Susanne Sahlin

Bridging School-Subjects and Distances in Upper Secondary Schools

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to report how Swedish upper secondary schools involved in a European Union-financed collaborative project intertwined aspects of subject integration and internatio ...

A Decade Later: Twelve Teachers' Retrospective Views on a National Programme for Teachers' Professional Development and ICT

Today, an increased impact of information and communication technologies ICT in the society at large has lead teachers to engage in professional development activities related to the use of ICT. Even though this development has been prominent for more than two decades, its long term effects seem complex to determine. This paper is based on interviews with twelve Swedish teachers who participated in a national program for promoting school development and use of ICT in 2000-2001. The program was aligned with the pedagogical approaches set out in the national Swedish curriculum, such as a shift from teaching to learning and giving pupils more responsibility, introducing interdisciplinary approaches to teaching in teams, and a problem based pupils-oriented pedagogy. The analysis of the interviews show that teachers still feel a high degree of appreciation for the program, and that they share a relative agreement of the importance of the program for their teaching with ICT in the last decade. The general intentions of the program to be more concerned with school development and pedagogy rather than technology and ICT seem also to be present today as a long term effect.