Within higher education, students’ autonomy in connection with degree projects is highly valued and research indicates relationships between autonomy and motivation, which are essential for both academic achievement and lifelong learning. However, it is unclear what autonomy means and how it is promoted in tutoring. This study aims to obtain knowledge about how to enable a learning environment in tutoring that develops students’ autonomy during their work with the degree project. Through phenomenology, the essential meanings of students’ autonomy in their degree projects are described. Data is gathered through focus-group interviews with both students and tutors in various educational programs. The results indicate that autonomy develops in a supportive process balanced by the tutor between control and freedom and requires frameworks such as space, knowledge and time. The student’s self-awareness and the tutor’s knowledge of the student’s individual needs facilitate the student’s autonomy.

This chapter employs a holistic view of the child in its examination of socially sustainable preschoolteacher professionalism, raising in particular the necessity of acknowledging the role of a child’s personalworldview as a part of it. Thereby, we aim to contribute to knowledge in the field and the discussions onsocial justice, Religious Education (RE), relational ethics and Early Childhood Education and Care(ECEC or preschool). Our argument stems from an understanding of preschool teacher professionalismthat in the daily lives of children and their families can notably contribute towards sustainable justice insociety. The chapter takes its starting point from our theoretical and analytical model for sociallysustainable communities of care (Raivio, Skaremyr & Kuusisto, 2022), for a further elaboration onpreschool as a caring community. The tool builds on previous theoretical, conceptual and empiricalstudies and focuses on five levels: International level, Societal level, Community (here preschool) level, aswell as the levels of Situations, Events and Acts of Care. Our holistic view of the child builds further onpostcolonial and feminist ethics of care, through which the model highlights the importance of theteacher’s sensitivity towards the child’s worldview with its religious or spiritual, ethical, and existentialelements. Caring for the child’s worldview is seen as vital for the child’s resilience, contributing tolearning, well-being, and sense of belonging, both in the daily events in preschool and in the longerperspective on their individual life trajectories. Thereby, receiving care also for this aspect of individualdevelopment is critically important for social sustainability in any society. The chapter concludes withreflections and implications for socially sustainable educational professionalism in preschool.

This chapter employs a holistic view of the child in its examination of socially sustainable preschool teacher professionalism, raising the necessity of acknowledging the role of a child’s personal worldview as important. The chapter takes as its starting point a theoretical and analytical model for socially sustainable communities of care for a further elaboration on preschool as a caring community. The holistic view of the child builds on postcolonial theory and feminist ethics of care, through which the model highlights the importance of the teacher’s sensitivity towards the child’s worldview with its religious or spiritual, ethical, and existential elements. Caring for the child’s worldview is seen as vital for the child’s resilience, contributing to learning, well-being, and sense of belonging, both in the daily events in preschool and in the longer perspective on their individual life trajectories. © Oxford University Press 2025.

This study examines how two instructional conditions - explicit and implicit narrative instruction - were implemented in Swedish preschools, drawing on principles from implementation science. Data from 21 preschool departments—including video recordings, teacher interviews, and survey data - were analyzed using a mixed-methods approach. The implicit approach (HINT), focusing on shared reading and meaning making, was perceived as easier to integrate and adapt due to its alignment with established preschool practices. The explicit approach (SCAN) was more challenging to implement partly due to a new and more systematic approach. Both approaches were highlighted as beneficial by teachers. However, SCAN was emphasized as particularly beneficial for previously quiet or less engaged children. While most teachers reported feeling prepared, sustained fidelity to core instructions declined over time for both HINT and SCAN. The analysis also reveals a persistent monolingual norm: despite multilingualism being a stated goal, few departments integrated children’s first languages into practice. The findings also underscore the need for balancing scripts with adaptation in early childhood interventions. 

This paper examines the place of religion in Nordic Higher Education through the case of Swedish ECEC Teacher Education. Sweden, alongside other Nordic countries, is both an increasingly secular and a notably multi-religioussociety. This may generate tensions related to worldview visibility and the related self-expression, relevant alsofrom the freedom of religion and Human Rights perspectives. Although equity and non-discrimination related toreligion and worldviews are central to all higher education, we know very little of what the visibility of religion andother worldviews in ECEC teacher education is like at present, and how the students themselves have experiencedthis phenomenon during their degree studies. This project aims to fill this gap in research, whereof the presentpaper focuses on the pilot study data from student narratives.

In Sweden, the discourse and content of ECEC teacher educations, from the perspectives of religion andworldviews, are yet to be explored. For this purpose, a theoretical tool (Raivio et al. 2022) based on criticalpedagogy, black feminist and postcolonial theory (e.g. hooks, 1994; Spivak,1988; Yuval-Davis, 2011) and feministethics of care (Noddings, 2013) will be used for analyzing and discussing discursive elements of ‘othering’ and‘belonging’.

The presented preliminary findings will focus on the ECEC teacher students’ perceived experiences of theeducational content related to issues linked to religion and worldviews during their education. A survey was usedto gather their narratives of perceived experiences. The survey, which consisted of open-ended questions, wasposted on the students' learning platforms.

Findings from an ongoing pilot study indicate that students perceive that they rarely encounter contents related toreligions during the seminars or lectures as the theoretical part of their teacher education, however, that theydescribe that they often meet children and parents with different religious affiliations during their teachingpractice. Students' narratives suggest that there is a dominant Christian and/or secular discourse within theprograms, which places students with religious or other than Christian worldviews as “the other” and in themargins of the discussions.

Addressing value issues related to social relations, equity and non-discrimination related to religion andworldviews is crucial in higher education. This project, focusing on religion in Swedish preschool teacher education,is highly relevant to Nordic educational research, as this perspective has not been previously studied in ECECteacher education.

This study deals with all children’s possibilities of meeting the multilingual society and aims to explore the norms regarding language and culture that are reflected in picturebooks in preschools. Previous research has shown how picturebooks can be used to develop literacy skills and intercultural understandings among children. A postcolonial lens is used to identify social locations and thereby unfold hidden power relations and social positionings of who is to be included and who is not (Spivak, 1988; Yuval-Davis, 2006). 35 picturebooks collected from preschools in Iceland, Norway and Sweden have been analysed by frequency and qualitative content analysis, eleven of which were found to contain multilingualism and/or multiculturalism. The results show a) a prevailing monolingual norm in which solely artefacts carry multilingual trails; b) a strong monocultural norm, which places people of diversity in a marginalised position; c) the English language holds an advanced position compared to majority languages, which situates other minority languages as anomalous. The educational significance of the research implicates a need for multilingual and multicultural diversity to be more observable in picturebooks used in preschool, to help children develop languages, and their own linguistic and cultural identity/-ies and, thus, their sense of belonging to a multilingual society.

The increasing societal diversity of religions and worldviews (R&W) in Swedish preschools affects what competencies today’s preschool teachers need and what needs to be taught in Swedish Preschool Teacher Education (PTE). The study aims to investigate the content and discursive norms regarding religion and worldviews in Swedish PTEs on a national policy level and contribute to knowledge in the research field of Religious Studies and Higher Education. The PTE curricula of all the twenty Higher Education institutions offering PTE in Sweden in 2022 are investigated using text-centred discourse analysis, together with a theoretical and analytical tool for analyzing different dimensions of the PTEs and the potential for them to function as socially sustainable communities of care. The results show that even though there might be implicit incentives for teaching about R&W, all but one of the educational curricula of the twenty PTEs in Sweden lack explicit mention of ‘religion’. Based on the results, we can see that at a national policy level, the content of the educational curricula reproduces liberal secular and humanist worldviews as norms for the PTEs. There is also a lack of explicit policy-related incentives for the PTEs to promote social sustainability regarding equipping students with proper knowledge and skills for developing care-centered and norm-critical R&W literacy. 

Societies of today are becoming increasingly pluralistic. This applies also to the diversity of values and worldviews in Swedish early childhood education and care (ECEC). Still, in the increasingly secular contexts, societal hegemony often fails to include children's home religions and worldviews in the actions and understandings aiming towards inclusiveness. We argue that it is of critical importance to also include the plurality of worldviews in the educational perception of "the whole child" in the care and education taking place in ECEC. The purpose of this article is to connect the discussions in the fields of intercultural and interreligious education, in particular those dealing with the diversity of religions and worldviews, to discussions on care and social sustainability in ECEC. The UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development promotes inclusive and equitable education, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child states children's right to freedom of religion and a concern for the spiritual, moral, and social development. Our previous findings have illustrated the importance of religions and worldviews in the intercultural work within early childhood education, both empirically and conceptually, and as part of the moral core of teaching. This article employs feminist and postcolonial ethics of care as a theoretical lens in elaborating on the three key notions: social sustainability, care, and worldviews. Several discursive challenges that ECEC teachers in Sweden face in their work, to enhance social sustainability by supporting the child's well-being and sense of belonging in the ECEC, have been outlined. To conclude, we bring forth a theoretical and analytical tool for the understanding, researching, and planning of socially sustainable communities of care.

This study is a newly started project about student autonomy with focus on the learning environment that promotes and develops students’ autonomy in degree projects. Research shows that academic writing in higher education needs to be developed in terms of student autonomy (Fung & Mei, 2015; Mickwitz & Suojala, 2020; van Blankenstein, Saab, van der Rijst, Danel, Bakker-van den Berg et al., 2019 ). Other aspects of learning such as critical thinking and motivation are closely related to students' autonomy, the studies show. Both autonomy and critical thinking are presented as desirable ideals generally in higher education, but based on research, and experiences as teacher educators, it turns out to be problematic to develop students' autonomy, not least in academic writing and in degree projects. Issues related to supervision strategies are rarely discussed and there is a presumption about how supervision is done (Eriksson & Gustavsson, 2016). As a common international issue, many students request templates and very clear guidance on how they “should” write to be approved.

Thus, the purpose of this study is to create a learning environment in supervision that develops students' autonomy in degree projects. Through the creation of the learning environment in supervision, students' autonomy is expected to develop.

The research questions are:

1.How do the teaching colleagues describe…

a) autonomy?

b) that autonomy is promoted?

c) their observation of autonomy?

2. How do the workshop and Self Determination theory contribute to the collegial consensus?3. How do the autonomy matrix contribute to the collegial consensus?