Teach for Sweden (TFS), stemming from the global Teach For All (TFA) movement, has attracted the attention of policymakers and various educational stakeholders since its establishment in 2013 for its efforts to solve the problems of Swedish schools by recruiting and training new groups of potentially qualified teachers. TFS particularly focuses on recruiting individuals with STEM or language expertise to undergo a short complementary teacher education program. While TFA has been studied internationally (Bailey, 2015), there is a lack of Swedish studies that examine TFS. Therefore, this paper aims at examining how the TFS initiative constructs problems and solutions within the contemporary Swedish education system, with a particular emphasis on its stated goal of addressing educational inequality. The analysis is based on a five-step critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the extensive material available on the TFS website. The analytical approach combines Fairclough’s (1995) analytical framework with a modified version by Guo and Shan (2013). The analysis include five steps: (i) Focusing on a social problem with a semiotic aspect, analysing how the problem is portrayed/construed and identifying the discourse(s) involved; (ii) Analysing how the proposed solution is portrayed/construed and identifying the discourse(s) involved; (iii) Mapping the network of practices within which the problem and solution are situated and how they may be reorganised; (iv) Identifying potential contradictions and gaps in the material; (v) Critically reflect on the analysis. In accordance with the initial step, this paper focuses on a social problem – educational inequality – that has a semiotic dimension, as evidenced by the use of images, fonts, colours, and other visual elements on the TFS website. 

Preliminary findings suggest that TFS constructs both problems and solutions within the framework of an overarching neoliberal discourse, which encompasses regulations concerning efficiency, competitiveness, knowledge claims and audit practices. This discourse, in line with an emphasis on practical-behavioural know-how in teacher education, position teachers not as ‘thinkers’ but as ‘doers’. Consequently, the TFS initiative reinforces the on-going tendency in Sweden toward a ‘teacher training’ paradigm, which emphasises the idea of deliberate practices (Horden et al., 2025) and, in turn, undermines teachers’ professional judgement and autonomy. In conclusion, our analysis reveals that TFS inadequately address structural injustices and inequalities within the Swedish school system. Although several Nordic countries are involved in the global TFA movement, research in the area is scarce. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest that the findings of this paper are relevant to Nordic educational research.

References

Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis. Longman.

Bailey, P. (2015). Consultants of conduct: New actors, new knowledges and new 'resilient' subjectivities in the governing of the teacher. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 47(3), 232–250.

Guo, S. & Shan, H. (2013). The politics of recognition: critical discourse analysis of recent PLAR policies for immigrant professionals in Canada. International Journal of Lifelong Education 32(4), 464–480.

Horden, J., Pratt, N., Kelly, P., & Evans, K. (2025). Why deliberate practice is not a basis for teacher expertise. Cambridge Journal of Education, 55(4), 569–586. 

This study examines Swedish government policy regarding language proficiency among preschool staff and their role in supporting the language development of multilingual children. The government has allocated resources to strengthen the language proficiency of welfare professionals, identifying preschool staff as a key target group. Using critical discourse analysis, we investigate a government language support program, focusing on its implementation through two private facilitators who invite preschools across Sweden to participate in language development courses. The results illustrate how the directive is recontextualized between the Swedish National Agency for Education and its language program, highlighting specific discourses that underscore partially counterproductive intentions. For instance, the program is marked by ambiguity in terms of objectives, pedagogy, and practical implementation, potentially reinforcing hierarchies among staff groups. Furthermore, it reflects an emphasis on individual responsibility and educational values based more on professional ‘know-how’ than on scientific knowledge. 

Teach for America, which began in 1989 as a market response to teacher shortages and underachievement in disadvantaged communities, brought high-achieving graduates into schools serving the poorest students (OECD, 2023). This inspired Teach First in the UK, which began in 2002. Teach for All was founded in 2007 and led to the establishment of Teach First Denmark and Teach for Sweden in 2013. Together, these programmes illustrate the rising influence and activity of international philanthropic networks in non-democratic education governance in Europe (Viseu, 2022). They assume the character and leadership of highly successful individuals allow them to help disadvantaged students overcome the social, cultural, and economic barriers that lead to educational underachievement (Thomas et al., 2021). 

For Wacquant (2010, 2012), the neoliberal reform of public services on the basis that mobilizing market competition will promote human flourishing has never been realized as an economic project. He suggests, instead, that this is a structurally coherent project, where the state is neither rolled back nor dismantled but reconfigured to impose the market on its citizens. The state achieves this by taking a hyper-individualist stance that emphasizes personal responsibility over social obligations. This stance underpins discourses of meritocracy, where hard work is assumed to bring just reward, and this, in turn, aligns closely with the American dream that all can achieve a better life through their own efforts and initiative. 

The neoliberal technologies of marketisation, increased performativity (Ball, 2017), and the new science of learning (Hordern & Brooks, 2023) have transformed the teacher education landscape in Denmark, England and Sweden, albeit in different ways. These reforms have resulted in the narrowing of teacher education programmes (Larsen et al., 2023) and exacerbated a tension that exists across the formal education sector between promoting individual excellence and education for all. lndeed, in all three countries the gap between the highest and lowest educational achievers, which Teach for All is expected to narrow, has either remained the same (in England; Farquharson et al., 2024) or widened (in Denmark and Sweden; Kjeldsen et al., 2024) over the past 20 years.

Rizvi characterizes the Teach for America agenda as ‘ridding school districts of veteran teachers, privatizing public schools, and forcing a data-driven culture upon low-income communities that face serious and often unique challenges’ (2021: xvi). Referring to Teach for All, he adds, ‘little is known, however, as to how these ideas travel and are translated through local cultural, political, and educational traditions’ (ibid: xvii). Whilst others (Brewer et al., 2020; Thomas et al., 2021) have begun this task mostly in policy terms, our symposium explores how the common rationale of Teach for All is recontextualized in three countries chosen for their contrasting education cultures, histories, and embrace of neoliberal approaches to education reform, Denmark, England and Sweden. We do this by examining programme documentation and the views of the teachers involved. The study reflects how neoliberal technologies and hyper-individualism permeate teacher education in the three countries studied, providing both agency, risks, and hope to their education systems.

Current national government discourses about Swedish school practices often construct teacher performance as insufficient and in need of new knowledge and skills. It is partly for this reason, the government has opened up alternative ways to prepare preservice teachers for the challenges and needs of schools over the last few decades. Teach for Sweden constitutes such an alternative, a private teacher education facilitator stemming from the global philanthropic Teach For All (TFA) movement. Today, TFA is implemented in most Western countries (Brewer, et al., 2015) with the general aim to support schools in disadvantaged communities. In specific, Teach for Sweden efforts to solve the problems of Swedish schools by recruiting and training new groups of preservice teachers (often qualified engineers) to undergo a short complementary teacher education program. National research on this program is scarce but describes an organisation using language that point at 'teach for' more so than dialogue, and that the leadership associated with Teach for Sweden is favored by measurable outcomes that reduces teaching to preparing for tests (Myers, 2021). The aim of this study is to analyse the subject positions that are constructed in conversations with Teach for Sweden graduates and how these positions relate to or challenge contemporary discourses in teacher education. The analysis will specifically focus on positions within the transition from the education period to working as a teacher after graduation, and discourses expressed within the same. The theoretical framework emanates from a discourse analytic approach and a Foucauldian perspective (Foucault, 1980), which provides a starting point for the analysis of power and dominance relations. The empirical material stems from an ongoing study comprising interviews with Teach for Sweden alumni. The analysis focuses on actors in interaction, which implies that inspiration is drawn from discursive psychology (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Tentative findings reveal subject positions among the participants that construct contrasts between the Teach for Sweden program and every-day teaching practices. Inconsistencies between various discourses give rise to a hesitant subject position, where the alumni try to navigate to handle workloads, lack of resources and school leaders under pressure. The discrepancy between positions during and after the Teach for Sweden program thus illustrate challenges for the alumni, for professional knowledge and for future teacher work. Although several Nordic countries are involved in the global TFA movement, there is a need for more research in the area. In light of TFA’s growing presence and legitimacy, it is reasonable to suggest that the findings of this paper are relevant to Nordic educational research.

For decades, scholars have been reporting on the crises in the professoriate, be-moaning how neoliberalism has brought about their deagentification, through inter alia, deprofessionalization, disaffection, hypermetricization, and structural inequity. The problems are real, but the widely circulating glosses of the neoliberal university have both flattened the variation of these problems as well as diminished pursuing tactics to ameliorate their effects. In the following vignettes, faculty across multiple national contexts, ranks, disciplines, genders, and racial identities, redress these concerns. Together, these vignettes detail the embodied challenges faculty face as well as reclaim a sense of productive possibility in redirecting how faculty may lead the charge to shape the professoriate today.

One emphasised discourse in Swedish higher education policy is internationalisation, which is in line with EU recommendations to ensure a sustainable knowledge system. This knowledge system, perhaps especially in Sweden, also emphasises the importance of gender equity. In this study, we are interested in the recontextualisation between discourses of internationalisation and gender in Swedish higher education (HE) at both national and local levels. We use critical discourse analysis to examine two different examples: (1) discourses in national HE policy, and, (2) discourses at a Swedish university and one of its departments. Overall, we find that government discourses on HE are recontextualised in ways that support national, standardised interests rather than local university needs. Although these discourses emphasise the importance of both internationalisation and gender through articulations of mobility, sustainability and equity, there are strong individualistic aspirations in line with a meritocratic system. These patterns are even more pronounced at the local university level, where these discourses join to promote certain successful departments and academic subjects. In conclusion, the findings illustrate how the recontextualisation between internationalisation and gender discourses legitimises the prevailing gender divide — not the other way around — but also that this recontextualisation can create tensions and changes

In recent years, the neoliberal Swedish political establishment has made a series of arguments that education, and teachers in particular, have failed, while at the same time overseeing an educational regulatory system that hasn't responded to the needs of schools (Beach & Bagely, 2012; Bylund & Player Koro, 2024). As a result, Teach for Sweden (TFS) (alongside other private education facilitators) has been marketed as a programme that aims to solve the problems of contemporary Swedish schools. Despite this, national research on this programme is scarce. In Myer's study (2019), he illustrates how TFS is created as an elite organisation using the symbolic language of the 'Teach For' model, referring to the 'top students' and 'world-class schools'. Dahlstrom (2013) argues that the leadership associated with TFS is that favoured by the new public management, i.e. a focus on measurable outcomes that reduces teaching to preparing for tests and exams. While the views and voices of TFA graduates have been studied internationally (Brewer & deMarrais, 2015; Matsui, 2015), as well as what counts as knowledge within the TFA organisation (Bailey, 2015), there is a lack of Swedish studies that examine how actors discursively position themselves within the TFS context. Therefore, the aim of this study is to a) analyse the subject positions that are constructed in conversations with TFS graduates and how these positions relate to the teacher subjectivities that this programme produces, and b) what problems these subjectivities seek to support or solve. The theoretical framework is post-structuralist theory with discourse analysis as the methodological approach (Foucault, 1980). Our starting point is a Foucauldian inspired analysis that provides an overarching view of the concept of discourse and gives us a starting point for revealing power relations. Further, the analysis is informed by discursive psychology (Poller & Whetherell, 1987) and discourse theory (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). We present an ongoing study comprising interviews with TFS graduates associated with different universities in Sweden. The findings are discussed, and discourses identified as part of the ideal model presented as TFS. Based on previous studies, we expect our findings to shed light on how new teacher subjectivities is negotiated and the tensions involved.