Drawing on Freire’s critical pedagogy, this study describes a Swedish case where middle school students learn about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, use it to understand their lived experiences, and act as teacher educators. Using autoethnography, the study describes collaboration between the Primary School Football Against Racism project and teacher education to explore how children’s voices and lived experiences of oppression reshape learning, body-space, subjectivities, and professional competences. The article adopts a normative and practice-oriented stance, advocating for the integration of children’s rights education into teacher education. Through dialogical workshops and multimodal storytelling, students engage with the Convention and personal experiences of oppression. The authors argue that recognising children as teacher educators challenges adult-centric norms and promotes rights-based pedagogy in teacher education. Such perspectives enhance student teachers’ professional skills, empower children’s agency, and incorporate core principles of the Convention, particularly participation and non-discrimination.

This article builds on the social justice and critical and emancipatorydimensions of practitioner inquiry in education. The aim is todemonstrate the potential and challenges of collaborative autoeth-nography for institutional change, transformative learning andnorm critique. Taking Jack Mezirow’s and Paulo Freire’s theoreticalframework as a starting point, I analyse four autoethnographiccases conducted by Swedish teachers. I demonstrate the ways inwhich autoethnography may help teachers realise their own silenceand unresponsiveness regarding oppression related to ethnicity,gender, professional role and generational hierarchies in preschoolsand schools. The collaborative autoethnography also instigatesteachers’ realisation of space-time dynamics and other institutiona-lised constraints and their constitutive power over practices, feel-ings, understandings and social relations. The transformativelearning that has emerged from collaborative autoethnographyhas led us to recognise the necessity and challenges of conductingempirical analysis, engaging in self-reflection and dialogue, andtransforming institutionalised and personal practices and norms.While bringing about institutional change has been challenging,individual and relational transformation has been more achievable.I argue that top-down initiated practitioner inquiry with colleaguesand superiors at one’s workplace may be more challenging, andI also argue for the benefits of engaging in practitioner inquiry withpeople outside one’s own organisation.

Drawing on the theoretical insights of Gert Biesta, Judith Butler, Paulo Freire and Kevin Kumashiro, this article critically examines current trends in citizenship and emancipatory education and the challenges and opportunities associated with promoting social action and academic freedom. It considers how contemporary political, social, ideological, environmental and economic developments contribute to increased precarity, risk and insecurity. It also emphasizes the relational interdependence between adults and children and their ethical responsibilities towards others. Moreover, it points to the roles, capacities and responsibilities of adults and children in transformative processes. The starting point for critical discussion and analysis is five contemporary cases related to citizenship education, emancipatory education and approaches to social action, as presented in this Special Issue of Citizenship Teaching & Learning. It explores the concepts of critical thinking, the importance of deliberative dialogue, the creation of a safe space and children’s capacity to imagine and resist. This article aims to analyse and engage in a dialogue with the central ideas presented in the articles in this Special Issue. We do not intend to dismiss or misinterpret the authors’ key concepts or perspectives. Instead, we emphasize the importance of critical dialogue, critical thinking and an open academic environment as the essential foundations for citizenship education and democracy.

The article discloses male preschool teachers’ and queer schoolteachers’ personal experiences of gender-based microaggressions and other forms of exclusion in Swedish educational contexts. I analyse the effects of exclusion on the professional, emotional, and relational aspects of working in educational institutions and the spatial distribution of bodies, highlighting institutional and structural power dynamics. The interviews with teachers show that male preschool teachers regard guardians as the main agents of exclusion. The interactions between male preschool teachers and guardians involve surveillance, questioning, positioning teachers as a threat, and preventing them from performing certain work tasks. Exclusion hinders relationship-building and reinforces female colleagues' normative position. Schoolteachers identifying as queer describe their colleagues as the primary agents of exclusion, highlighting the contextual nature of exclusion. While queer schoolteachers avoid certain social situations, they do not feel directly prevented from teaching or interacting with students. The proximity of privileged bodies and those positioned as invaders and benders disrupt norms and expectations, leading to disorientation, questioning or fear. Non-normative teachers evoke emotions that circulate inside institutions and impact the emotions and reactions of targeted teachers, leading to their subjection, transformative learning, and subversion.

I analyse Swedish teachers' narratives about experiences of workplace exclusion, focusing on what it means to be recognised as a non-normative body in institutional settings. Specifically, I examine how preschool teachers who identify as men and schoolteachers who identify as queer, bisexual, polyamorous, non-binary, or trans perceive microaggressions and exclusionary behaviors from peers and legal guardians. Microaggressions are covert and often repeated verbal and non-verbal comments, behaviours, insults or oppressive actions, as well as seemingly benevolent praise, that represent a derogatory exercise of power that typically falls below the threshold for social or legal action as well as the research interests of Swedish scholars.

Thus, the paper scrutinises male preschool teachers’ and queer schoolteachers’ personal experiences of gender-related microaggressions and other forms of exclusion in Swedish educational contexts that lead to feelings of vulnarability. I analyse the effects of exclusion on the professional, emotional, and relational aspects of working in educational institutions and the spatial distribution of bodies, highlighting institutional and structural power dynamics and vulnerability.

Following Butler’s, Ahmed’s and Puwar’s arguments that bodies suffer gendered cultural constructions and that social and performative acts are not only individual but also collective experiences, it becomes clear that the personal is political. Hence, the point of departure is that the sedimented history of gender(ed) power in institutions, society and relationships shapes personal experiences 

Interviewed Swedish preschool teachers, identifying as men, regard guardians as the primary agents of exclusion. The interactions between male preschool teachers and guardians involve surveillance, subtle questioning, positioning teachers as a threat, and preventing them from performing certain tasks. Exclusion hinders relationship-building and reinforces female colleagues' privileged position. Interviewed schoolteachers identifying as queer describe their colleagues as the primary agents of exclusion, highlighting the contextual nature of exclusion. While queer schoolteachers avoid certain social situations, they do not feel directly prevented from teaching or interacting with students. The proximity of privileged bodies and those positioned as invaders and benders of gender-normative workplaces disrupt norms and expectations, leading to disorientation, questioning or fear. Non-normative teachers evoke colleagues’ and guardians’ emotions that circulate inside educational institutions and impact the emotions and reactions of targeted teachers, leading to their subjection, transformative learning, and subversion. Thus, teachers’ vulnerability is viewed as a condition for a liveable life and action (Gressgård, in print).

Swedish schools and teachers are responsible for implementing policies that promote social justice. Based on qualitative data from observations, interviews and students' reflections and perspectives on intersectionality, the study critically analyses how students and school staff participate in the ethnicised and racialised oppression of Swedish compulsory school students. The interplay between different bodies in the school context and children's capacity to resist oppression is of particular interest. Thefindings suggest that oppression and control of body space based on ethnicity and race are often intertwined with different power structures, such as social and economic background, age, religion and masculinity. In addition, the silence of the majority plays a crucial role in perpetuating oppression. However, students who experience oppression have the capacity to resist the coercive power of their peers and adults. The article suggests that students and school staff should increase their capacity to recognise and identify oppressive power dynamics in their local contexts. By developing these skills, individuals can reflect on their role in perpetuating oppression, performatively open up new possibilities, and learn how to take transformative action and promote social justice

[Reconocer, Nombrar y Resistirse a la Racialización y la Etnización en las Escuelas Obligatorias Suecas]

Las escuelas y los profesores suecos son responsables de aplicar medidas que promuevan la justicia social. Basándose en datos cualitativos procedentes de observaciones, entrevistas y reflexiones y perspectivas de los alumnos sobre la interseccionalidad, elestudio analiza críticamente cómo los alumnos y el personal escolar participan en la opresión étnica y racial de los alumnos suecos de enseñanza obligatoria. La interacción entre los diferentes cuerpos en los contextos escolares y las capacidades agentivas de los niños para resistirse a la opresión es de especial interés. Las conclusiones indican que la opresión y el control del espacio corporal basados en la etnia y la raza suelen estar entrelazados con diversas estructuras de poder, como el origen socialy económico, la edad, la religión y la masculinidad. Además, el silencio de la mayoría desempeña un papel crucial en la perpetuación de la opresión. Sin embargo, los alumnos que sufren opresión tienen la capacidad de resistir el poder coercitivo de sus compañeros y de los adultos. El artículo propone que se anime a los estudiantes y al personal escolar a mejorar su capacidad para reconocer e identificar las dinámicas de poder opresivas dentro de sus contextos locales. Al desarrollar estas competencias, losindividuos pueden reflexionar sobre su papel en la perpetuación de la opresión, abrir performativamente nuevas posibilidades y aprender a emprender acciones transformadoras y a potenciar la justicia social.

Among Swedish policymakers and researchers, there is a growing interest in social justice education and children's empowerment. However, there is a need for more research on children's agency and how critical evaluation of lived experiences can enhance social justice. The paper is based on an ongoing article focusing on ethnic and racial oppression experienced by the compulsory school student and their resistance. The aim is to illustrate the processes of resisting and sustaining ethnicised and racialised oppression and how institutionally initiated inquiry can help understand and address oppressive norms and behaviours in local school contexts. Oppression is defined as marginalisation, discrimination, harassment, and exclusionary practices that reinforce inequalities in educational settings (Kumashiro, 2000; Freire, 2018). The primary research questions include exploring how racialised and ethnicised oppression is experienced, resisted, and perpetuated in local schools, how oppressive power dynamics affect the organisation of “body space”, and how understanding and investigating oppression can serve as a form of anti-oppressive education. 

Theoretical framework

The analytic point of departure is the analysis of oppressive behaviour and normative categorisations and the importance of children’s responsive capacities to resisting oppression (Ahmed, 2012; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Oppression is viewed as a phenomenological issue. The analysis is centred on how performative acts and verbal interactions position bodies, shape them and lead to disruptive responses. It underscores the spatial distribution of bodies and interpellations and how these actions align, contest, and maintain boundaries between normative and non-normative bodies, ultimately influencing social interactions and societal meanings attributed to these bodies (Puwar, 2004; Dolk, 2013).

Methodology

This is an ethnographic study conducted in compulsory schools situated in areas of a large city in Sweden. The empirical data were collected through various methods, including students' written reflections on their personal experiences of oppression, participatory observations, and interviews with teachers.

Expected results and findings

The analysis highlights various aspects and examples of the intersection of whiteness, migration, ethnicity, and power dynamics related to age, gender, socioeconomic resources, honour, and religion, as well as resistance to ethnicisation and racialisation. By refusing silence, disrupting, and claiming power to oppose, the student opens the body space to transformation and new potentialities. I argue for the importance of collective and collaborative efforts to develop a critical analysis of privilege and oppression, which can lead to personal, institutional, and social change. The results suggest that recognising and challenging oppressive power dynamics can open new possibilities for transformative actions.

Relevance to Nordic educational research

As the Swedish Discrimination Act excludes race as a basis of discrimination, and there is the official stance of colour blindness in Swedish society (Hübinette & Tigervall, 2009; Osanami Törngren, 2015), it is important to disclose students' own experiences of racism and ethnicisation and their agentic capacity in school contexts.

Aiming at solving perceived failures of top-down, centralised, silo-organised and decontextualised educational policies, theories and research, teachers are governed towards shifting their theory of practice so that they may engage in collaborative learning and realise interpersonal capacity and their agentic power and responsibility for school improvement. In Sweden and elsewhere, we have witnessed the rise of co-learning, underpinned by the argument that collaborative, local and bottom-up inquiry-based learning is crucial for the effectiveness, emancipation and democratisation of school improvement and personal and collective development and learning. 

As teachers are increasingly governed towards new professional identities and schools are adopting and facilitating these changes, there is a need to critically address the circulation of new knowledge and ideas from the international and national levels to a local educational context, as well as the circulation of people who advocate these changes. The paper focuses on mapping the distribution of agents of change in a large Swedish municipality. In this paper, I explore how ideas and people travel and how experts adapt them to the local context. I portray and critically analyse the ways the current educational system and school cultures are problematised and the ways this problematisation is used to argue for “turn of sight”, new “knowledge and skills that are needed in the society of the future”, and "finding the paradigm of the future". The results show governance towards the following shifts: from "fragmentation" to "holistic thinking", from "state responsibility" to "local community & joint and individual responsibility", from "silos, fragmentation and isolation" to "networks, partnerships, co-creation and collaboration", from "hierarchies" to "horizontal associations", from "durable knowledge" to "provisional", from "rigidity & prescribed roles" to "adaptive and flexible individuals" and last but not least from "autonomy" to "dependence". 

The study explores thirty compulsory schoolteachers’ experiences of exposure to exclusionary behaviour and comments by fellow colleagues, students, or their legal guardians at the workplace. Using analytic terms exclusionary processes and intersectionality, and by interviewing teachers who have experienced exclusion due to norms concerning gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and religion, I will answer following research questions: How do teachers experience exclusion and how does it affect them? What makes exclusion at workplace possible and how can one act on it? Of particular interest is subtle exclusion, as it is hard to detect and has been neglected be professionals and Swedish researchers, despite the evidence of high rate of occurrence and negative psychological, social, and professional consequences. Theoretical inspiration comes from research on intersectionality and microaggressions in the workplace. The study is based on interviews with teachers, who have volunteered to talk about their own experiences of exclusionary processes. The interviewees, working in different educational settings, define, describe, and are asked to problematize and contextualize exclusionary processes that affect them. The study shows that the interviewees are subjected to exclusionary processes because they do not occupy normative position in the local context. Gender-based exclusionary processes are often interdependent of several identity-based power differentials that may or may not operate simultaneously (for example age, gender, ethnicity and educational background or whiteness norms, religion, and gender may intersect each other, reinforcing or weakening different power axes). Additionally, the interviewed teachers express that there is a lack of institutional support for change, highlighting the importance of developing analytical tools to understand and eventually tackle subtle exercises of exclusionary power. Nowhere in the analyzed empirical material has there been talk of attempts at collective action where the teachers join or themselves organize social movements and act collectively, even though, according to Bonilla-Silva (2018), these forms of resistance make the largest impact in terms of changing social structures of exclusion. The lack of collective action and institutional support highlights the need for a paradigm shift.

Taking as our point of departure a prevention initiative involving Arabic-speaking mothers and local emergency services in a designated ‘vulnerable area’ in Sweden, the chapter aims to show how shifting notions of vulnerability and corresponding ideas of learning and responsibility work to entrench ethnic and gender divides and stereotypes, even as they promote an ethics of attentiveness and awareness. While a conventional understanding of vulnerability, in accordance with established in/equality metrics, conceives of minority-ethnic populations in deprived areas as amongst those most in need of empowerment and capacity building, a more affirming approach views vulnerability as a precondition for mutual learning, not limited to deprived or minoritized people, groups or spaces. As the term vulnerability has dispersed through contemporary prevention discourses, the ‘classical’ us/them or friend/enemy distinction is being increasingly displaced, amounting to a ‘flattening’ and ‘whitewashing’ of differentiations. The disavowal of the structural conditions of those involved in prevention measures is not simply a decoupling of vulnerability from power relations, but is itself a political strategy.