Conference Agenda

This symposium is the result of the work of the KOSS Network (Knowledge and Quality across School Subjects and Teacher Education). The network brings together interdisciplinary educational research groups from Sweden, England and Finland that specialise in different school subjects. The symposium is based on the recentely published book Bringing Powerful Knowledge into Classrooms -Subject teachers as agents of recontextualization (2026), which explores how teachers develop such knowledge in the classroom by transforming their disciplinary understanding through subject teaching that responds to the educational needs of society. Drawing on Bernstein’s concepts of pedagogic device and recontextualisation, as well as theories of teacher agency, the symposium will examine how teachers navigate the boundaries between academic disciplines, school subjects, and everyday knowledge. This is achieved through empirical case studies from England, Finland and Sweden.

The research questions for the symposium are:

1. What is the role of teachers in recontextualization processes?

2. What kind of knowledge does recontextualization agency require from teachers?

The pedagogic device (Bernstein, 2000) is a theoretical framework that explains how knowledge is recontextualised (transformed) when applied in a school setting. The original framework distinguishes between the fields of knowledge production, official recontextualisation and pedagogical recontextualisation, as well as reproduction. It also examines the rules and power relations that affect the choices made within each field. Bernstein argued that agents of recontextualisation engage in struggles over pedagogic discourse, which can essentially be viewed as a struggle over learners' consciousness (see also Singh, 2002). These struggles have become evident in today's polarised societies, where pedagogues, school officials, governments and other ideological organisations attempt to influence what is taught in schools. However, Bernstein’s pedagogic device indicates no active role for teachers in these struggles. The presentations at the symposium emphasise that teachers play a broader role in recontextualisation than Bernstein initially theorised.

The first presentation focuses on literary teaching in Sweden and illustrates how a teacher can lose touch with disciplinary knowledge. The observed teacher draws on beliefs that emphasise students’ personal opinions and discussions as central to learning, rather than employing subject‑specific concepts such as analysis, argumentation, intertextuality, narrative structure, or reading comprehension This results in classroom activities aligned with so‑called Future 2 approach outlined by Young & Muller (2010). The presentation finds that the digital setting does not in itself lead to substantial changes in how subject content is transformed.

The second presentation discusses the case of an experienced physics teacher who played a vital role in recontextualisation in curricular and pedagogical terms (see Hordern, 2021). This teacher combined an understanding of academic and school physics with the recontextualisation process, as well as a deep understanding of students and knowledge of teaching approaches. Therefore, the presentation argues that the role of teachers extends beyond motivating students and making concepts or content relevant to them. The curriculum is not static, created outside the classroom and merely implemented by teachers; nor is it separate from the pedagogy that brings it to life.

The third presentation summarises the book's theoretical core by considering teachers' role as recontextualisation agents, and further develops Bernstein's initial theorisation. Drawing on the empirical cases presented in previous papers and other examples from the book, the presentation introduces a revised model of the pedagogic device. It builds a dialogue between powerful knowledge, Bernstein’s ideas and the Nordic Didaktik tradition.

The symposium begins with a brief introduction to the book's key theoretical concepts and research process.

The extensive use of digital technologies in schools partly dissolves traditional boundaries of classrooms and teaching, as online environments enable almost unlimited access to information and communication. This contribution examines an example where an L1 teacher in Swedish grade eight uses a lesson plan published on a widely followed blog by an award winning Swedish teacher, an illustration of how teachers inspire each other through online communities (Liljekvist et al., 2020). Based on video recordings of a remote lesson conducted via Microsoft Teams during the Covid 19 pandemic, we analyse how the teacher facilitates students’ interpretations of a literary text. The students read a short story by a well known Swedish author and work collaboratively on a related assignment. Our analysis focuses on the teacher’s agency and underlying teacher beliefs (Biesta et al., 2015) as she transforms and recontextualises subject content in relation to a broader professional community online, the student group, and the digital platform that constitutes the classroom. The findings show that literary subject matter becomes recontextualised in two distinct digital arenas, the blog post and the Teams lesson, highlighting the need to rethink classroom boundaries beyond traditional imaginaries of a physical space with desks and blackboards (Nilsberth et al., 2024). However, we also find that the digital setting does not in itself lead to substantial changes in how subject content is transformed. Instead, the teacher draws on beliefs that emphasise students’ personal opinions and discussions as central to learning, rather than employing subject specific concepts such as analysis, argumentation, intertextuality, narrative structure, or reading comprehension (Johansson, 2015; Olin Scheller & Tengberg, 2016). This results in classroom activities aligned with so called Future 2 dimensions (Young & Muller, 2013), where generic and rhetorical skills are prioritised, contributing to what has been described as an over socialised teaching ideal. To strengthen students’ access to powerful knowledge in literary reading and interpretation, we conclude that in L1 teaching it is important to include disciplinary understandings of what literary texts are, how they could be taught and how students could be supported in providing interpretations that have potential to enhance their literary understandings, in digital learning contexts as well as in physical classrooms.

Biesta, G., Priestley, M. & and Robinson, S. (2015) ‘The role of beliefs in teacher agency’., Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 624–640. Graeske, C. (2015). Fiktionens mångfald. Om läromedel, läsarter och didaktisk design. [The Diversity of Fiction: Educational materials, modes of reading, and didactic design]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Johansson, M. (2015). Läsa, förstå, analysera. En komparativ studie om svenska och franska gymnasieelevers reception av en narrativ text. [Read, Understand, Analyse: A comparative study of Swedish and French upper secondary school students’ reception of a narrative text]. Linköping: Linköpings universitet. Liljekvist, Y. E., Randahl, A., van Bommel, J. &and Olin-Scheller, C. (2020). ‘Facebook for professional development: Pedagogical content knowledge in the centre of teachers’ online communities’. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. Nilsberth, M., Høegh, T. & Slot, M. (2024). Spatializing literacy-as-events. Literacy in new techno-scholastic environments of lower secondary classrooms. Language & Education. Tengberg, M. & and Olin-Scheller, C. (2016). ‘”Novelläsning i årskurs sju’” [Reading short stories in year seven]. In C. Olin-Scheller, C & and M. Tengberg, Michael (eds.) Läsa mellan raderna. [Reading Between the Lines]. Malmö: Gleerups. Young, M. & and Muller, J. (2013). ‘On the powers of powerful knowledge’. Review of Education, 1(3), 229–250.

The task of bringing a curriculum to life in classrooms has been characterised in various ways, from ‘delivery’ and ‘enactment’ (Doyle, 2017) to ‘curriculum making’ (Lambert & Biddulph, 2015) and ‘transformation’ (Gericke et al, 2018). Each term implies a slightly different role for the teacher, with part of the distinction resting on how much agency teachers might have over curricular or pedagogic decisions and how far these can be kept separate. Young (2010) has written that ‘teachers cannot create a curriculum themselves’ and sees a teacher’s primary role as bringing knowledge to life through the selection of appropriate teaching strategies rather than as transforming the knowledge itself in the process. This contribution explores the example of an experienced teacher of physics teaching fifteen and sixteen-year-old students about an aspect of physics. It was impossible to separate the ’what’ from the ’how’ in his decision-making. My argument is that during the lessons this teacher was a vital agent of recontextualisation in both curricular and pedagogic terms (see Hordern, 2021). He brought an understanding of academic physics, school physics and the recontextualisation process together with a deep understanding of the students he was teaching and his knowledge about effective teaching approaches. He may not have written the externally prescribed course but he made constant choices in the lesson - about specific questions to ask, what to write on the board, when to reinforce a point, what resources to use – which were shaped by his knowledge of physics, his students and teaching approaches or, in the words or Hoadley (2011), the knowledgem the knoewers and the knowing. When Michael Young (op. cit.) wrote that the job of teachers is to motivate students and make concepts real for them rather than to create a curriculum, he was not adequately describing teachers like this. A curriculum is not static, created outside the classroom and merely implemented by teachers, nor is it separate from the pedagogy that brings it to life.

Doyle W. (2017). ‘The Didaktik/Curriculum Dialogue: What Did We Learn?’ In Uljens M. and Ylimaki R. (Eds.), Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik. Educational Governance Research, Vol 5. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Gericke, N., Hudson, B., Olin-Scheller, C. and Stolare, M. (2018). ‘Powerful knowledge, transformations and the need for empirical studies across school subjects’. London Review of Education, 16 (3) 428–444. Hoadley, U. (2011). ‘Knowledge, knowers and knowing’. In L.G.M. Yates (Ed.), Curriculum in today’s world: Configuring knowledge, identities, work & politics. New York: Routledge. Hordern. J. (2021). ‘Recontextualisation and the teaching of subjects’. The Curriculum Journal, 32, 592–606. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.110 Lambert, D. and Biddulph, M. (2015). ‘The dialogic space offered by curriculum-making in the process of learning to teach, and the creation of a progressive knowledge-led curriculum’. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43 (3), 210-224. Young, M. (2010). ‘Why educators must differentiate knowledge from experience’. Journal of the Pacific Circle Consortium for Education, 22(1), 9-20

The presentation highlights the key theoretical contributions of the book by presenting a slightly revisited model of Bernstein’s pedagogic device (Puustinen et al., 2026). Based on an empirical starting point, we set powerful knowledge and recontextualization into dialogue with the Nordic Didaktik tradition to discuss how each tradition can support an understanding of the recontextualisation processes. With the purpose of making the teacher’s role more visible and drawing on the empirical examples of the book, we theorize teacher agency and teacher knowledge in relation to recontextualisation. We suggest the space for a teachers’ recontextualisation agency includes two parts. The first part is planning and reflection in relation to the curriculum and other standards. The other part is the actual classroom teaching. To this end, we introduce three kinds of knowledge essential for recontextualisation agency: knowledge about the disciplines and subjects, knowledge about education, and subject-specific knowledge about teaching and learning (see also Hordern, 2021; Puustinen, 2022). First, to understand how knowledge transforms when traveling through education system, teachers need to be able to compare recontextualised knowledge (the school subject) to disciplinary knowledge, where the transformation began. Second, knowledge about education includes understandings of educational aims, but also emphasise the importance of disciplinary, systematic educational knowledge (see Barrett & Hordern, 2021) which helps teachers to identify the ideological, political and economic influences on education, which affect both the transformation of knowledge and the material and cultural constraints on teachers' work (see also Shalem & Allais, 2025). We argue that without sufficient knowledge about education as a societal system, even a skilful teacher may lose touch with a disciplinary starting point and end up merely reproducing a predetermined curriculum and unquestioned ideologies. Third, subject-specific knowledge about teaching and learning includes knowledge about teaching, knowledge about students and their needs, and for example, classroom interaction skills. This knowledge is essential for any teacher because the teaching profession is ultimately about constant interaction with students. Yet, it alone is not a sufficient knowledge base for recontextualization. The more understanding an individual teacher has about the recontextualisation processes that take place before the classroom level, the more space they can have for they own intentional recontextualisation.

Barrett, B., and Hordern, J. (2021). Rethinking the foundations: Towards powerful professional knowledge in teacher education in the USA and England. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 53(2), 153–165. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity (Vol. 5). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Hordern, J. (2021). Recontextualisation and the teaching of subjects. The Curriculum Journal, 00, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.110 Puustinen, M. (2022). Teacher education and history teachers’ powerful professional knowledge. In B. Hudson, C. Olin-Scheller, N. Gericke, & M. Stolare (Eds.), International Perspectives on Knowledge and Quality: Implications for Innovation in Teacher Education Policy and Practice (1st ed., pp. 45-62). (Reinventing Teacher Education). Bloomsbury Academic. Puustinen, M., Marjokorpi, J., & Khawaja, A. (2026). Theorising the recontextualisation processes: The teacher’s role revisited. In M. Hardman, M. Nilsberth & M. Puustinen (Eds.), Bringing powerful knowledge into classrooms: Subject teachers as agents of recontextualisation. UCL Press. Shalem, Y. & Allais, S (2025). Why “liberating” education studies from foundation disciplines cannot make it more coherent? In G. McPhail, R. Pountney, & L. Wheelahan (Eds.) Emerging Perspectives from Social Realism on Knowledge and Education: curricula, pedagogy, identity, and equity. (pp. 162-180). Routledge.