Abstract Since the end of 2022, global discussions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have surged, influencing diverse societal groups, such as teachers, students and policymakers. This case study focuses on Swedish primary school students aged 11–12. The aim is to examine their cognitive and affective perceptions of AI and their current usage. Data, comprising a pre-test, focus group interviews, and post-lesson evaluation reports, were analysed using a fusion of Mitcham’s philosophical framework of technology with a…

‘Open schooling’ has become in recent years a burgeoning theme in the discourse on how to rethink education for the 21st century. This paper addresses a gap between calls for implementing an open schooling approach in policy papers and international reports and the scarcity of rigorous academic discourse on what open schooling theoretically means and practically entails in terms of school organization and curriculum. To this end, the paper presents an ecological model of school openness that is composed of eight i…

Education has responded to global Sustainable Development (SD) goals by drawing on a range of issue-related, context-based, and cross-curricular approaches to teaching SD. This paper aims to examine how teachers describe the content in SD and how they justify this content concerning their teaching practice. The Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) framework, with its reflective tool Content Representation (CoRe), was used in combination with semi-structured interviews to capture 18 Swedish upper-secondary science t…

The pursuit of sustainable development is a necessity for life on Earth and the future of humanity. Education is important in this endeavour; therefore, creating knowledge about teachers' teaching for sustainable development is essential. This study aimed to investigate how Swedish upper secondary science teachers adjust their teaching of the environmental dimension in sustainable development to the different vocational education programmes their students attend. Data were collected through individual semi-structu…

Abstract In this qualitative study, we investigated how students and teachers responded to the design of a digital self-assessment tool and how they experienced the use of the tool to support understanding and development of twenty-first century skills when working with makerspace activities. There were 65 lower secondary school students and four teachers participating in the study. We used individual interviews with the teachers and group interviews with the students. Data were analysed with thematic coding of tr…