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Background

While positive school climate is important for students’ well-being and mental health, school personnel may experience challenges in creating a nurturing school climate. School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SW-PBIS) has shown positive effects on school climate and children’s prosocial behaviors, but fewer studies have been conducted in a European context.

Aim

This project aims to investigate the effectiveness of SW-PBIS program for students’ social-emotional skills and academic achievement as well as teachers’ and students’ perceptions of classroom learning environment. Furthermore, the study intends to evaluate how school-level factors mediate or moderate the effects of the intervention. In addition, the study includes a qualitative evaluation of the dynamic interaction processes that occur during program implementation in local school contexts.

Methods

Data on school- and individual-level measures are collected in intervention and control schools. With regard to challenges in retaining control groups over extended time periods, two waves of recruitment are used. In the first wave, an active control group is used and data are collected during three time points. In the second wave, a wait-list control group will be used and data will be collected during two time points during one school year. Hierarchical regression analyses will be conducted to explore the effects of SW-PBIS on the outcomes of the study. An ethno-methodological approach will be applied to provide a detailed examination of the social interactional and meaning-making practices of different school implementation teams, and the negotiation of normative expectations and rules of conduct in peer-teacher-student interactions in different classrooms.

Discussion

The study is expected to contribute to knowledge on the effects of the SW-PBIS program and how these effects may be mediated or moderated by school-level factors. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the significance of school contexts in the implementation of the SW-PBIS program constitutes the strength of the study. The challenge in the study is the extended period of implementation of SW-PBIS, which entails difficulties in retaining a control group over the required time period. Therefore, two waves of recruitment are used, encompassing different procedures of allocation to intervention or control group.

Artikeln tar sin utgångspunkt i hur aktörer på den privata läxhjälpsmarknaden, i kölvattnet av en intensiv politisk och medial debatt, befinner sig i en position som innebär förändrade behov, förutsättningar och möjligheter att söka legitimitet för sin verksamhet. Genom detaljerade analyser av intervjudata med representanter för två olika privata läxhjälpsföretag synliggörs hur olika positionerings- och kategoriseringspraktiker sätts i arbete i deras berättelse om sin organisation och hur detta resulterar i en vid repertoar av identitetframträdanden. Analysen visar på hur de organisationsidentiteter som framträder relaterar till såväl det reguljära utbildningssystemet och olika samtida utbildningsideal och frågor som efter-frågan, men även mer pragmatiska aspekter som behov och marknadsförutsätt -ningar. Sammanfattningsvis visar studien hur organisationsidentitet inte kan förstås som något statiskt svar på frågan om vilka en organisation är eller vill vara, utan snarare som något dynamiskt som hela tiden omkonstrueras i relation till omgivande förutsättningar där såväl politiska regleringar, samtida samhälleliga debatter som mer stabila normer och ideal sätter ramar för organisationers möjligheter att framställa sin verksamhet som legitim och önskvärd.

This article concerns students’ help-seeking in one particular educational setting in Sweden, namely mathematical homework support. It presents in-depth analyses of video-recorded instances of interactions using multimodal conversation analysis. By exploring how tutors and students with no prior interactional history collaboratively establish an agreement upon what constitutes the student’s problem, the study sheds light on the problem presentation and its interactional and epistemic challenges and pitfalls. The results of the study demonstrate the sequential pattern of help-seeking interactions and the crucial role of objects, such as notepads, as epistemic resources for determining the student’s problem. It moreover shows how students put their (mis)understandings on display using verbal, embodied and material resources to describe their problem-solving efforts. Finally, it shows how epistemic framings of the help request are of consequence, in which responsibility for the problem presentation may be transferred from student to tutor.

Purpose: Taking läxhjälp/homework support in Sweden as a case, this article aims to further explore shadow education, especially as a pedagogical object from curriculum theory perspective.

Design/Approach/Methods: Approaches including policy analyses, ethnomethodological work based on video-recorded interaction, and narratives have produced empirically grounded knowledge. We use examples from several substudies and analyze the reentry and regulation of supplementary education and how tutors and tutees interact in tutoring settings and negotiate identities in läxhjälp as well as the relation to regular schooling.

Findings: Läxhjälp is conditioned by the logic of equality and changes in the governance of läxhjälp. The proliferation of different kinds of tutoring practices provided by various organizations calls for a broad definition of shadow education. With curriculum as boundary object, equality and academic success are foundational. Different settings and spatiotemporal arrangements affect modes of interaction, distribution of epistemic authority, and negotiations of identities.

Originality/Value: With Sweden as a case, it is possible to explore shadow education in a new context, the Scandinavian welfare state, and its history of comprehensive education. Moreover, ethnomethodological interaction and narrative studies and curriculum perspectives are seldom employed within research on shadow education. A number of critical key boundary objects are identified.

The overall aim of this study is to explore how individual children with long-term school difficulties follow unique ‘trajectories of participation’ in special educational needs settings, sometimes in unexpected ways, and how this contributes to alternative forms of identification and processes of learning. The data draws on long-term video-ethnographic work, tracing trajectories of participation during the course of a school year for an individual girl with an ADHD diagnosis who is a newcomer to a special support school in Sweden. We use a multi-layered theoretical and methodological framework to learning, identities and participation as situated practices to explore how the focal girl, through her everyday participation in classroom contexts structured to amplify the student’s capabilities, gradually moves from an ‘unwilling student’ to an ‘agentive learner’. Through a multimodal interactional analysis, we demonstrate how the focal girl’s actions and the teacher’s scaffolding responses are interactionally organised, and the emotional and relational dimensions in the creation of participation frameworks for learning. It is argued that the student’s agency and emerging emotional engagement in school-based learning are intimately linked to the pursuit of building long-term learning relationships based on mutual trust.

The study focuses on how preadolescent girls in instances of adult-children talk within the institutional setting of a girl group discussion forum construct joint stories that challenge a master narrative of school bullying. The unfolding of one such multi-party storytelling event on the topic of victimization is analyzed; primarily highlighting the participants' interactional management of diverse moral concerns, blame allocations, and issues of responsibility. All in all, the study highlights how the girls' collaborative storytelling comes to redefine moral concepts and test the institutional borders of tellability in ways that also raise questions about the institutional foundations of school bullying interventions.

This article examines episodes of potential student conflict in a Swedish special support classroom in which teachers deploy a particular type of directive in the form of a negative imperative: ‘bry dig inte’ (Eng. ‘don’t mind …; don’t bother …’). The analyses of three such extended episodes, by use of a conversation analytic approach, highlight how the focused directive works in a neutralising fashion in relation to students’ affective stances, constructed through bodily displays (postures, facial expressions, gazes) and/or verbal acts (complaints, accusations, insults), explicitly offering an alternative way for involved students to avoid participating in an escalation of a conflict. A pertinent element of the analysed episodes is how the focused directive format appears to downplay the relevance of a conflict source, as well as be orienting more towards teaching students self-restraint than towards reprimand and punishment. The analysis also demonstrated how the directive seems to bear metapragmatic knowledge specific to the particular school culture, leading the connotation transmitted in the context to be more comprehensive than what follows from the actual words.