En viktig uppgift för tidskriften Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige är att fungera som samlingsplats för att definiera och utveckla pedagogikämnet betraktat som vetenskaplig disciplin. Allt sedan Durkheim (1922/1965) – som ursprungligen själv var professor i pedagogik innan han bytte ämnesidentitet till sociologi och ifrågasatte om pedagogik kan sägas utgöra en självständig vetenskaplig disciplin – har frågan om pedagogikens vetenskapliga status förblivit omstridd och oavklarad. Det visar sig dock då vi jämför med andra vetenskapliga discipliner att dessa långt ifrån är så enhetliga som vi vanligen förknippar med en vetenskaplig disciplin.

I ett tidigare nummer av Pedagogisk Forsknings i Sverige (vol 20, nr 3-4, 2005) om temat “Högre Utbildning och professionell verksamhet” pekar redaktörerna Sven Persson och Anders Olsson på en rad nya tendenser inom forskningen om professioner och professionalitet. Den viktigaste utmaningen är den personliga kunskapsaspekten. Även om det otvivelaktigt är så att professioner är makrosociologiska och därvid också kollektiva och strukturella fenomen – som existerar utanför och är oavhängiga den enskilde individen, både historiskt och nationellt – krävs en lång erfarenhet och oftast någon form av högre utbildning för att kunna inträda i rollen som professionell yrkesutövare.

What is aesthetic education good for in pedagogical regards and how can it be compared with the competencies that intercultural education aims at? Our main argument in the article is that the core of intercultural competencies consists of a number of overlapping modes of knowledge, skills and capabilities such as active empathy, critical approach to hidden colonial and racial heritages, dialogic relationships with the world and the other, as well as openness to experiences that are radically different from one’s own. We regard these skills, competencies and knowledge as main elements of “educating responsible citizens.” This article is a joint product of researchers working within different disciplines and with different knowledge interests. They share an interest in the question of if and how aesthetic education can lead to the particular intercultural competence of educating responsible citizens.

This sociological collection advances the argument that the concept of a `turning point´expands our understanding of life experiences from a descriptive to a deeper and more abstract level of analysis. It addresses the conceptual issue of what distinguishes turning points from life transitions in general and raises crucial questions about the application of turning points as a biogrphical research method. Biography and turning points in Europe and America is all the more distinctive and significant due to its broad empirical database. The anthology includes authors from ten different countries, providing a number of contexts for thinking about how turning points relate to constructions of meaning shaped by globalisation and by cultural and structural meanings unique to each country. The book will be useful across a wide rangev of social sciences and particularly valuable for researchers needing a stronger theoretical base for biographical work.

The aim of this paper is to present a theoretical framework that can help us make visible the aesthetic and artistic aspects of the teaching profession. The framework consists of the following aspects: a) the social- semiotic aspect or how the teacher communicates and how effectively in the class room in term not only of ideas but also relations and textual presentations as well as in terms of the teacher´s awareness of metacommunicational issues and sub-texts (aesthetic sensibility) b) the experiential aspect or the more vague, pre-reflexive, tactile and sensual experiences of critical situations (aesthetic experience) c) the organizational aspect or how teachers finds legitimate time to plan ahead and renew teaching materials and methods, as well as being able to improvise, motivate and inspire students within the time constraints of a highly scheduled everyday organization of school work (artistic working methods) d) the identity aspect or how to negotiate between personal and professional convictions and the expectations and demands coming from other actors which are part of ones life-world such as students, other colleagues, superiors, parents, guiding documents, national policies etc (the problem of authenticity). The method is mainly essaistic, using any kind of empirical material available ( “fishing method”).

A core competence as well as central part of the identity of future teachers in the arts, is the problem of how to teach visual methods. What are visual methods for, how can one motivate youth to learn visual methods and how do you engage your students in a dialogue or communication about the role and functions of art and visual methods in contemporary societies that feels relevant for the younger generations? In this paper I will present the oral as well as written and visualized reflections by nineteen coming school teachers made over a period of one and a half years of training in the teaching of art . I will look at how they have coped with these issues both in their own education to become teachers of art and in their attempts to apply some of the theories, ideas and methods they learned at Malmo University during their periods of practical training in different schools in and outside Malmo. Since the town of Malmo is the "immigrant port" of Sweden, Malmo itself as well as it schools can be seen as natural laboratories of how visual methods in teaching interact with the increasingly multicultural context of contemporary Europe (more the fifty per cent of all school children are recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants).

The chapter frames and highlights the advances represented in the anthology Biography and Turning Points in Europe - theoretically and methodologically. It reveals the importance of integreting the notion of "event" into our comprehension of narrative - and understanding that we are not necessarily speaking of institutionalized or ritualized life courses, but turning points granted or constructed by the individual. It builds an analysis of narrative devices (for example the narrator/ character divide, the structurating factor of time and the myths and modes of narration) to illustrate the contributions in the text. It also points to the enduring sociological promise of turning points as a tool for deconstructing narratives that the subjects confer with meaning.

In his book Structuralist Poetics, Jonathan Culler argues that from a literary point of view, everything can be seen as a "text". The everyday world is a text, culture is a text and literary norms (genres) as well as conventions are texts. From a sociological point of view everything, not the least the literary and artistic worlds are seen as partial empirical realities ("social fields" or "institutions") which are at the same time "social constructions." Now looking on the world as a text which is to be dechiffered by some competent reader or as empirical realities that have already been constructed socially by actors who are themselves endowed with different kinds of habitus and equipped with different degrees of social and symbolic capital and accompanying strategies of distinction, is obviously something different. On the other hand, the two approaches amount to the same thing in the sense that both seek to impose a particular perspective on the world. The question I want to raise in this paper is iif there are some epistemological advantages in trying to replace the usual, "elevated" way disciplines go about trying to make sense of the world (which we could call "disciplinary imperialism") with something more "down to earth" that we could call "analytical wrestling". With the latter I mean that you so to say step down from your imagined throne and try to "grab" the other in a more open-ended contest. You emerge yourself in the perspective of the other, but not completely, you then return to your own perspective but somewhat shaken or changed. What would such a way of approaching the issue of aesthetics and sociology contribute to both? Could something new emerge out of such analytical wrestling, something that contains elements of both perspectives at the same time?

Towards the end of his academic career, Lewis Coser wrote Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. The overall problem in the book is “the loss and generation of prestige”. Coser looks closely at a number of cases mostly in the social sciences and humanities, somewhat apart from these is also a chapter on writers. Given that the study is on scholars and that the most prominent refugee scholars figured within the natural sciences and architecture, Coser’s sample seems somewhat odd. Even more unusual is that, given Coser’s own status as refugee scholar, this is the only book-length study in which he addresses this particular issue. In this chapter I will try to look into the reasons why Coser came to this subject so late in his life as well as why his sample looked the way it did. My assumption is that the problem he tackles in his last major work was an issue that is reflected in all Coser’s works. There are hidden traces of this theme throughout his sociological career. 

In contrast to those who claim that science is purely empirical, the philosophy of science argues that science is based on certain norms of a methodological nature. Such norms have to be learned, that is they are pedagogical in kind. In this article I discusse what this means for our understanding of pedagogy as a science. What is it and how can it be conceptualized. In particular the aricle looks at speecg act theory and how pedagogical speech acts make human learning inherently creative

What does learning to become a professional mean and how can the scientific study of various forms of professional education help those institutions that educate teachers understand better what becoming a professional teacher means in contemporary Swedish society? In this inauguration lecture as new professor of education at Malmo University, I argue that the traditional understanding of what it means to enter a profession that we find in the subdiscipline “the sociology of professions,” has had an unfortunate tendency to overestimate the importance of scientifically grounded knowledge and underestimate other forms of relevant knowledge and experience. In order to conceptualize such an alternative view of analyzing professional education and learning, I suggest the concepts of “creativity regimes” and “hybrid modernity.” Whereas the former concept helps us to clarify how professional education can help students to cope with new situations in a creative manner within their own profession, the concept of hybrid modernity suggests that the professional education of teachers can also gain from studying other types of professional education, as this could broaden the creative competence of future teachers. What I am suggesting is thus that rather than trying to prepare teachers for a career as researchers – which represents a particular creativity regime where critique is the dominant norm in which students are professionally socialized – the education of teachers should be organized around the dominant norm of the pedagogical creativity regime, which is dialogue. Teaching has its own role expectations, norms and identity, but in a society which is increasingly hybridized, being inspired by other models is both a virtue and necessity This role-modeling should not drive out the core competence of teaching but rather supplement it.

The concepts of "mediation" or "mediated" learning is used more and more often in swedish pedagogical research but in an inconsistent and confusing manner. The concept seems to mean many diffrent things and has many different pedagoogical implications. In this introducing chapter I discuss how a pedagogical theory about the knowledgefield "mediated learning" could be stuctured in a better and mor rigorous manner, For this purpose i have leaned on RagnarJosephson´s theor of artistic creation and Austin & Searle speech act theory

A core problem of social constructivist theories of knowledge is the lack of theoretical clarity about the role of knowledge constraints and how they are overcome in practice, by what type of social agency. Knowledge constraints are both special - rules constituting and/or regulating such distinct intellectual fields as science, art and technology - and general - laws working across the nature/culture divide. In order to sort out this complexity of knowledge constraints in science, we need to start by recognizing the existence of knowledge constraints in the first place. Advance of knowledge is not contingent, as claimed by the Strong Program inaugurated by David Bloor. The latter reduces the problem of knowledge constraints to reputational work. But reputational work is what all humans engage in; this is one reason why networking is so crucial for the human species. Moreover, it requires the special form of communicative competence, talk, which only humans possess. It is also because humans can talk that they have managed to invent the coherent argument, the core of the special constraint that constitutes science, giving it a law-like character. Arguments are both competitive and cooperative at the same time, reputational work contains both elements. This strongly social element of science is missing in Latour's concept of the social. Latour reduces the social (both networking and agency) to naked competition. But the model for this thinking is not sociology, it is literature. As a social construction it possibly reflects the psychological effect of the French system of elite education.

The chapter describes a research project on artistic career patterns in Northern Jutland,Denmark. It discusses how the interpretative work of a biographical researcher might change over the course of time, as more and more layers of interpretation are identified. Such layers need to be gradually unpacked by the researcher, as they are not immediately visible. One of the main obstacles for such a multilayered interpretative work seems to be the problem of incommensurability of or movement between alternative paradigms that Thomas Kuhn discovered. Such incommensurability makes the translation of discourse or movement from one paradigm to another difficult. Incommensurabilities can be found both within the narrated stories or interviews, different available theoretical and methodological approaches and between current theory and the empirical material itself, suggesting that interpretative work is a higly complex activity which needs to be studied for its own sake.

In the article a new educational concept is presented with the purpose of renewing education in corporate entrepreneurship from a theoretical point of view. The article presents the results so far from the attempts to develop a research based concept for corporate entrepreneurship education with a focus on field work as the core of a practical training period. The idea is that the role of "stranger" should enable the student to 1) identify obstacles for innovations within a company 2) become aware of ones own competences which might be useful to remove some of these obstacles. The educational concept is developed from theoretical studies, analyses and pracital experiences with entrepreneurial education and similar activities. The developent of the concept has been supported by the Cultural Ministry of Denmark and has been tested by an experimental course. The development of the course has been supported by the Oresund Entrepreneurship Academy