reasoning lessons, influence participants’ epistemic beliefs about history and pedagogical beliefs about history teaching?

2. Which elements of the PD programme do participants consider as sources of growth for their professional development?

In education fields action research can be undertaken for a range of purposes. Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon (2014) argue that the purpose of critical participatory action research is to “change social practices” (p.2). Carr and Kemmis (1986) argue that improvement and involvement are the two key aims for action research (p.165). Hardy and Rönnerman (2011) identify action research as a valuable approach to professional learning that supports collaboration, an awareness of the complexity of educator learning, and a focus on site-based practices and arrangements.

For the action research projects that we discuss in this presentation, two of the presenters undertook the role of “academic action researcher” (Platteel et al. 2010, 432). As Olin et al (2016) note, “These practices are characterised by being both researchers and, at the same time, facilitators of professional development who aim to support and empower teacher participants” (p. 424). It is this professional development aspect, and how action research can support that development, that is the focus of this paper.

This paper considers two case studies of action research projects: one with Swedish principals; and the other with Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) teachers of beauty therapy. The Swedish principals’ action research project was part of a higher education course (7,5 credits) and the AR project was undertaken over 14 months. The overall aim of the course was to support a critical approach to principals’ professional practice. The Australian VET teachers project was undertaken with four Beauty Therapy teachers, with a focus on middle-leaders supporting the development of VET pedagogy. The participants in the action research projects were not alone in their learning. Academic facilitators are also learners during these projects (Olin & Pörn, 2021; Olin, Karlberg-Granlund, & Furu; 2016). By focusing on two quite different groups of educators (eg principals and teachers; Sweden and Australia), and different arrangements for the action research projects (one part of a formal qualification and one developed together with the participants as part of a research project to develop VET pedagogy) we hope to identify broader arrangements that enabled and constrained the professional learning of educators through undertaking action research projects.

The research questions for this paper draw on both projects, and the experiences of the academic facilitators. They are:

• What did action research team members report that they learnt as a result of undertaking action research projects?
• What enabled and constrained that learning?
• What did academic facilitators learn through their involvement in the action research projects?
• What enabled and constrained that learning?

These research questions will be considered through the lens of the theory of practice architectures. With a site-based focus on practices, the theory of practice architectures holds that practices are made up of sayings, doings and relatings that ‘hang together’ in a project (Kemmis et al. 2014). These sayings, doings and relatings are prefigured (but not predetermined) by practice architectures present or brought into the site. Sayings are prefigured by the cultural-discursive arrangements in a site, doings are prefigured by the material-economic arrangements in a site; and relatings are prefigured by the social-political arrangements in a site (Kemmis et al. 2014).

Teacher educators and teacher education researchers have long underscored the importance of professional learning community (PLC) in facilitating teacher professional development (PD) in context (Borko, 2004; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). Recent body of scholarship discusses the ways in which PLCs promote teacher development (Zheng, Yin, & Wang, 2021), factors that influence teacher participation in PLCs (Bridwell-Mitchell & Cooc, 2016), the transformative consequences (Brennan & King, 2022), and so on. Nevertheless, while the portrayals and mechanism of productive PLCs become increasingly clear, how to sustain them in varied social and political contexts remains a difficult challenge (Hairon et al., 2017).

A growing body of scholarship stresses the local perspectives of teachers in sustaining PLCs. For example, Brodie (2021) describes the vital role of teachers’ professional agency in deciding to participate in or withdraw from PLCs. Similarly, Heikkiläa, Iiskalaa, and Mikkilä-Erdmann (2020) depict the nuances of professional agency in a group of student teachers and examine how different enactments of agency shape their participation in the community. One would assume, based on existing literature, that the more diverse the community members and the activities they engage in are, the more sustainable the PLC will be. Yet, most studies focus merely on a homogenous group of teachers (e.g., senior school teachers in Cooper et al., 2020) or regular PD activities (e.g., teacher research in Zheng, Yin, & Wang, 2021). What does a PLC with diverse participates engaging in varied activities look like and how does it sustain?

To address these problems, this study draws on the idea of “inquiry as stance” to explore how a group of in-service teachers and teacher educators in China build and sustain a PLC through an assemblage of book clubs, video clubs, and lesson planning sessions. Against the view that professional development is a time-bounded project where “what work” get shared and duplicated, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) argue that inquiry is a way of generating local knowledge of practice from within. From their perspective, novice teachers do not necessarily learn from the experienced. Instead, teachers with different backgrounds and experiences work together to “pose problems, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the work of others for generative frameworks, and attempt to make visible much of that which is taken for granted about teaching and learning” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 45). In our study, thus, we see a PLC as a local organization in which teachers discuss their everyday work in school, share their experience, feelings, and reflections on their teaching practice, and make their ideas public and legitimate through noticing, discussion, and critiques (e.g., Bakker, de Glopper, & de Vries, 2022; Zhang & Wong, 2021). Our focus is not on how a teacher applies what she learns in some PD program to her classroom, but on how she makes sense of her professional learning with others and within particular contexts and how her sensemaking is consequential to herself, to others, and to her school. Following Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999, 2009), we name such PLC “inquiry community” hereafter to stress our inquiry-as-stance lens.

Two research questions guide our study here. First, how do the teachers participate in the inquiry community? Second, how are different activities assembled to sustain the inquiry community? We use a video-based approach to documenting and analyzing the workings of an inquiry community in an urban school district in Shanghai. By focusing on the sustainability of an inquiry community, our study provides insights into one of the most serious challenges professional development and learning research faces and sheds light on the design of and support for teacher learning.

This symposium, consisting of two sessions (90 mins + 90 mins) is organized by the Network Project which has emerged within the Network 1 (Professional Learning and Development) of EERA. This network, operating as an integral part of the network NW 1 of EERA, is named Ecologies of Teacher Induction and Mentoring in Europe (TIME). Founded in 2021, the TIME network has so far met during NERA 2022 and ECER 2022 conferences, and the third in-person meeting of TIME is held during the ECER 2023.

The TIME network is in the process of publishing a European anthology, entitled European Perspectives on Teacher Induction and Mentoring. The anthology will be part of a TEPE book series (Teacher Education Policy in Europe Network), published by Brill Publishers.

An open call for proposals for this anthology was published in the fall of 2022. From the numerous proposals for the book, the editors chose eight for further development. These eight papers make up this two-part symposium in ECER 2023. So, this symposium will present unique and new research that has not been published anywhere else thus far. The presentations offer different perspectives on mentoring and induction of new teachers from different theoretical and empirical as well as national standpoints. Some presentations bring together broader reviews of mentoring that include multiple countries. Others, on the other hand, are focused more precisely on specific practices or, for example, on comparisons between two countries. Included in this symposium are perspectives from Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and the UK, including Scotland and Gibraltar.

The aims of the anthology, are to: (1.) Theorise about the implicit understandings of teacher education and teacher development, thereby addressing the broad understanding of teacher education; (2.) Create insights into the foci that characterise European research in the field and the approaches that are drawn on to discuss the current research literature; (3.) Unpack the European concepts of induction/mentoring.

The chapters of the anthology offer insights to different theoretical frameworks and assumptions that underpin induction and mentoring in Europe. The chapters describe and discuss various European as well as global approaches and implications regarding how mentoring practices are understood and examined. One of the goals of the anthology is also to review the implications of local, national or international policies for induction practices and research on mentoring across different European countries.

The Part 1 of the symposium will start with an overall introduction to the aims of the project and provide an overview on the discussions on induction and mentoring of new teachers in Europe. The second presentation will introduce a comparative analysis on practices and policies of teacher induction and mentoring by using the concept of ‘curriculum ideologies’ as a theoretical lens. The third paper will introduce results of a literature review on European studies on teacher induction and mentoring. The fourth presentation will offer a Nordic view on mentoring and induction.

The Part 2 of the symposium sheds light on mentoring practices and their mutual interaction through four comparisons between two countries. The first paper outlines how the Finnish peer group mentoring model was implanted in Gibraltar and hybridized with the action research approach and how it adapted into and developed in a new kind of ecological niche in a new educational ecosystem. The second presentation compares the mentoring practices of neighboring Belgium and the Netherlands. The third paper is based on an Eastern European perspective, with Romania and Moldova as case examples. The fourth presentation compares mentoring practices in Austria and Israel.

This symposium presents research on understanding the manifestation of practices of induction and mentoring of new teachers in Europe. The symposium is organised in two sessions with eight presentations. Through these papers, diverse insights into framing practices of mentoring and induction in different countries will emerge. This diverse picture can be viewed as an ‘ecology of practices’, where induction and mentoring practices thrive and concur with other educational and social practices, forming a living, dynamically evolving whole. The idea to frame and study practices as if they were ecosystem is one of the theoretical lenses that has inspired this European network - to such an extent that the name of the network reflects this focus. The ecological perspective has been applied recently by a number of other scholars in educational research (e.g. Barnett & Jackson 2019; Godfrey & Brown 2019). The perspective applied in this symposium is based in particular on the work of Australian practice theorist Stephen Kemmis (e,g. Kemmis & Heikkinen 2012). This theory suggests that educational practices like induction and mentoring interrelate with one another in the same way as living organisms do in nature. Thus, concepts derived from ecology can be applied, with given limitations, to the study of mentoring practices. Induction and mentoring are nested within municipal, regional (van der Pers & Helms-Lorenz, 2021), national and international educational professional development practices (Helms-Lorenz et al., 2019). In other words, mentoring practices inhabit a given ‘ecological niche’ in each education ecosystem. Niches are evident for the distribution of resources and for individuals to thrive in systems they fit in best. The relevance of induction and mentoring practices and its research requires “ontological synchronization – i.e., continuous tuning to what is happening and matters at hand, and what future is being generated, including what values and judgements (practitioners, researchers, policymakers) perpetuate in society” (Akkerman, Bakker & Penuel, 2021). A sustainable mentoring system is embedded (‘nested’) within the broader educational ecosystem including the national agreements of the teachers’ working conditions (e.g. salaries, working hours etc.). The symposium focuses on analysing how mentoring can find its ‘ecological niche’ (or not) in the respective educational ecosystems. We will discuss to what extent national and regional programs are influenced by political- economical, teacher and student interests and scientific evidence.

Akkerman, S. F., Bakker, A. & Penuel, W. R. (2021). Relevance of Educational Research: An Ontological Conceptualization. Educational Researcher, 50 (6) , 416-424. Barnett, R., & Jackson, N. (2019). Ecologies for Learning and Practice: Emerging Ideas, Sightings and Possibilities. Milton Park: Routledge. Capra, F. (2005) “Speaking Nature's Language: Principles for Sustainability”. In M. K. Stone and Z. Barlow. (Eds.) Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (pp. 18–29). San Francisco, CA:Sierra Club Books. Godfrey, D., & Brown, C. (Eds.) (2019). An Ecosystem for Research-Engaged Schools: Reforming Education Through Research. Milton Park: Routledge. Kemmis, S. & Heikkinen, H. (2012). Future perspectives: Peer-Group Mentoring and international practices for teacher development. In: H. Heikkinen, H. Jokinen & P. Tynjälä (Eds.) Peer-Group Mentoring for Teacher Development. Milton Park: Routledge, 144-170. Helms-Lorenz, M., van der Pers, M., Moorer, P., Lugthart, E., van der Lans & Maulana, R. Supporting Beginning Teachers 2014-2019: Final report. Teacher Education department University of Groningen. Plauborg, H., Wieser, C., Petersen, K.B. & Laursen, P.F. (2022): Teachers who stay in the profession, Pædagogisk indblik, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag

For over 30 years there have been calls to focus on supporting beginning teachers and improve teacher quality (Darling-Hammond 1995; Huling-Austin 1992). This has led to new national standards, legislation and policies which aim to safeguard beginning teacher learning. The underlying purpose of teacher induction is to provide support to beginning teachers (Britton et al., 2003; Mena & Clarke, 2021; Olsen et al., 2020; Shanks et al., 2022; Snoek et al., 2010). Here, four national contexts (Malta, The Netherlands, Norway and Scotland) are compared to critically inquire into induction. A comparative approach helps us to understand the interrelatedness between education and culture (Kazamias 2009) and how national contexts surrounding teacher learning are embedded in policies, resources and actual practices. A comparison between countries which differ in terms of history regarding induction, and policy contexts: Centralized or decentralized approach; Level of collaboration and trust between teacher education institutions and schools/local authorities; Employment status of beginning teachers after initial teacher education (permanent or temporary/partial license or registration to teach); Approaches to address teacher shortages: Focus on teacher recruitment or retention; Availability of clear teacher career paths. To analyse and compare the impact of these differences we use Schiro’s curriculum ideologies as a lens. This is based on our understanding of the teacher profession as a continuum of professional learning. As initial teacher education provides a curriculum that supports the professional development of student teachers, an induction programme can be understood as a curriculum supporting beginning teachers. Schiro (2013) recognizes four different ideologies that can drive curriculum aims and curriculum development: Scholar Academic ideology; Social Efficiency ideology; Learner Centred ideology; and Social Reconstruction ideology. Our research question is: How do curriculum ideologies in different national contexts create a European perspective for teacher induction? For each country, we analyse to what extent the curriculum ideologies can be recognised: Scholar Academic ideology (e.g., focus on further development of knowledge, skills and inquiring mindsets of beginning teachers); Social Efficiency ideology (e.g., focus on improving learning outcomes of children/students and reducing teacher attrition); Learner Centred ideology, (e.g., focus on the needs of beginning teachers); Social Reconstruction ideology (e.g., focus on beginning teachers as change agents in schools, education systems and societies). This comparison highlights the importance of studying local educational practice and pedagogy, including historical factors which impact how induction is structured. The induction schemes are inspired by or can lead to a common European framework.

Britton, E. Paine, L., Pimm, D., & Raizen, S. (2003). Comprehensive teacher induction. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Darling-Hammond, L. (1995). Changing conceptions of teaching and teacher development. Teacher Education Quarterly, 22(4), 9-26. Huling-Austin, L. (1992). Research on learning to teach. Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3), 173-180. Kazamias, A.M. (2009a) Comparative education: Historical reflections. In: Cowen, R., Kazamias, A.M. (eds) International Handbook of Comparative Education vol. 1. Dordrecht, Heidelberg: Springer. Mena, J., & Clarke, A. (Eds.) (2021). Teacher induction and mentoring: Supporting beginning teachers. Palgrave studies on leadership in teacher education. Palgrave Mcmillan. Olsen, K.-R., Bjerkholt, E.M., & Heikkinen, H. L.T. (Eds.) (2020). New teacher in Nordic countries: Ecologies of mentoring and induction. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Schiro, M. (2013). Curriculum theory: Conflicting visions and enduring concerns. London: Sage. Shanks, R., Attard Tonna, M., Krøjgaard, F., Paaske, K. A., Robson, D. & Bjerkholt, E. (2022) A comparative study of mentoring for new teachers, Professional Development in Education, 48:5, 751-765, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2020.1744684 Snoek, M., Eisenschmidt, E., Forsthuber, B., Holdsworth, P., Michaelidou, A., Dahl Norgaard, J., Pachler, N. (2010). Developing Coherent and Systemwide Induction Programmes for Beginning Teachers. A handbook for Policy makers. Brussels, European Commission.

In many European countries, teacher induction and mentoring are central answers to the question of how newly qualified teachers' path into the teaching profession can reduce attrition, increase job satisfaction and enhance the quality of teachers' work. However, it is difficult to gain insight into existing European research in the field partly because this research has not previously been systematically collected and analysed. There have been efforts to summarise relevant literature in some European regions e.g. in the Nordic countries (Olsen et al. 2020), but a literature review of research across European countries is missing. This is the goal of this chapter. Through a critical literature review (Hart 2003/2018) focusing on empirical, peer reviewed European research, the chapter will address the following research questions: - How is teacher induction and mentoring organised across the different countries in Europe? - What are recurrent topics explored in studies on teacher induction and mentoring in Europe? - How is induction and mentoring conceptualised in European studies in the field? - What effects of teacher induction and mentoring processes are examined in the research literature and how are these effects investigated? Research literature written in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Greek, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish is searched in ProQuest and EBSCO as well as in specific European databases in the period from 2000-2023. Inclusion criteria are: empirical studies, focused on teacher induction and/or mentoring in primary and lower secondary schools, conducted in one or more European countries and peer-reviewed.

Hart, C. (2018): Doing a Literature Review. Releasing the Research Imagination, Sage Olsen, K. R., Bjerkholt, E. M. & Heikkinnen, H. L. T. (Eds.) (2020): New teachers in Nordic countries – Ecologies of mentoring and induction. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Symeonidis, V. (2021). Europeanisation in teacher education: A comparative case study of teacher education policies and practices. Routledge. Vidović, V. V., & Domović, V. (2013). Teachers in Europe - Main trends, issues and challenges. Croatian Journal of Education, 15(3), 219-250. Zuljan, M. V., & Požarnik, B. M. (2014). Induction and Early-career Support of Teachers in Europe. European Journal of Education, 49(2), 192-205. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12080

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of teacher induction practices and the situation of mentoring for new teachers in the Nordic countries and Estonia. The chapter will identify what is unique within a broader European context and also what, if anything, is significantly different. This chapter arises from a longstanding collaboration between teachers' trade unions, teacher educators and researchers on mentoring and induction which includes partners from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This chapter will report on the current research and development project named Nordic Teacher Induction - Sustainable Ecosystems of Mentoring (NTI-SEM) which is funded by Nordplus Horizontal. This paper will begin with six summaries of the current state of mentoring and induction from each of the partner counties. The summaries will include a short historical account about the development of induction and mentoring, and then the most up-to-date status from each country will be introduced. Following this, a comparison of the various contexts for teacher induction will unpack each nation’s policies as they relate to induction and mentoring, and discuss the implications for induction and mentoring practices and research. In this comparison concepts drawn from the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) and ecologies of practice (for example Kemmis, 2022) will be used. The final part of this paper will reflect on the unique collaboration that this network has sustained for nearly two decades; that between teacher educators, researchers, teachers and teacher unions. This collaboration has already resulted in important conference symposia, publications including two anthologies titled: “Newly Qualified Teachers in Northern Europe – Comparative Perspectives on Promoting Professional Development” (edited by Fransson & Gustafsson, 2008) “New Teachers in Nordic Countries: Ecologies of Induction and Mentoring” (edited by Olsen, Bjerkholt & Heikkinen, 2020), as well as in a series of “Road Show Events” in each of the countries. The multi-stakeholder collaboration has not only provided a mapping and comparison of mentoring and induction practices for newly qualified teachers across the Nordic region, it has also provided impetus for change in policy and focus in the educational landscape in relation to mentoring and induction in each of the countries.

Fransson, G. & Gustafsson, C. (Eds.) (2008). Newly Qualified Teachers in Northern Europe – Comparative Perspectives on Promoting Professional Development. University of Gävle. Kemmis, S. (2022). Transforming Practices. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education. Springer Science & Business Media. Olsen, K.-N., Bjerkholt, E. & Heikkinen, H. (Eds.) (2020). New Teachers in Nordic Countries: Ecologies of Induction and Mentoring. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk.

In Spring/Summer 2023 Professional Development in Education will have published a special issue of the journal entitled ‘Beyond Reproduction: The Transformative Potential of Professional Learning’. This special issue is based on the premise that there is an often unquestioned assumption that professional learning and development (PLD) is a ‘good thing’ (Stevenson, 2019), and that whilst co-opting the language of transformation, many professional learning policies and practices actually serve to further entrench hegemonic practices. Use of the term ‘transformation’ in multiple education contexts is often over-used and under-theorised (Boylan, 2023). Little attention is paid to precisely what is being transformed, for what purpose, by whom and how. Literature is often focused on identifying ‘what works’ solutions within a set of parameters that do not question ‘what matters’ (Biesta, 2007). Against this backdrop, the special issue of PDiE seeks to explore the potential of professional learning to be disruptive – to challenge current inequalities, dominant ideas and established orthodoxies (Kennedy, 2005; Kodama et al, 2023).

Much of the debate about transformative adult learning has been shaped by Mezirow (1991, 1995), with a focus on the personal transformation of a learner’s ‘frame of reference’, defined as a combination of both ‘habits of mind’ and ‘points of view’. Mezirow describes habits of mind as ‘habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting influenced by assumptions that constitute a set of codes’ (1997, pp5-6). ‘Points of view’ are the values, attitudes and feelings that represent an articulation of an individual’s habits of mind. The latter can be quite superficial and open to change, but habits of mind are much more embedded and enduring. For Mezirow, it is the transformation of an individual’s frame of reference (as either a shift in one’s habit of mind, or an ‘accretion of transformations in points of view’ 1997, p. 7) that is the measure of genuinely transformative learning.

Mezirow’s exposition of transformative pedagogies is located in what might be described as traditional adult education contexts, rather than the more precise, and arguably problematic, context of professional learning and development. ‘Professional learning’ is a specific form of adult education that can be described, in some loose sense, as ‘learning for work’. Given the inevitable constraints that such a definition imposes – can professional learning ever be considered transformative, even in the limited form developed by Mezirow? What are the transformative possibilities for those engaged in professional learning and who frequently work in the systems they simultaneously seek to disrupt and transform. Is it possible to work ‘in and against’ (Mayo, 2015)? Is it possible to conceive of professional learning as not only learning for work but learning about work and even learning against work?

The panel discussion will provide an opportunity for attendees and PDiE Editorial Board members to discuss issues arising from the special issue, mapping out where this debate and the research, might go next. Following a brief introduction to the Special Issue by the editors, four members of the PDiE Editorial Board from different national contexts in Europe and the USA will each present brief reflections on what they have taken from the issue, drawing out themes of interest from across the articles, and using these to form and pose provocations for session attendees to consider. Attendees will then be invited to react to these provocations, drawing on their own specific contexts and knowledge bases. We anticipate that the diversity of interpretation, policy and practice in Europe will be highlighted and we hope that the perspectives of ECER attendees from across and beyond Europe will help to expand and develop this conversation on the transformative power of professional learning.

This panel will discuss, How can European education systems support collaborative in-school professional learning as a culture, and how can universities play a useful role?

The panellists will draw on their experiences and separate research in Ireland, the Netherlands and Scotland, to explore current opportunities and challenges, and identify what may be useful to European systems going forward.

As evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, both autonomy and collaboration are important to strategic planning and management at the meso-level, enabling schools to develop ways to tackle their most pressing issues. Autonomy and collaboration are equally important in designing learning for students and adapting national curricula to the micro-level classroom context; what is often termed ‘curriculum-making’.

Professional learning here refers to an active and structured engagement with the new knowledge, skills and attitudes that are necessary for the development of one’s individual and collective practice. Professional learning happens whilst challenges are faced and must also pre-empt future challenges, which means that an ongoing dialogue of collaborative, critical and creative enquiry needs to take place in schools to complement the professional development of individual staff members during their careers.

Despite these ideals, meaningful professional learning still struggles to find a sustained and school-embedded place in European education systems. The obvious challenges are adequate time, reward, and the opportunity to focus on topics of actual need, spurred on by the pandemic. Perhaps less well understood are leadership issues of navigating relationships between staff, and ambodying a credible mentor identity that seems to be caught between innovation and compliance.

The professional community needs members at all levels to take responsibility and possess a deep understanding of professional learning in order to lead others in the process from their various starting points and in a way that is relevant to the local context. At the start of their career, teachers are focused on developing their own practice and have limited appreciation of the complexities of the profession. School and system leaders, whilst arguably more experienced, also do not automatically possess an informed understanding of purposes, process and approaches to professional learning to enable them to effectively design and lead it in a meaningful way. It is risky for education systems to assume that such a capacity exists and, with the approaches of either informal sharing or the selling of pre-packaged professional learning, the concern is that diverse perspectives are lacking and the role of universities is being overlooked.

This panel will consider how universities can evolve their engagement and partnerships with schools and educators in order to better support them to have the capacity (the confidence and competence) to lead and sustain meaningful professional learning. Panellists will respond to the questions with examples from teacher education research in their countries:

In the Netherlands, despite focusing mainly on initial teacher education and induction, a growing number of initiatives are based on lesson study and on strengthening the capacity of teacher leaders. However, professional development as a systemic feature is hindered by the structure of schools and a static perspective of the profession, characterized by isolation. In Scotland, the focus on collaborative partnerships with schools and local authorities underpins university approaches to supporting school strategic development and building capacity in leading professional learning, including through specially-designed part-time master’s programmes. In Ireland, the Teaching Council have initiated a Researcher in Residence Scheme to support school-university partnerships that aim to build capacity for and sustain professional learning mutually between educational researchers and practitioners.

The panel discussion will dive into the common issues in a broader European context and consider some positive actions for the future.

An opportunity for a Meet and Greet with the Editors of publishing "Professional Learning and Development" & the chance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal.

Innovation in Teacher Professional Learning in Europe Research, Policy and Practice is a book due to be published by Routledge in 2023, providing an overview of teacher professional learning and development in 14 European countries. The authors participating in this symposium will provide an insight into current policy and practice relating to PLD in their countries. Taken together, the three symposia in this series will enable an up-to-date commentary on the state of PLD in Europe.

During recent decades we can track a path going from teacher education as In-service training (INSET) to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to Professional Learning and Development (Ostinelli and Crescentini, 2021). The first is usually conceived as an occasional complement to initial teacher education; the second is a continuing process typified by transmissive approaches (Timperley, 2011); the third, finally, includes learning under the form of evolutionary processes capable of generating professional expertise and mastery (Dreyfus and Dreyfuss, 2008), focusing on the teacher as an individual professional but forming part of a network of professional learners capable of providing adequate answers to the rapid and sudden changes affecting contemporary schooling.

Teacher professional learning in every country analysed here has been classified as pertaining to one or other of these categories. However, each school system also has its particularities, both in defining its approach to teacher professional learning and from a cultural/structural point of view. Moreover, the countries participating in this study are also different in terms of population, going from small nations like Wales to larger ones such as France or Italy.

The information here proposed can give a good background for future deepening and more precise studies on various issues concerning teacher professional learning. Questions of relevance for all the countries include the increasing prominence of informal professional learning, the incentives for participating in teacher professional development, (including leadership development (Jones 2022) and how these may be aligned with needs, conditions and resources, and the issue of compulsoriness, in particular, the balance between prescription and option. Coaching (Kise, 2017), mentoring (Geeraerts et al., 2015) and professional learning networks (Handscomb and Brown, 2022) are associated practices that also deserve attention. Another important issue is how to balance and integrate in a lifewide-oriented organized approach what is performed autonomously and informally by teachers as professionals who take responsibility for their own learning.

The critical inquiry proposed here was intended as an exploration of how conceptualizations of learning, responsibility and change have been articulated through the pandemic crisis. Issues framing teachers’ professional learning and development, along with the dynamics of roles and architectures of temporality shaping the meaning-making and the policy-making processes, were rendered visible. In discussing their normative implications for teachers’ professional learning and development (PLD), I proposed taking a more complex view (Strom, Mills and Abrams, 2021) of the multiplicity of co-evolving conditions and factors explaining the dynamics of change during crisis (Rikowski, 2020; Sayed et al., 2021). This meant looking for historical, systemic, structural, political and cultural connections with the context of continuing professional development in Romania. A number of 66 policy documents and policy statements issued by government actors, NGOs, experts (local members of the academic or non-academic community), stakeholders (professional bodies, trade unions, etc.) and market actors have been sampled for analysis. Analytically, positions theory (Davies & Harré, 1990) and critical frame analysis (hereafter, CFA) (Dombos et al, 2012) have been employed to look at how issues of teachers’ professional learning and development have been articulated in the education policy debates in Romania between March 2020 and June 2021. The analysis resulted in unpacking conceptual and processual factors constraining innovative approaches to teachers’ PLD that the pandemic crisis might have harboured. Some of these constraints have systemic and structural roots. Others are epistemic and could remain concealed, should the inquiry abide by linear models of framing the research design, as Kennedy (2016) warns. The greater risk associated with linear approaches to conceptualizing learning, responsibility and change through crisis, rests with hindering the ethical and political responsibilities conjoined with innovating teachers’ PLD. The pandemic crisis has provided great opportunities to see that innovating the teachers’ professional learning is not only about asking what or how, but also by whom and towards which horizon of possibilities. These questions demand that we recognize the complex multitude of factors and agencies cutting into post-pandemic innovative approaches to PLD, and that we place this recognition more in service of developing solidarity and socially just educational practices, than in serving neoliberal agendas of performativity, progress and competitiveness.

Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the theory of social behaviour, 20(1), 43-63. Dombos T, Krizsan A, Verloo M, Zentai V (2012) Critical Frame Analysis: A Comparative Methodology for the QUING Project. Working Paper Series, Center for Policy Studies. Central European University. Hungary: Budapest. http://pdc.ceu.hu/archive/00006845/01/cps-working-paper-critical-frame-analysis-quing-2012.pdf [downloaded April 2020] Kennedy, M.M. (2016) How does professional development improve teaching?, Review of Educational Research, 20 (10), pp. 1-36. DOI: 10.3102/0034654315626800 Rikowski, G (2020). Crisis: critical reflections on the language of neoliberalism in education. Routledge. Strom, K., Mills, T. and Abrams, L (2021) Illuminating a continuum of complex perspectives in teacher development, Professional Development in Education, 47 (2-3), pp.199-208, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2021.1901005 Sayed, Yusuf, Cooper, Adam, & John, Vaughn M.. (2021). Crises and disruptions: Educational reflections, (re)imaginings, and (re)vitalization. Journal of Education (University of KwaZulu-Natal), (84), pp. 9-30. https://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i84a01

This paper analyses policy and practice related to teachers’ professional learning (PL) in the Republic of Ireland (RoI). Like other European contexts, Ireland developed a national framework (called Cosán = pathway) for teachers’ PL. The Teaching Council of Ireland (2016) developed Cosán in consultation with teachers and other key stakeholders. While the framework acknowledges the importance of teachers as learners (Evans, 2014) and highlights the centrality of PL in teacher professionalism (Kennedy, 2014), it was also initially linked to teacher registration with the Teaching Council as is the case with the professional update in Scotland (General Teaching Council Scotland, 2014). Only teachers registered with the Teaching Council can teach in state-recognised schools. However, the idea of mandatory engagement with PL for registration was met with resistance. While the Teaching Council argues teachers have a responsibility to engage in PL , they are questioning the value of making PL mandatory. As highlighted by the OECD (2009) there is a fine line between professional responsibility and accountability with the latter being perceived as managerialism. This paper will explore the policy context and rationale for the development of Cosán before tracing its journey through the consultative process with teachers which was a unique approach in the context of the Irish policy landscape. Challenges to enactment (Bell and Stevenson, 2015) will also be explored including the socio-political environment of teacher PL, governance and strategic direction, mandatory PL , and developing a strategic approach to teachers’ PL across all education stakeholders. Finally, this chapter will propose a way forward for the enactment of Cosán emphasising the importance of a common understanding of PL, contexts and considerations for PL, and leadership for PL at the macro, meso and micro levels of the system.

Evans, L. (2014). Leadership for professional development and learning: enhancing our understanding of how teachers develop. Cambridge Journal of Education, 44(2),179-198 General Teaching Council for Scotland (2014). Professional update. Available at: https://www.gtcs.org.uk/professional-update/professional-update.aspx# Last accessed (4, May 2021). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2009). Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First Results from TALIS. Available at: https://www.oecd.org/berlin/43541636.pdf. Last accessed (4, May 2021). Kennedy, A. (2014). Models of Continuing Professional Development: a framework for analysis. Professional Development in Education, 40(3), 336-351 King, F., and Holland, E. (2022) A transformative professional learning meta-model to support leadership learning and growth of early career teachers. International Journal of Leadership in Education, DOI: 10.1080/13603124.2022.2037021 Teaching Council (2016b). Cosán: Framework for Teachers’ Learning. Maynooth, Ireland: Teaching Council. Teaching Council (2018). Common Ground in a Crowded Space. Maynooth, Ireland: Teaching Council.

In France, teachers’ continuing in-service education, as currently designated (formation continue in French) has been the subject of numerous national and international studies, research and reports which regularly and consistently highlight its deficits (Cour des Comptes, 2017; IGEN, 2017). A long-standing top-down conception of in-service teacher training is part of a uniform vision of the educational system that has long neglected a genuine diagnosis of needs and an engineering approach that would enable the implementation of training activities that are well thought out and geared to specific educational contexts. In accordance with our previously published article (Malet, 2021 & 2023; Ostinelli and Crescentini, 2021) France shows a centralistic influence that contributes the use of innovative forms of PL testifies to the fact that some innovation at least starts to appear in the system. Yet, a programmatic reorientation of in-service training policy from the perspective of steering training activities centred on the professional development of teachers is underway in France. It is inspired, often explicitly, by foreign examples of the promotion of an human resource management policy governed by the concept of CPD for teachers. It is driven by a concern to implement a genuine human resources management policy, which is lacking in the French education system, and which is likely to increase the attractiveness of the teaching profession and the prospects for career and professional mobility in the course of employment, and to restore the image of the profession and the motivation of serving staff and their commitment to a lifelong learning approach.

Cour des comptes (2017). Gérer les enseignants autrement : une réforme qui reste à faire. Paris : Ministère de l’Education Nationale. IGEN – IGAENR (General Inspection of the French Department of Education) (2017). Rapport n° 2017-037, L’évaluation sur la politique publique de formation continue du premier degré, June 2017. Malet R. (ed.) (2021). De la formation continue au développement professionnel des personnels d’éducation. Situation nationale, comparaisons internationales, état des recherches. Paris : Conseil National d’Evaluation des Systèmes Scolaires (CNESCO). Malet R. (forthcoming). Teachers’ Continuing professional Development in France. A Systemic Transformation in Progress. In Ken Jones, Giorgio Ostinelli, Alberto Crescentini (Eds). Innovation in Teacher Professional Learning: Research, Policy.and Practice in Europe. Routledge. Ostinelli G., Crescentini A. (2021). Policy, culture and practice in teacher professional development in five European countries. A comparative analysis, Professional Development in Education, 1-17.

The current debate on how a national or local institution can implement teacher professional learning (PL) and development has resulted in significant shifts in the conceptualization, design, and delivery of continuing professional development (CPD) programs. Despite the specific policies and models adopted at the national or school level, CPD is one of the critical issues of the European Education Area (EEA) strategic framework (Council Resolution 2021/C 66/01). The EEA framework gives a platform of shared European initiatives, which underlie the need to promote CPD opportunities for a good quality of teaching and learning. Teachers’ professional quality directly impacts the educational outcomes of all students; consequently, there is a relevant demand for continuous development. Given the complexity of this policy and research scenario, we can assume that a CPD plan, at the school or system level, can help in understanding how students’ educational outcomes relate with teachers’ PL (Earle & Bianchi, 2021). CPD is not the current label for teacher PL in Italy, where it is called “continuing teacher education” (CTE). The CTE is implemented through a three-year national plan that combines school and teachers’ needs with national priorities (MIUR, 2016; 2017). It represents a) an educational policy challenge - one of the weakest points of the educational system - (Foschi, 2021); b) a teachers’ need, and a spending priority of significant weight (OECD, 2019). The proposal’s primary focus is to figure out which indicators, literature-based categories, and criteria of professional learning were considered during the design, implementation, and evaluation of teacher PL in Italy. If country adopts the concept of PL, it is necessary to examine those policies, organizational models, and practices which have put teachers’ learning needs at the core of school improvement (Korthagen, 2017; Cirkony et al., 2021). The national CTE model could fail if poorly informed by current literature on teacher education and professional development (Kennedy, 2019). For that reason, the paper suggests a set of literature-based indicators that could help in understanding the Italian CTE policy at a large-scale policy level and at local professional development initiatives: how much time is needed to foster teachers’ professional changes? How to learn about teachers’ learning? How to design studies and CPD policies to promote teachers’ PL? How can we provide guidance to improve teachers’ practice and enrich their thinking about teaching? How to understand the changes in student learning due to teachers’ participation in CPD activities?

Cirkony, C., Rickinson, M., Walsh, L., Gleeson, J., Salisbury, M., Cutler, B., Berry, M. & Smith, K. (2021). Beyond effective approaches: A rapid review response to designing professional learning. Professional Development in Education, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2021.1973075. Council Resolution on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training towards the European Education Area and beyond (2021-2030) 2021/C 66/01. (2021). Official Journal, C 66, 1-21. Earle, S. & Bianchi, L. (2021). What role can professional learning frameworks play in developing teacher agency in subject leadership in primary science? Professional Development in Education, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2021.1942142. Foschi, L. C., (2021). Teachers’ Continuous Professional Development in Italy: An analysis of the results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Italian Journal of Educational Research, 27, 52-64. Korthagen, F. (2017). Inconvenient truths about teacher learning: Towards professional development 3.0. Teachers and Teaching, 23 (4), 387–405. Kennedy, M.M. (2019). How we learn about teacher learning. Review of Research in Education, 43(1), 138–162. MIUR (2016). Piano per la formazione dei docenti, 2016-19. Roma: MIUR. MIUR (2017). Orientamenti concernenti il Piano Triennale dell’Offerta Formativa. Roma: MIUR. OECD (2019). TALIS 2018 Results (Volume I): Teachers and School Leaders as Lifelong Learners. TALIS. Paris: OECD Publishing.

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

Innovation in Teacher Professional Learning in Europe Research, Policy and Practice is a book due to be published by Routledge in 2023, providing an overview of teacher professional learning and development in 14 European countries. The authors participating in this symposium will provide an insight into current policy and practice relating to PLD in their countries. Taken together, the three symposia in this series will enable an up-to-date commentary on the state of PLD in Europe.

During recent decades we can track a path going from teacher education as In-service training (INSET) to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to Professional Learning and Development (Ostinelli and Crescentini, 2021). The first is usually conceived as an occasional complement to initial teacher education; the second is a continuing process typified by transmissive approaches (Timperley, 2011); the third, finally, includes learning under the form of evolutionary processes capable of generating professional expertise and mastery (Dreyfus and Dreyfuss, 2008), focusing on the teacher as an individual professional but forming part of a network of professional learners capable of providing adequate answers to the rapid and sudden changes affecting contemporary schooling.

Teacher professional learning in every country analysed here has been classified as pertaining to one or other of these categories. However, each school system also has its particularities, both in defining its approach to teacher professional learning and from a cultural/structural point of view. Moreover, the countries participating in this study are also different in terms of population, going from small nations like Wales to larger ones such as France or Italy.

The information here proposed can give a good background for future deepening and more precise studies on various issues concerning teacher professional learning. Questions of relevance for all the countries include the increasing prominence of informal professional learning, the incentives for participating in teacher professional development (including leadership development, Jones 2022) and how these may be aligned with needs, conditions and resources, and the issue of compulsoriness, in particular, the balance between prescription and option. Coaching (Kise, 2017), mentoring (Geeraerts et al., 2015) and professional learning networks (Handscomb and Brown, 2022) are associated practices that also deserve attention. Another important issue is how to balance and integrate in a lifewide-oriented organized approach what is performed autonomously and informally by teachers as professionals who take responsibility for their own learning.

Wales is part of the UK but, following devolution in 1999, has built and developed an education system separate from that of the other three UK nations. Although Wales has a population of just over 3 million and may be seen as a small education system, its cultural diversity, geography, economy and social composition has produced a complex mix of policy and practice. Since 2017 education in Wales has undergone significant change, including its curriculum, professional standards for teaching and leadership, and initial teacher education. Although key policy decisions are made centrally, policy implementation is largely devolved. Responsibility is subdivided into three tiers: the Welsh Government; 22 local authorities, arranged into four regional consortia; and schools. Different attempts to transform the system in Wales have been implemented in recent decades, and in relation to professional learning, policy drivers have swung repeatedly in response to ‘political’ or ‘professional’ influences (Jones, 2011), referred to as a “white knuckle ride for education in Wales” (Evans, 2015). Professional Learning is central to this change. There is a National Mission with a common purpose to build “a high-quality education profession”, emphasising co-constructing change through networking. However, a key challenge is ensuring that professional learning is supported in an equitable way, taking into consideration geographical location, areas of deprivation and language (Wales is a bilingual nation). Professional learning is most effective in collaborative cultures, but the learning process is individual (requiring active rather than passive engagement), often informal, and always complex (Strom and Viesca, 2021). A key challenge in making policy change work is to Identify and overcome potential obstacles to implementation. Supporting effective leadership of professional learning in post-pandemic complex environments is a high priority in achieving this (Jones, 2022).

Evans, G. (2015) A Class Apart. Learning the lessons of education in post-devolution Wales. Cardiff: Ashley Drake Publishing Ltd. Jones, K. (2011) Central, local and individual continuing professional development (CPD) priorities: changing policies of CPD in Wales Professional Development in Education Vol. 37, No. 5, 759–776 Jones, K. (2015) ‘Professional Development’ or ‘Professional Learning’ ... and does it matter? https://www.ewc.wales/site/index.php/en/about/staff-room/son-archive/43-english/about/blog-archive/93-ken-jones-professional-development-or-professional-learning-and-does-it-matter Jones, K. (2022) Leading Professional Learning Insight Paper National Academy for Educational Leadership Wales https://nael.cymru/insight/leading-professional-learning/ Strom, K.J. and Viesca, K.M. (2021) Towards a complex framework of teacher learning-practice, Professional Development in Education, 47:2-3, 209-224, DOI: 10.1080/19415257.2020.1827449

This paper explores the complexity of the professional development landscape in England (Woods et al., 2021). There are different types of school, routes into teaching, providers of professional development and interpretations of professional development and learning with a confusing variety of terms in use. The subtle differences between how people use these terms are significant because they influence teachers’ attitude, agency and understanding purpose. Some see professional development and learning as activities that teachers do or which are ‘delivered’ to them in a transmissive model; others see it as learning on the part of teachers with varying degrees of agency and others focus on the impact on pupils (Sims et al, 2021). At a time of challenges in recruitment and retention, the English government policy purports to create a ‘golden thread’ of development from initial training and education through to middle leadership, headship and executive leadership (DfE, 2022, p5) with nationally designed programmes set out as a framework of content organised into ‘learn that’ and ‘learn how to’ statements. The Early Career Framework for new teachers aims to enhance retention but its approach is controversial (Ovenden-Hope, 2022). Alongside these are more grassroots opportunities and initiatives such as professional learning networks and communities leading their own research and activities for sustained improvement. Research into the impact on professional learning and wellbeing will be explored.

Department for Education (2022). Delivering world-class teacher development – policy paper. London: DfE. Ovenden-Hope, T. (Ed.) (2022). The Early Career Framework: origins, outcomes and opportunities. John Catt. Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J., & Anders, J. (2021). What are the Characteristics of Teacher Professional Development that Increase Pupil Achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Education Endowment Fund. Woods, P.A., Torrance, D., Donnelly, C., Hamilton, T., Jones, K., & Potter, I. (2021).Diverging systems of educational leadership in the four nations of the United Kingdom? School Leadership and Management, 41(1-2),1-5.

Teacher professional learning has been a major element in Scottish education policy as part of efforts to bring about system-wide improvement in learner outcomes. Initially, professional development was a tool for the implementation of wide ranging top-down reforms to the curriculum and school management. However, in the ‘Empowerment Agenda’ policy reform programme to create a school and teacher-led system, schools are to develop approaches to the curriculum and learning to address the needs of all learners in their school. Career-long professional learning (CLPL) is a means of mobilising the profession to address an enduring poverty-related attainment gap. This paper will discuss briefly key milestones in the development of CLPL, the use of practice-based learning, modelling professional learning, professional standards and re-accreditation. Significant investment has been made to engage teachers in CLPL, where CLPL sits at the centre of teacher professionalism. However, as Scottish education faces unrest and funding issues, there are questions about the sustaining the profession-wide engagement in CLPL. The paper raises issues regarding collaborative learning, teacher agency and the impact of professional learning on school improvement.

Forde, C. (2011b). Approaches to professional learning. In C. Forde and J. O’Brien (eds.) Coaching and mentoring: Developing teachers and leaders (17-31). Edinburgh: Dunedin Press. Forde, C., & McMahon, M. (2019). Teacher Quality, Professional Learning and Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Forde, C., McMahon, M. A., Hamilton, G., & Murray, R. (2017). Rethinking professional standards to promote professional learning. Professional Development in Education, 42(1), 19-35. GTCS (2019). The National Model of Professional Learning. Edinburgh: GCTS. GTCS (n.d.). Professional Standards for Teachers. Edinburgh: GTCS, from https://www.gtcs.org.uk/professional-standards/professional-standards-for-teachers/ (accessed 1st May 2022). Scottish Government (2017) Education Governance Next Steps. Edinburgh: SG. Scottish Government (2018) Education Reform – Joint Agreement. Edinburgh: SG. Scottish Government (2019) Empowering Schools Education Reform: Progress Report. Edinburgh: SG.

Teacher learning in Northern Ireland occurs in the unique context of an education system where the historical and political legacies of the past continue to be manifest in a denominationally divided school system (Gallagher, 2021: p.13) though with a growing ‘integrated’ school system. With a population of 1.9 million, Northern Ireland is a small state within the United Kindgom (UK). Sharing a land border with the Republic of Ireland (RoI), it has been described as having ‘the smallest school population in the UK but with a structural design that is amongst the most complex’ (Gallagher, 2021: p.147). As one of the three devolved administrations of the United Kingdom (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) its Department of Education (DE) has responsibility for education and for teachers in Northern Ireland. However, the development of the teaching profession, and teachers’ professional learning, has been impacted by many factors relating to its unique political context and the legacy of the circumstances in which the Northern Ireland state was established. In fact, devolution in Northern Ireland has followed a ‘stop-start’ approach that impacted on the ways in which innovation in teacher professional learning has evolved. There have been a series of reviews of education in Northern Ireland and the inability to progress the outcomes of these is perhaps indicative of complexities associated with introducing change in education in the Northern Ireland context. It is against this backdrop, that our presentation will explore teacher learning in Northern Ireland. Conceptual models of the teacher and teaching, which are key pillars in the teacher learning strategy as it has evolved since the early 2000s, are considered, looking closely at Teaching: the Reflective Profession (GTCNI, 2007) and Learning Leaders (DE, 2016), as well as arrangements for early professional development (EPD). We will consider the ways in which teacher learning has evolved and some of the challenges facing the wider implementation of policy and teachers’ engagement with it.

Department of Education for Northern Ireland - DE (2016) Learning Leaders: A Strategy for Teacher Professional Learning. Bangor: DENI. Gallagher, T., (2021) ‘Governance and leadership in education policy making and school development in a divided society’, School Leadership & Management, 41:1-2, 132-151, DOI: 10.1080/13632434.2021.1887116 General Teaching Council Northern Ireland - GTCN (2007) Teaching: The Reflective Profession Belfast: GTCNI https://gtcni.org.uk/professional-space/professional-competence/teaching-the-reflective-profession

Innovation in Teacher Professional Learning in Europe Research, Policy and Practice is a book due to be published by Routledge in 2023, providing an overview of teacher professional learning and development in 14 European countries. The authors participating in this symposium will provide an insight into current policy and practice relating to PLD in their countries. Taken together, the three symposia in this series will enable an up-to-date commentary on the state of PLD in Europe.

During recent decades we can track a path going from teacher education as In-service training (INSET) to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to Professional Learning and Development (Ostinelli and Crescentini, 2021). The first is usually conceived as an occasional complement to initial teacher education; the second is a continuing process typified by transmissive approaches (Timperley, 2011); the third, finally, includes learning under the form of evolutionary processes capable of generating professional expertise and mastery (Dreyfus and Dreyfuss, 2008), focusing on the teacher as an individual professional but forming part of a network of professional learners capable of providing adequate answers to the rapid and sudden changes affecting contemporary schooling.

Teacher professional learning in every country analysed here has been classified as pertaining to one or other of these categories. However, each school system also has its particularities, both in defining its approach to teacher professional learning and from a cultural/structural point of view. Moreover, the countries participating in this study are also different in terms of population, going from small nations like Wales to larger ones such as France or Italy.

The information here proposed can give a good background for future deepening and more precise studies on various issues concerning teacher professional learning. Questions of relevance for all the countries include the increasing prominence of informal professional learning, the incentives for participating in teacher professional development (including leadership development, Jones, 2022) and how these may be aligned with needs, conditions and resources, and the issue of compulsoriness, in particular, the balance between prescription and option. Coaching (Kise, 2017), mentoring (Geeraerts et al., 2015) and professional learning networks (Handscomb and Brown, 2022) are associated practices that also deserve attention. Another important issue is how to balance and integrate in a lifewide-oriented organized approach what is performed autonomously and informally by teachers as professionals who take responsibility for their own learning.

Comparing different educational systems is a task that can sometimes appear artificial. In fact, every one of them grew up from different histories and systemic conditions (Ostinelli, 2009). For performing this duty, we renounced to the use of “sharp” descriptive models, preferring a broader and flexible constructivist/complexivist teacher professional learning (PL) framework (Ostinelli and Crescentini, 2021). Based on these criteria, we defined a set of indicators: needs, validity, organic structure, sustainability, support, professional learning, frame, form and effectiveness. Starting from these indicators we created an online 30 item survey, and we submitted it from February to September 2022 to the presenting authors of this tri-symposium. This choice was done mainly for reasons of opportunity (in particular the high number of participant countries and of different languages spoken). However, it relied also on the argument that every author, even if from a subjective standpoint, is an expert of her/his national educational system, and in particular of teacher PL. We used frequency and Likert scales and we asked the respondents to provide further details, where appropriate, through open-ended questions. Therefore, our study has to be considered of explorative character. The resulting information can be an outline for further qualitative and quantitative investigations.

Ostinelli, G. (2009). Teacher Education in Italy, Germany, England, Sweden and Finland. European Journal of Education, 44(2), 291-308. Ostinelli, G., & Crescentini, A. (2021). Policy, culture and practice in teacher professional development in five European countries. A comparative analysis. Professional Development in Education, 1-17.

In this chapter, we focus on approaches to professional learning and development (PLD) in Denmark since the 2014 national school reform. We describe how a formal competence development approach dominated in the initial phase, and how this was gradually supplemented by a top-down-oriented teacher collaboration approach within the framework of professional learning communities (PLCs) (Qvortrup, 2016). As this type of teacher collaboration is often characterised by teachers sharing experiences, discussing student learning, and/or exchanging instructional strategies (de Jong et al., 2022), a central assumption behind this emphasis on collaboration was that collaboration would lead to increased on-the-job learning through feedback and reflection. Neither of the recent PLD approaches, however, seems to have had a significant positive impact on students’ performance. In order to contribute to new ways of thinking about teacher PLD, we zoom in on teacher collaboration as part of the recent PLD effort in Denmark and analyse an empirical example of teacher collaboration in a Danish school. In the example, we follow a series of collaborative events that revolve around two teachers meeting to plan a lesson, the unfolding of the lesson, and the talks and encounters that follow the lesson. The analysis is informed by a complexity-oriented process theoretical perspective (Hernes, 2008, 2014) and it highlights how potential learning opportunities that arise as part of the teachers’ collaborative events do not actualize because the events mainly revolve around the production of consensus, legitimisation of and adaptation to current practices and mutual support. From our analysis the chapter advocates an approach according to which teacher collaboration and PLD should be observed as a result of emerging processes of organisation and complexity management, rather than being the result of top-down management decisions. An implication is that PLD programmes that take this observation into account should be structured around an understanding of the importance of supporting and sustaining PLD processes that emerge as part of the school organisation.

de Jong, L., Meirink, J., & Admiraal, W. (2022). School-Based Collaboration as a Learning Context for Teachers: A Systematic Review. International Journal of Educational Research, 112, 101927. Hernes, T. (2008). Understanding Organization as Proces—Theory for a Tangled World. Routledge. Hernes, T. (2014). A Process Theory of Organization. University Press. Qvortrup, L. (2016). Det ved vi om professionelle læringsfællesskaber. (1. ed.). Frederikshavn: Dafolo. [English Title: What We Know about Professional Learning Communities].

REssential to Finnish education context is decentralisation and autonomy of municipalities, schools and teachers (Niemi, 2015). Therefore, teachers are active participants in the design of local curricula and courses. Teachers in Finland are required to have a master’s degree. An essential characteristic of teacher education in Finland has been its emphasis on research (Tirri, 2014). This orientation supports teachers in the local planning and assessment processes. Moreover, the research orientation supports student teachers in developing professional teacher identity and agency in their work (Niemi, 2015). The in-service education or support for the professional learning of teachers is the responsibility of the municipalities and cities in Finland. Teachers must participate three days per year to professional learning. Therefore, municipalities have organised short in-service courses for teachers. In addition to three in-service days, there is 120 hours for co-design time during the academic year for co-design, consultations, and for home-school co-operation. According to Kumpulainen (2017) and National Agency of Education (2019) the Finnish teachers and principals have participated actively in voluntary professional learning, typically yearly 80% - 91% of various teacher groups. Teachers’ professional learning is supported in various school, district and national level projects or activities. At school level, teachers in Finland, are seen as developers of the school community and school culture (Finnish National Board for Education [NBE], 2014). This idea of teachers as developers could be interpreted as an activity of a professional learning community (PLC) of teachers (Webb et al., 2009). In addition to development projects there are several teacher networks, which support teachers’ professional learning. One important current teachers’ professional learning innovation is s a tutor-teacher model . A tutor teacher is a teacher, who has fewer lesson hours than other teachers but supports other teachers in their own classrooms to use digital tools in education. National Agency for Education has been responsible for the development of tutor-teacher’s competencies and network of tutor-teachers As a summary, it is possible to recognise, how the outcomes of research on teachers’ professional development and learning are aimed to implement to Finnish teachers’ professional learning activities. The development project or professional learning communities activities are often long-term by nature (Oliveira, 2010). Teacher led development projects and PLCs support teachers to take an active role in their professional learning (Garet et al., 2001) and connect their professional learning to the classrooms and practice context (Van den Bergh et al., 2015).

Webb, R. et al.. (2009) Professional learning communities and teacher well‐being? A comparative analysis of primary schools in England and Finland. Oxford Review of Education, 35(3), 405-422 Van den Bergh, L. et al. (2015). Teacher learning in the context of a continuing professional development programme: A case study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 47(1), 142–150. Tirri, K. (2014). The last 40 years in Finnish teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(5), 600–609. Oliveira, A. W. (2010). Improving teacher questioning in science inquiry discussions through professional development. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(4), 422–453. Niemi, H. (2015). Teacher Professional Development in Finland: Towards a More Holistic Approach. Psychology, Society, & Education, 7(3), 279-294. National Board of Education (NBE) (2014). The National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. Helsinki: NBE. Lavonen J., et al. (2020). A Collaborative Design for a Finnish Teacher Education Development Programme. Journal of Teacher Education and Educators, 9(2), 241-262. Kumpulainen, K. (2017). Opettajat ja rehtorit Suomessa 2016 [Teachers and principals in finland 2016]. Raportit ja selvitykset 2017:2. Helsinki: Opetushallitus Garet. M et al.. (2001). What makes professional development effective? Results from a national sample of teachers. American Education Research Journal, 38(4), 915–945.

In Estonia, the current success in education (i.e. PISA) is a result of long-term systemic work on curriculum development, teacher initial education, continuing professional learning. and the preparation of futures scenarios of national and educational development. The concepts of “teacher education” and Lifelong learning (LLL) underline curriculum development, engagement of teacher-students into research, reflective practice and cultural aspects. Estonia enjoyed a well-developed and nationwide regulated and funded CPD model for teacher LLL during the Soviet epoch. After regaining independence, the locus of governance of the system started to move itself towards schools and teachers. Expected Teacher competencies depend on the teacher qualification (beginner, teacher, Master Teacher, etc.) and include PLD mastery and e-learning/teaching. Teacher professionalism includes also self-development, ethics and social skills. The main changes in Estonian teacher lifelong professional learning (LLPL) model are: a transition from the original Soviet teaching/pedagogical organization to a needs- and demands-lead model, and a total change of the learning-teaching environment as result of technological developments. The pandemic period appears to be a good accelerator of processes and models, leading to develop pervasive practices, whose impact is already visible in Estonian schools.

Sarv, E.-S. (2014). A Status Paper on School Teacher Training in Estonia. Journal of International Forum of Educational Research, http://ejournal.ifore.in Vol.1 No.2 July-December 2014 ISSN: 2349-2708 Sarv, E.-S.; Krabi, K. (2015). INNOVE Report on the Results of the Visit to Georgia July 27–August 7, 2015 and Recommendations on Teacher Training: Report to UNICEF-GEORGIA. 81 pp. Sarv, E-S., Krabi, K. (2015). Perspectives on Teacher Education: core issues through virtual learning experience. (Virtual learning site.) Tallinn: Foundation INNOVE. http://kristiinakrabi.wix.com/teachereducation Sarv, E-S., Rõuk, V. (2020). Estonian Curriculum: Becoming Independent, in Kesture, I., Sarv, E-S., Stonkuviene, I. (Eds.) Pedagogy And Educational Sciences In The Post-Soviet Baltic States, 1990–2004: Changes And Challenges, Riga, University of Latvia, pp. 84-101. https://doi.org/10.22364/bahp-pes.1990-2004.05

New types of learning spaces allowing for larger cohorts of pupils and teachers working in teams have emerged across the world and are challenging teachers to interact in new ways. These learning spaces are often described as innovative learning environments, and the pedagogical practices that accompany them as team teaching. In light of these developments, this study examines the concept of team teaching, introducing an analytical framework for unpacking it in relation to learning environments and other issues.

In order to prepare pupils for an uncertain future, calls around the world revolve around new capabilities and knowledge, new pedagogies and new learning environments that support such a preparation. Innovative learning environments have been defined as innovative spaces and practices (French, Imms, and Mahat, 2020). Following this line of argument, when new schools are built across the world ordinary classrooms should to be replaced with a more varied collection of spaces that can be shared by larger cohorts of pupils and several teachers (Dovey and Fisher, 2014). These new ways of designing school buildings and learning environments have emerged over time, together with ideas about lifelong learning, an increased degree of individualisation in education and the importance of variation for the individual’s learning, as well as from a contextual perspective emphasising the importance of professional learning communities (cf. Schön, 1983; Stoll, Bolam, McMahon, Wallace, and Thomas, 2006).

Working in new learning environments require new skills from teachers (Campbell, Saltmarsh, Chapman and Dre, 2013; Charteris and Smardon, 2019; Leighton and Byers, 2020), who have traditionally had sole responsibility for one class but are now expected to transition into new types of spaces, organising and pedagogies. Such transitions mean extensive changes to their teaching practices (Woolner, Clark, Laing, Thomas, and Tiplady, 2014). One response, team teaching, according to Simons et al (2020) means that teachers collaborate around all pupils. Some teachers argue that collaborating in a teaching context benefits their professional growth and pupils’ learning (Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen, and Grissom, 2015).

Previous research often refers to the importance of so-called professional learning communities (PLCs) (Datnow, 2018). PLC is a way of organising teachers in groups in order to introduce and increase cooperation between teachers as teams (Lipscombe, Buckley-Walker, and McNamara, 2020; Ronfeldt et al., 2015). This is central from a perspective in which teachers develop and learn from each other by planning together, exchanging experiences, sharing responsibility for a group of pupils and so on as a way of organising activities to build a professional learning community (Ronfeldt et al., 2015). In the long term, teachers’ collaboration organised in teams can provide a more sustainable development of teachers’ professionalism, schools and education (Duyar et al., 2013; Lipscombe et al., 2020). A strong teaching team can also according to Hattie (2012) be a success factor for pupils’ learning.

However, conceptualising and defining a collaboration between teachers can be problematic in that several synonyms and concepts are used (Welch, 2000). In this context, the paper aims to examine and shed further light on the concept of team teaching by the development and presentation of a framework for describing four levels of interaction (from superficial to deep) involving four shared dimensions of pedagogical work (from space to teaching). The framework is illustrated using data from a case study of team teaching in two Swedish innovative learning environments with different layouts and organisations.

Since the seminal article on co-teaching models by Friend and Cook (1995), co-teaching has taken root in both classrooms and research. Co-teaching is widely examined at all levels of education from kindergarten to higher education, covering various subject areas and several research fields such as coaching and co-teaching as a tool of teacher training (e.g., Allen et al., 2014; Guise et al., 2017; Underwood et al., 2016). Co-teaching is generally defined as a collaborative practice in which two or more teachers plan, teach and evaluate together a group of learners (e.g., Fluijt et al., 2016). Moreover, as most of the literature on co-teaching draws from inclusive education, aiming for high-quality education for all learners, it is defined particularly as a practice between a special education teacher and a general education teacher, yet it can be practised between any two teachers (e.g., Härkki et al., 2021). In our understanding, co-teaching is a multifaceted practice based on teachers’ shared vision and responsibilities concerning teaching and learning for all students (Fluijt et al., 2016).

Much of the existing oeuvre of research has focused primarily on co-teaching models, and the trend has resulted in the prevailing understanding of the most common model in classrooms being the simplest one, that is, one-teach one assist (Scruggs et al., 2007). However, relatively little is known about how teachers learn to co-teach.

In general, the aim of teacher learning is change in teachers’ cognition and knowledge, beliefs, behaviour, skills or attitudes (Hoekstra & Korthagen, 2011; Vermunt & Endedijk, 2011). Additionally, the role of teacher identity appears to be playing a role in teachers’ professional learning both as a target of the intended change and interacting with the learning process (Beijaard, 2019; Meijer, 2011). Teachers themselves are also individuals with variation in their willingness to learn new things (Van Eekelen et al., 2006).

In this review, we investigated the relationship of co-teaching and teacher learning in more detail. We decided to limit the scope of our investigation to literature focusing on co-teaching between at least two qualified teachers in K-12 education[1] and chose to look at the studies reporting professional development (PD) programmes related to co-teaching. PD programmes were chosen as the focus of this review because PD inherently contains the premise of goal-oriented teacher learning, aimed at changes in teachers’ thinking and/or practice.

In discussing teacher learning as a focus of research, Kennedy (2019) posed three main questions for researchers: first, what is it that teachers are supposed to be learning; second, what is the process of how teachers learn; and the third, how can teacher learning be evaluated. These questions led this review, as we applied them in the context of co-teaching and teachers’ professional learning.

The aim of this review is to explore the relationship between teacher learning and co-teaching in the context of professional development on co-teaching. We argue that teachers’ learning process within co-teaching is a difficult phenomenon to recognise, and thus often go unheeded. We will address the following research questions:

1. What features of co-teaching are the focus of teacher learning in the studies of professional development programmes on co-teaching?

2. How is teacher learning supported in the studies of professional development programmes on co-teaching?

3. How is teacher learning investigated/evaluated in the studies of professional development programmes on co-teaching?

[1] K-12, from kindergarten to high school, refers to publicly supported education system in US and is similar in many other countries

When hit by the pandemic of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, educational systems across the globe faced the biggest challenge in the modern era. Due to regional or national regulations, schools were closed or their operation drastically restricted. In this unexpected, new environment, teachers were forced to find ways to reach and teach their students and transfer their classes to a sudden emergency remote format (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020). Before the pandemic, most schools primarily had onsite courses, and most teachers lacked experience in an online setting. Thus, the new learning environment forced teachers to adjust their teaching methods and implement new ways of teaching. Therefore, technical and pedagogical support was needed.Through in-depth interviews with upper-secondary teachers in Iceland, this study explores the role of teacher collaboration and collegiality in navigating these disruptions. Since the pandemic has had the most significant impact on the school system in the modern era, it is critical to examine how the pandemic revealed a collaboration culture and teachers’ support network. This research contributes to that.

For the past few decades, researchers have examined and emphasized the importance of collaboration among teachers within schools (Fullan, 2015; Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995; Hargreaves, 1994; Lieberman, 1990; Louis et al., 1996). Research suggests that collaboration among teachers can improve student outcomes (DuFour & Eaker, 1998), teacher satisfaction and school general culture (Fullan, 2015). A collaborative culture is a key to professional learning communities (PLCs) that can increase teachers’ effectiveness and satisfaction and improve students’ achievement (DuFour & Eaker, 1998; Stoll, 2011). Furthermore, Fullan (2015) argues that collaboration among teachers and PLCs is essential for schoolimprovement and a key aspect of successful school reform. He emphasizes that for collaboration to be effective, it must be focused on student learning and be based on trust and mutual respect among teachers. Leadership within schools during the pandemic changed and shifted to a more shared and distributed leadership (Harris, 2020), which can support collaboration among teachers within schools (van Schaik et al., 2020). Hargreaves and Dawe (1990) have explored the importance of peer coaching and a professional community in which teachers define and develop their purpose and goals. Therefore, the participation of teachers is crucial to school development in a post-pandemic era.

The conference theme of diversity in education highlights the importance of inclusive and supportive learning environments for all educators. This research presentation will further the conversation on this crucial issue.And for education to reach all students, it is essential to focus on collaboration among teachers within and between schools (Ainscow & Miles, 2008). Collaboration can be vital in evolving and maintaining schools‘ inclusive culture (Kugelmass, 2001). Furthermore, better collaborative practices can contribute to the inclusion of all students in schools (Messiou & Ainscow, 2015).

The shortage of teachers is considerable in many European countries (Federičov, 2020; García, & Weiss, 2019). It concerns different school types from primary schools to vocational schools. Moreover, a wide range of school subjects is affected. The lack of teaching personnel that European countries face today has obviously led to severe challenges in society. Hence, there is an urgent need of recruiting, mobilizing and retaining educated teachers in many parts of the world.

Against this background, the aim of the symposium is to describe, explain and compare teachers’ shortage from the perspective of three European countries: Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. The purpose of this session is to discuss the phenomenon and how to handle it depending on different situations in each country. Having a clear understanding of background factors and main explanations will lead to a better insight and preparedness to prevent and correct the shortage in a short and long term.

Researchers from three countries, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, are going to share their findings from their research activity for two years. The overall ambition of the session is to comprise new knowledge and gaining a deeper understanding of the problem of teacher shortage, including how reasons, solutions and implications behind teacher shortage are mutually intertwined, which will be of importance for stakeholders in the three countries and internationally. We are also going to discuss possibilities and problems with international comparisons concerning methodology and theoretical aspects focusing on research and literature in the field. Due to variations between the studied countries, we suggest a multiple case design as methodological approach which allows an individual analysis as well as a comparison of the countries. The methodological model comprising 8 parameters and 23 indicators summarizes the interacting factors influencing teacher shortages (Ana et al., 2022).

The discussion session is going to be a focussed conversation centred around the following questions:

(a) How may the current situation be described regarding the teacher shortage in each of the three countries? What are the background factors and main explanations for teacher shortage?

(b) What similarities and differences can be seen, regionally, nationally, and internationally? How can these similarities and differences be explained? What can be learnt from each other and from the three countries?

c) How could each country understand, prevent, and correct the shortage of teachers in the short and long term?

d) How may the lack of a specific teacher category, vocational teachers, in this context, be explained and understood?

The university partners have been working together for two years in a research-based net-work-project (What About Teachers’ Shortage, WATS’ up) and are keen to advocate for others of similar interests to become involved. Participants are encouraged to join this discussion and to help expand the international network of researchers interested in teachers´ shortage worldwide.

Expected outcomes related to research will be the research contribution of scientific novelty of new knowledge in teacher shortage in a transnational perspective. These insights are going to lead to a knowledge contribution of the phenomena of teacher shortage, which may be difficult to attain solely on a national level. The research project may also shed light on which strategy leads to teachers staying in their profession in the long term.

The supply of teachers in Sweden is seen today as a challenge of historic proportions (Ber-tilsson, 2018). However, the lack of teachers is not only a Swedish problem, but exists largely in all European countries (Federičová, 2020) and in the USA (Garcia & Weiss, 2020). The proportion of fully trained teachers in Sweden needs to increase by just over 50% until 2035. The shortage of certified teachers varies greatly between school forms, be-tween 25 and 85%, where the largest shortage is within special schools. The imbalance will thus continue for many years to come. The variation between schools is great. Findings in-dicate that one of the problems for schools is not a shortage of teachers coming into the sys-tem, but that many of the newly graduated teachers do not choose to go into teaching at all or leave after just a few years (Statistiska Centralbyrån, 2017). Teacher shortage can be traced back at least 50 years and that the causes are many and complex, for example many different reforms, deteriorating conditions, low status of the profession and New Public Management as a management philosophy. The possibilities to solve the problems in the long term are several: higher wages, better working conditions, strengthened professional identity, higher status, and flexible ways to study to become a teacher. Analysis of the situa-tion have shown the following:1) Paradoxically, every educational policy reform in Sweden seems create even greater degree of problems with teacher supply. 2) The dominant man-agement philosophies, New Public Management, must be re-evaluated in relation to the school and its activities. 3) A broad anchoring with all significant relevant actors is needed to meet the internal and external challenges that exist for Swedish schools and for to be able to remedy the teacher shortage (Boström et al. 2021). Drawing on Bacchi's (2009) critical policy analysis What’s the Problem Represented to be (WPR) this paper analyses national and regional actors' perceptions of the problem in the light of previous research in the light of previous research and in relation to international findings, national and regional stakeholders' perceptions of the problem and its consequences.

Bacchi, C. L. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Frenchs Fo-rest, N.S.W Pearson. Boström, L., Bostedt, G., Håkansson Lindqvist, M (2021)Den allvarliga lärarbristen i Sve-rige – hur kunde detta hända och vad kan vi göra? PAIDEIA, nr. 22, 6-22 Federičová, M. (2020). Teacher turnover: What can we learn from Europe? European Jour-nal of Education, 2020(00), 1–15. DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12429 García, E. & Weiss, E. (2020). A policy agenda to address the teacher shortage in U.S. pub-lic schools. The sixth and final report in the ‘Perfect Storm in the Teacher Labor Market’ series. Economic Policy Institute. Washington, DC. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED611183.pdf Statistiska centralbyrån SCB (2017). Lärare utanför yrket. Temarapport 2017:2.

Teacher shortage in Germany has reached an alarmingly high level. In total, estimations point out a gap of 30.000 qualified teachers in August 2022 (Stephanowitz, 2022). In order to define the rather complex phenomenon (in Germany) more precisely, a differentiation between several determinants like federal state, region, school type, and subject seems to be adequate. For instance, primary schools, special needs schools, and vocational schools are strongly affected as well as the subjects mathematics, chemistry, physics, and music (KMK, 2022). The impact of the imbalance is manifold: classes are cancelled, some subjects are deleted from the timetable, teachers work overtime, or not fully qualified staff—often university students—is hired. As a consequence, job satisfaction suffers and sickness rates rise. Several causes of teacher shortage can be identified: for example, miscalculations, demographic developments such as rising birth rates and migration, and also an unpredictable number of dropouts at university or in teacher training. Moreover, there is an aging teacher population. Accordingly, many teachers will soon reach retirement age (Eurydice, 2021). In addition, the number of study places does not match the demand of teachers, especially as the educational planners assume that on the one hand every student enters the labor market and on the other hand after a standard period. Reality looks different: Studying often takes much longer than expected (Kreienbaum, 2008) or students drop out. Not all of those who complete their exams become teachers. The short-, medium- and long-term measures to counteract the shortage are as varied as its causes: some schools re-activate retirees. Those working part-time are asked to switch to full-time. In some federal states, academics from other professions are trained as teachers in special programs. In order to gain a better understanding of the complex phenomenon, interviews with experts in the field of Educational Science were carried out (Kreienbaum & Wüllner, 2023). Their views on the problem as well as their ideas to overcome the crisis will be presented and discussed. We aim at structuring our results with the help of the methodological model created by the WATS up team (Blanco et al., 2023).

Blanco, A. M., Bostedt, G., Michel-Schertges, D., & Wüllner, S. (2023 in press). Studying Teacher Shortages: Theoretical Perspectives and Methodological Approaches. Eurydice/European Commission/EACEA. (2021). Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. https://op.europa.eu/o/opportal-service/download-handler?identifier=78fbf243-974f-11eb-b85c-01aa75ed71a1&format=pdf&language=en&productionSystem=cellar&part= KMK (2022) = Sekretariat der Ständigen Konferenz der Kultusminister der Länder in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (2022). Lehrkräfteeinstellungsbedarf und -angebot in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 2021-2035. [Teacher Recruitment Requirements and Supply in the Federal Republic of Germany 2021 - 2035. Summarized Model Calculation of the German States]. https://www.kmk.org/fileadmin/Dateien/pdf/Statistik/Dokumentationen/Dok_233_Bericht_LEB_LEA_2021.pdf Kreienbaum, M. A. (2008). Katholisch, weiblich, weit gereist – der aktuelle Bildungshintergrund angehender LehrerInnen in NRW. [Catholic, Female, Well-travelled – The Current Educational Background of Prospective Teachers in NRW]. magazIn, 18-25. Kreienbaum, M. A., & Wüllner, S. (2023 in press). Lehrkräftemangel in Deutschland – Ursachen, Maßnahmen und Einschätzungen aus der Perspektive von Expert*innen () [Teacher shortage in Germany - causes, measures and assessments from the perspective of experts]. Stephanowitz, J. (2022, 30. August). An deutschen Schulen fehlen bis zu 40.000 Lehrer. [At German Schools there is a Shortage of 40.000 Teachers]. https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/schule/2022-08/lehrermangel-40-000-lehrer-fehlen-deutscher-lehrerverband

Teacher shortages in Denmark as well as internationally are a growing problem (Andersen et al., 2021; Boström et al., 2021). In the Danish literature, such shortages are often described as problems of recruiting and retaining teachers (KL, 2016), as well as minimising the number of teachers who leave the profession (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2010). One-third of all new Danish teachers leave their jobs in state schools during the first year, and four out of ten teachers resign during the first five years , feeling that the job is demanding, unrewarding and lonely (Dahl et al., 2022). Overall, 17,000 qualified teachers do not work in schools (DLF, 2018); both political (DLF, 2018) and professional (Nordenbo et al., 2008) stakeholders seem to agree that the lack of qualified teaching staff in schools damages children’s schooling. The problem of teacher shortages in Danish schools seemingly does not concern a general lack of trained teachers, but rather that schools find it hard to attract and retain teachers (DLF, 2018). But why do Danish school teachers leave the profession? And how may the problem of teacher shortages, particularly teacher retention, be addressed by schools? Drawing on self-determination and motivation theory (Ryan & Deci, 2017) and situated learning theory (Wenger, 1998), the paper explores the motivation and professional becoming of new teachers, whose working-lives are characterised by a multi-faceted complex of problems (Dahl et al., 2022; EVA, 2019; Hargreaves, 2000; Hjort & Weber, 2004). The paper concludes that although new teachers start their careers as inspired individuals who are motivated for ‘doing good’ (Pedersen et al., 2016), their motivation for teaching is dismantled (Dahl, 2020) when they experience the conflicting demands of personal and professional ambitions, political plans, in a time-, top- and economyrestricted everyday school practice in schools.

Andersen, F.Ø., Frederiksen, L., Sunesen, M.S.K. & Thorborg, M. (2021). Lærermangel i Danmark. Paideia, 22: 21-32. Boström, K., Bostedt, G., & Lindqvist, M. (2021). Den allvorliga lärerbristern i Sverige – hur kunde dette hända och vad kan vi göra? Paideia, nr. 22: 6-20. Dahl, K.K.B. (2020). Mo(ve)ments in professional identification. Compare, 50(1): 123-140. Dahl, K.K.B, Laursen, P.F., & Andreasen, B. (ed.) (2022). Overlevelsesguide for nye lærere. Dafolo. DLF, Danmark Lærerforening (2018). Folkeskolens rekrutteringsproblemer. DLF. EVA, Danmarks Evalueringsinstitut. (2019). TALIS 2018. EVA. file:///C:/Users/au50263/Downloads/TALIS%202018_011019.pdf Hargreaves, A. (2000). Nye lærere, nye tider. Klim. Hjort, K. & Weber, K. (2004). Hvad er værd at vide om professioner? I Hjort, K. & Weber, K. (red.), De professionelle. (s. 7-20). Samfundslitteratur. Nordenbo, S. E., Larsen, M. S., Tiftikçi, N., Wendt, R. E. and Østergaard, S. (2008). Lærerkompetencer og elevers læring i barnehage og skole. Copenhagen: Dansk Clearinghouse for Uddannelsesforskning

Teacher shortage in Germany is severe – especially in vocational schools. Recent prognoses expect a shortfall of approximately 1600 qualified V(ocational)E(ducation) and T(raining)-Teachers a year until 2035 (Autor:innengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung, 2022, 315). The lack of vocational teachers concerns beyond S(cience)T(echnology)E(ngineering) and M(athematics) and the personal service professions. It is an unsolved problem at present whether the expansion of training capacities and the development of cross- and side-entry programmes will be sufficient to address the shortage in all vocational disciplines. Therefore, it is quite important to understand both, the attracting as well as the deterring factors of choosing teaching in vocational schools as a career. In educational research, however, teachers’ motivation in the choice of career has been analysed especially referring to expectancy-value theories (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020) mostly based on university student samples (Watt et al., 2012; König et al., 2013). This is obviously not ideal for two reasons: Firstly, in student-teacher surveys, the motivation to become a teacher is measured after the transition in teacher education (Goller & Ziegler, 2021). This might lead to biased answers due to social desirability and false memories to an extent we can’t nearly assess yet. Secondly, we learn less about the dissuasive factors of teaching as a career if we only ask those who have already - at least to a certain extent – decided on the teaching profession (Renger et al., 2022; Rahn et al., 2023). Against this background, the lecture will explore the questions, what influences students’ motivation or (dis-)inclination of choosing teaching as a career before deciding to start teacher training? Which attraction factors and especially which aversion factors can be identified? In order to answer this, empirical findings from a survey of roundabout 540 students of German vocational schools are presented and discussed. Referring to expectancy-value theory the fit choice scale of Watt & Richardson has been adapted. In addition, the prestige of teaching in VET as a profession has been measured. With a few exceptions, the scales have satisfactory or good internal consistency. Some descriptive results and logistic regression models will be presented and discussed as well. The presentation will lead to practical conclusions for VET-Teachers’ current recruiting strategies on the national level, which might run the risk of having undesirable side effects and some conclusions for international comparing research on the teacher shortage in VET.

Autor:innengruppe Bildungsberichterstattung (2022). Bildung in Deutschland 2022: Ein indikatorengestützter Bericht mit einer Analyse zum Bildungspersonal. Bielefeld. Eccles, J. S. & Wigfield, A. (2020). From expectancy-value theory to situated expectancy-value theory: A developmental, social cognitive, and sociocultural perspective on motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101859 Goller, M. & Ziegler, S. (2021): Berufswahlmotivation angehender Wirtschaftspädagog*innen: Validierung des FIT-Choice-Ansatzes und Exploration der Gründe für das Studium der Wirtschaftspädagogik, 117 (2), 154–193. König, J., Rothland, M., Darge, K., Lünnemann, M. & Tachtsoglou, S. (2013). Erfassung und Struktur berufswahlrelevanter Faktoren für die Lehrerausbildung und den Lehrerberuf in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 16(3), 553–577. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-013-0373-5 Rahn, S., Schäfer, B., Fuhrmann, Ch. (2023). Berufsoption „Lehrer*in an einer beruflichen Schule?“ Warum sich Schüler*innen (nicht) für das Lehramt an beruflichen Schulen interessieren. Zeitschrift Bildung und Erziehung, 01/2023. Renger, S., Köller, M. M., Möller, J. (2022): Was motiviert Schülerinnen und Schüler für das Lehramt?. Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Psychologie, 36, 1–15. Watt, H. M.G., Richardson, P. W., Klusmann, U., Kunter, M., Beyer, B., Trautwein, U., Baumert, J. (2012).Motivations for choosing teaching as a career: An international comparison using the FIT-Choice scale. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28 (6), 791–805.

This paper investigates structural constraints for early career teachers (ECTs) who hold a master’s degree from Norwegian teacher education. Although education and educational research is done within diverse educational settings, research shows that the current educational systems constrain ECTs, (Loh & Hu, 2014; Valenčič Zuljan & Marentič Požarnik, 2014) , and ECTs continue to flee the profession (Schaefer et al., 2021). Furthermore, education is increasingly understood as human capital, seeking to prepare students for new future work and labour relations (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010).

In light of these perspectives, this paper offers a critical realist lens to examine constraints and enablements in relation to practicing as teachers and seeks to identify underlying mechanisms (Archer et al., 1998) that produce conditions affecting teachers (and students). In critical realist ontology, reality is stratified into three levels or domains; the empirical, the actual and the real. At the level of the real, critical realism claims to demonstrate the independent reality of underlying mechanisms informing societal processes (Benton & Craib, 2011). To examine ECTs experiences with constraints and enablements at the empirical level, the following research question is posed: How do early career teachers experience structural constraints and enablements after five years of teaching? To investigate the underlying mechanisms at the level of the real, the following question is asked: What ideologies about the role of the teacher inform these constraints and enablements?

European countries have for a decade conducted neo-liberal policy school reforms to improve quality assurances, accountability and for promoting evidence-based teaching (Ball, 2016). Neo-liberalism as a concept promotes what Shamir (2008) describes as responsibilization in the public sector and may be understood as:

"A complex, often incoherent, unstable and even contradictory set of practices that are organized around a certain imagination of the ‘market’ as a basis for the universalization of social relations, with the corresponding incursion of such relations into almost every single aspect of our lives" (Shamir, 2008, p. 3).

As such, Neo-liberalism strengthens market thinking in public school systems, and promotes both individualism and state control (Shamir, 2008). According to Erlandson et al. (2020) contributes neo-liberalism to individual struggles for Swedish teachers related to performativity, competition and hierarchisation. Kutsyuruba et al. (2019) and Loh and Hu (2014) found that early careers teachers (ECTs) have more challenges because of neo-liberalism related to time management and the handling of daily work tasks than anticipated. This indicates a wicked problem as most European countries lack teachers and that the existing teachers experience challenges related to their workload (Kutsyuruba et al., 2019). Drawing from the perspective of Hackman (2009) there is a need to address systematic work challenges and not only focus on positive individual solutions. We also follow the advice of Tiplic et al. (2015) and study cohorts of ECTs alone.

From this background, the objective is to do a comparative analysis of primary and secondary ECTs beliefs about the challenges faced in their professional practice and their views on how they handle these challenges in Norwegian and Spanish schools. Here, Norwegian teachers thinks about leaving the profession because of organisational and contextual factors and not individual reasons (Tiplic et al., 2015) and Spain don’t have challenges related to retention (Umpstead et al., 2016).

As an analytical lens, we used the Australian theory of practice architectures (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008). According to this practice theory we can understand the practice of ECTs work from understanding language games (sayings), activities (doings) and ways of relating to others and the world (relatings), and how these hangs together in the projects of practices’ (Kemmis et al. 2017, p. 57). The practices are channelled in their course[RP1] by practice architectures composed of cultural-discursive arrangements (resources that make possible the language and discourses used), material-economic arrangements (resources that make possible the activities undertaken) and social-political arrangements (resources that make possible the relationships amongst people) (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008). Practices do not occur in a vacuum but are held in place and shaped by prevalent arrangements, such as new reforms or other neo-liberal demands such as quality arrangements, accountability, and evidence-based teaching both nationally and locally, which include all the conditions that shape how a particular practice unfolds in a particular site, with this teacher, those particular students, those colleagues and the management (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008).

Our two research questions are:

1) What are the ECTs’ beliefs about challenges of practice associated with neo-liberalization of schools?

2) How do ECTs handle the challenges related to neo-liberalism in their practice?

This workshop will present and discuss the research and collaborative project STEP funded by the Research Council of Norway. STEP could be discussed as a model for collaborative projects in the educational field. The project period extends over four years from March 2021 to March 2025. The partners in the project are researchers from the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN); the University of Tromsø (UiT) - the Arctic University of Norway, representatives of The Union of Education Norway (UEN), their student organization Norwegian Teacher Student Union (PS) and The Norwegian Association of local and regional authorities (KS).

STEP follows the first generation of student teachers from the five-year master's education for primary school teachers in Norway during the last year of study and the first two years as teachers.  

The primary objective is to develop research- and experience-based knowledge on the transition from Master Initial Teacher Education (M-ITE) into the teacher profession. This knowledge will influence the further development, implementation, and institutionalization of the Norwegian national framework for mentoring Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) as a sustainable, coherent induction and mentoring system for individual and collective learning for NQTs.

STEPs overall research questions are:

Work package 1 (WP1): What expectations do students and their future colleagues; school leaders and owners have for the newly qualified teachers' mastery of the challenges they face in school?

WP2 and WP3: What measures can help retain graduates in the profession and be part of a comprehensive strategy for career development and competence enhancement in schools? How is the graduates' professional competence and insight into research valued and used in school?

WP4: How can research-based knowledge contribute to developing the national framework for mentoring newly qualified teachers?

This workshop will highlight both the preliminary findings from a questionnaire to the student teachers in their last year before graduating and the cooperation model between the partners in this research project.

Students’ expectation to becoming teachers

The questionnaire was sent to the first generation of students graduating from the five-year master's program for primary school teachers in Norway in the autumn of 2021. The following research questions were used as a basis for the preparation of the questionnaire:

o What do the students assume will represent their biggest challenges?

o How do they assess their own competence for meeting these challenges?

o What measures do they think may be needed in order to support them in the transition from teacher education to the professional work as a teacher?

o What do they think they can contribute with in collegial collaboration and in the meeting with the students?

The questionnaire was administered digitally and was answered by about 500 of a population of approximately 2000 students. For results: see preliminary findings below.

Partnership

The partners in STEP represent different perspectives in a diverse educational community and contribute to a more complex dialogue and understanding of both local, national, and international context and research. This diversity presents various legitimate interests which may cause tensions but also growth, different perspectives, and possibilities to understand complexity. Legitimate interests and tensions need to be respected and valued as positive factors in collaborative projects. What sort of tensions have we experienced in this project?

The novelty of STEP is the unique collaboration between researchers and stakeholders, the combination of research- and experienced based knowledge and the knowledge of policymaking in Norway and internationally. STEP aims to develop a model for collaboration between researchers and partners/stakeholders on research- and experience-based policymaking and thereby to facilitate dialogues on policymaking both nationally and internationally.