This article examines and compares principal training programs in Sweden and Norway, the two Nordic countries with national leadership programs for already active school leaders. To investigate the knowledge base and design of the programs we draw on two research-derived tools about successful professional learning programs for school leaders. Based on the examinations, we suggest that the programs reflect international research both in terms of content and process factors. In addition, we identify topics and issues, such as balancing democratic participation with managerial decision-making, which can be characterized as making up a Nordic profile.

Demokrati- och jämlikhetsargument intar en alltmer marginell roll när reformer på skolområdet diskuteras. Det är dock okänt om detta även gäller vänsterblocket, och inte bara de borgerliga partierna. Här studeras debatten kring den centrala gymnasiereform som den borgerliga regeringen genomförde 2009 (”Högre krav och kvalitet i den nya gymnasieskolan”). Undersökningen visar att Socialdemokraterna och Miljöpartiet, i likhet med högerpartierna, gav liten tyngd åt demokrati- och jämlikhetsresonemang. Undantaget var Vänsterpartiet, som riktade kraftfull kritik mot reformen utifrån ett jämlikhetsperspektiv. Demokratiuppdraget sägs försummas när framtidens utbildning utformas, en farhåga som stöds av resultaten i den här studien.

This article presents a longitudinal study of three students’ experiences with learning to write academic texts in preschool teacher education.  Through in-depth interviews and drawing on an academic literacy approach combined with a “before, within and after education” perspective, their different struggles with learning academic writing are identified. A significant finding is that students experience different ways of being in and out of control. Another finding is that the institutionalized framing represents a control from above that helps two but not the third. The result indicates preschool teacher educators should pay close attention to the variation in students’ resources in writing.

The article presents a study of higher education teachers' view of student participation. The aim of the study is to describe and understand perceptions of student participation on teaching in relation to organisations, processes and contents through statements by a number of teachers. The theoretical framework consists of Foucault's view of power and Arnstein's participation model. The method is a qualitative textual analysis. The results show that student participation can be identified on the basis of the topics governance, activity and evaluation, and that there are six perspectives that show various levels of student participation and degrees of power. The conclusion is that student participation should be demonstrated on the basis of a broader perspective than normally seems to be the case.

Recent socio-economic changes, developments in school policy, and increased migration have added new dimensions to debates about educational inequalities. They concern one of the major challenges facing Sweden today, which is to offer all its students an equal education. What we know so far is that growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood with high rates of poverty, joblessness, and single parenthood are often used to explain lower levels of schooling, but that their mechanisms and interactions are not well understood. This is the focus of the present article. In it we use meta-ethnography to explore expressions about the education experiences of youths from suburban areas with high levels of unemployment and migration and educational performances lower than the national average to try to cast further light on these problems. We suggest that the common arguments used to account for the problem of school performance are strongly correlated with proficiency in the language of instruction and socio-economic conditions, but that these factors cannot account for the full extent of the problem. What it means to live within specific multicultural urban contexts is important as is the segregation and media representation of these areas and those who live in them.

This article introduces the concept of ‘threshold of adversity’ as an, at present, tentative means of understanding the turning points to radicalization and extremism within educational systems. The conceptual frame is, we argue, of pedagogical and policy relevance across and beyond Nordic countries. Across Nordic countries, the main objective for the prevention of radicalization and extremism through education (PVE-E) is to strengthen the students’ resilience against ideological influences. Given the specialist complexities of the interdisciplinary research literature on terrorism, from which much PVE-E derives, for teachers and policy-makers, understanding the theoretical contexts, which underlie such policy innovations and their pedagogical implementation, are, understandably, problematic. To discuss extremism and the possibilities of its prevention especially in the education sector, an understanding of what exactly is being prevented or fought against is needed. Our conceptual ‘threshold of adversity’ model offers at least a starting point for a more practicable pedagogical implementation.

The main purpose of this article is to focus what meanings the concept of quality is given in the political development of Swedish upper-secondary school. By using Quentin Skinner’s speech-act theory comparisons are made between the meanings formulated in the early 1990s and the now current investigation Framtidsvägen (SOU 2008:27). The result shows consequences for the goal- and result oriented steering system as well as changes in the perspectives of citizenship education and ideolology.

The main purpose of this article is to focus what meanings the concept of quality is given in the political development of Swedish upper-secondary school. By using Quentin Skinner’s speech-act theory comparisons are made between the meanings formulated in the early 1990s and the now current investigation Framtidsvägen (SOU 2008:27). The result shows consequences for the goal- and result oriented steering system as well as changes in the perspectives of citizenship education and ideolology.

The present paper conducts a conceptual analysis of how parent support is recontextualised when connected to the education system in a Swedish local authority. Official documents and interviews with officials are analyzed. The study shows that in the discourse on parent support, supporting activities are commonly connected to the teachers, and consequently the teachers are made responsible for the provision of support. The student health services or other professionals such as leisure time personnel are less prominent in the discourse. The paper asks for reflection on the part of compulsory schooling in health promoting and risk preventing work.

The present paper conducts a conceptual analysis of how parent support is recontextualised when connected to the education system in a Swedish local authority. Official documents and interviews with officials are analyzed. The study shows that in the discourse on parent support, supporting activities are commonly connected to the teachers, and consequently the teachers are made responsible for the provision of support. The student health services or other professionals such as leisure time personnel are less prominent in the discourse. The paper asks for reflection on the part of compulsory schooling in health promoting and risk preventing work.

In this article we argue that there are several similarities between the process of Bildung and the process of producing a modern monography. A short historical summary of Bildung and hermeneutics is given, followed by a discussion concerning the positioning and conceptualization of the individual within the process of Bildung, which is then criticized from a poststructuralist perspective, so as to suggest how the modern monography might be developed to include an alternative view. Here, knowledge is seen to arise from the interaction of both conscious and unconscious processes, implying the necessity for a different type of research which takes into account ruptures, gaps, inconsistencies and irregularities, as opposed to looking for meaning, unity and consistencies. Presenting examples of postmodern monographies, we argue that the modern thesis needs to expand and/or change to allow for these new modes of research to develop.

The topic of this article is the

moral grammar of cultural conflicts,

and the question it

addresses is: What does it mean

to be morally thoughtful and

considerate in education? The

aim of the article is twofold. On

the one hand I critically examine

the response of the Swedish

National Agency for Education

to the controversy about burqa.

On the other hand the specific

cultural controversy about burqa

is used to examine whether the

Habermas concept of discourse

ethics could learn something

from the post-modern challenge

to this ethical question and its

consequences for educational

theory. Three different ways of

understanding moral consideration

are outlined in the article: an

extended form of equal treatment,

an increased ethical sensitivity

and an asymmetrical obligation

between human beings.

This article focuses on Swedish folk high schools’ participants with disabilities, and their learning environment within adult education. Facilitating factors are presented and discussed, as well as developmental factors regarding the adjustment of the learning environment. The basis for this empirical study is data from Statistics Sweden and a self-designed online questionnaire with respondents representing the folk high schools (N=212). Theoretical reference is given to concepts such as adult education and inclusive education. The results show there are an increased number of participants with disabilities in Swedish folk high schools. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the meaning of pedagogics with a personalized, individualized approach, and highlights a need for further education of adult educators about disability. The conclusion is that a stronger inclusive-education perspective with focus on learners’ diversity reflects only one side of practice, as this practice is also challenged by welfare system-steered processes that may conflict with an ideal of adult education as empowerment.

This study analyses whether disruptive classroom behaviour affects students’ results in Swedish lower secondary schools (N = 1704), measured by the schools’ grade point averages (GPA). The data, collected from the Swedish school authorities, comprises variables on schools’ pupil composition, classroom environment and student mean grades. Previous research has shown that disruptive classroom behaviour has a negative impact on students’ results. This study finds such effects. The effect size reported is equal to the reported GPA differences between boys and girls. Results show that some of the original effects of school compositional variables are mediated through disruptive behaviour.

The article highlights similarities in the politics and practices linked to gender equality in education in Finland and Sweden from the 1970s to the 2010s, with special consideration given to the alliance between heteronormativity and marketisation as well as their influence. State and gender equality project documentation is analysed. In both countries, the main focus of attention has, in line with heteronormativity, been on the labour market and the directing of the girls towards science and technology, along with publicly funded, short-term projects. The results indicate that the alliance between heteronormativity and marketisation has increasingly reproduced the genders as competing dichotomous categories with one sex losing to the benefit of the other.

The objective was to reflect on the experience of working collaboratively across education programmes, departments, and faculties from the perspective of university teachers at a higher education institution. Nine teachers from five programmes working together to develop a new curriculum for interprofessional education (IPE) participated in a focus group discussion. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings suggest that teacher experiences can be understood in terms of teamwork processes valued from both professional and IPE experiential variations within the group. Since findings illustrate pedagogical collaboration across department and faculty boundaries, they can inspire teachers who are planning a similar process.

The purpose of the article is to highlight school problems of adolescents with alcohol and drug problems in Sweden. Bronfenbrenners social-ecological model has been applied in a quantitative content analysis of 415 interviews in connection with the adolescent’s admission of an outpatient contact. The results show that over a third of the adolescents statements are linked to individual characteristics or abilities, while problems related to the school are 13 percent, interaction with peers to 13 percent, and with the connection to the family of 3 percent. About a third of the statements involve both individual factors and the school, and the interaction between these. An important conclusion is that most of these adolescents are still enrolled in school and that several of the school problems mentioned in the study are changeable and thus possible to remedy through both an educational and social support that promotes their connection to the school.

The aim of this article is to illuminate and discuss the relationship between state governance and local Swedish knowledge culture from 1958 to 1999. The main questions are: How do conceptions of knowledge and learning in a local teacher education culture relate to state governance, and how can adaptation and resistance be understood? The overall perspective is one of curriculum theory and the methods used are archival studies and interviews. The concepts of strategy and ideology are used and found helpful for understanding adaptation and resistance in the knowledge culture under study. Adaptation occurred when local ideological standpoints were in harmony with state governance and there were no strategic losses for the culture as a whole.

The study highlights the extension and scope of teachers’ work. Swedish teachers reflected on this before and after visiting schools in France, where “CPE-staff” alleviate teachers with different tasks. In sum, findings indicate that the extension and scope of teachers’ work can be discussed in terms of what, when and where, but also as already institutionalized or something that reshapes during negotiations on a daily basis. The findings are analyzed by the concepts of “structure” and “communitas” (Turner, 1974, 2008), highlighting how the professional boarders are dependent on patterns of structures and relationships within the school as an organization.

How does the motivation to become a teacher vary across countries? We conducted an exploratory study among aspiring teachers in three countries to explore the possibility of detecting differences in teacher motivation across education policy contexts. Using the FIT-Choice Scale developed by Watt and Richardson (2007), we found that participants in Finland and Sweden expressed different impressions of and attractions to the teaching profession. A sample from the United States revealed further differences still. Between-country differences were significant. Using these results, we suggest further comparative analyses regarding policy and the motivations of teacher candidates.

This article contributes to the discussion about educational environments. Drawing on Dewey’s and Hansen’s work, the point of departure is that the educational environment is dynamic and connected to educational purposes, and that educational relationships can be both direct and indirect and connected to norms, values and subject matter. In a case study, using interviews and observations, the periphery of educational environments is explored. Distinctions between the intended and actual functions, and between environment and surroundings in different parts of the municipal administration, and the resulting shortcomings of using an atomistic rather than an ecological perspective in education, are also discussed.

This article analyses how efforts to combat «honour-related» violence are linked to and reproduce nationalist ideas. On the basis of theories that discuss the concept of nation and conceptions of belonging and origins I investigate how notions about Swedish values and gender are central in school staffs discussions and understanding of honour-related violence. The empirical material is based on documentary material, participant observations and interviews with welfare staff working at different compulsory schools and colleges of further education in the county of Östergötland in Sweden. The analysis underline the fact that notions of «us» and «the others» are ambiguous and in no way homogenous. It shows how «honour-related» violence is dissociated from Swedishness and how this defines borderlines between those who belong to the nation and those who do not belong.

This article analyses how efforts to combat «honour-related» violence are linked to and reproduce nationalist ideas. On the basis of theories that discuss the concept of nation and conceptions of belonging and origins I investigate how notions about Swedish values and gender are central in school staffs discussions and understanding of honour-related violence. The empirical material is based on documentary material, participant observations and interviews with welfare staff working at different compulsory schools and colleges of further education in the county of Östergötland in Sweden. The analysis underline the fact that notions of «us» and «the others» are ambiguous and in no way homogenous. It shows how «honour-related» violence is dissociated from Swedishness and how this defines borderlines between those who belong to the nation and those who do not belong.

Since about a decade there is a new phenomenon in Nordic early childhood education and care, the mobile preschool. It is an ECEC practice conducted on a bus that travels to various locations to perform everyday preschool activities and routines. With theory of policy enactment this article analyzes workshop discussions with mobile preschool professionals. The results show two main policies within mobile preschools; safety as well as experiential learning in a variety of learning environments. While discussing how to handle these policies, the professionals construct the mobile preschool simultaneously as ordinary and unique in relation to ordinary stationary preschools.

This article presents the general situation for pupils in need of special support (PNSS) in Swedish independent compulsory schools. The analysis is based on a survey of all independent schools in Sweden. The results show that the number of PNSS is lower in independent schools than in municipal schools and that a deficit perspective seems to be common regarding explanations for school problems. There is, however, great diversity among the schools. The conclusions are that school choice as a challenge to the traditional way of conceiving education seems to be more effective for some other groups of pupils than for PNSS and that there are few signs that independent schools challenge traditions in work with PNSS.

This article presents the general situation for pupils in need of special support (PNSS) within the Swedish independent compulsory schools. The analysis is based upon a survey of all independent schools in Sweden. Results show that the amount of PNSS is lower in independent schools than in municipal schools and that a deficit perspective seems to be common regarding explanations of school problems. There is, however, great diversity among the schools. Conclusions are that the challenge of independent schools to the traditional way of conceiving education, regarding school choice, seems to be more effective less for some other groups of pupils than for PNSS and that there are few signs that independent schools challenge traditions in work with PNSS in municipal schools.

This article presents the general situation for pupils in need of special support (PNSS) within the Swedish independent compulsory schools. The analysis is based upon a survey of all independent schools in Sweden. Results show that the amount of PNSS is lower in independent schools than in municipal schools and that a deficit perspective seems to be common regarding explanations of school problems. There is, however, great diversity among the schools. Conclusions are that the challenge of independent schools to the traditional way of conceiving education, regarding school choice, seems to be more effective less for some other groups of pupils than for PNSS and that there are few signs that independent schools challenge traditions in work with PNSS in municipal schools.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of folk high school teachers’ professional development. Forty-three students, during the last part of their folk high school teacher education, video-recorded and viewed their own teaching sessions. Two years later, eight of them were chosen to do the same again, now as working teachers. The collected data from first occasion was in the form of written reflection documents; the second time it was interview transcripts. Ideas from pragmatism and symbolic interactionism were used when analysing the data. The findings showed that the video tool contributed to the teachers’ professional development, by offering them an image of themselves acting in the classroom. This supported a reflective habit, and gave them more confidence. It helped them to develop on their own terms, in relation to the local context, and to ideas associated with Nordic popular education.

The present study investigates the practice of teaching in preschool. Similarities and differences in Swedish science education in compulsory school and preschool practice are compared. This is executed by a study of teacher’s participation in the meaning making process in the activities. The empirical material consists of video observations and field notes from preschool and compulsory school. A pragmatist approach is used to analyse the activities.

The result shows that even though no learning goals are articulated by the preschool teachers the analyses show that the teachers direct children in specific ways. Teaching in this context is understood as an action to direct children’s meaning making towards what is considered relevant in the practice.

The study shows that children in both preschool and compulsory school learn the central principle to make investigations. The actions made by the teachers do not look like teacher-centered-teaching where play and caring necessarily is ignored. If teaching can be defined as directing children’s attention into a certain direction in line with the curriculum, teaching is a central activity through the whole day in preschool.

Sweden has a reputation as a country with a relatively high level of gender equality. Nevertheless, both the labour market and vocational training programmes in upper secondary school are highly segregated along gender lines. The present ethnographic study concerns the minority position and professional socialisation of male students taking part in a health and social care programme in upper secondary school in Sweden. In addition to observations, students, health and social care teachers and internship supervisors were interviewed. The study revealed that it was taken for granted that men were considered particularly valuable. The male students universally and frankly described how they expected to receive preferential treatment in future employment situations. They showed no sign of finding this as being unjust to their female colleagues. Furthermore, the emphasis on male students’ gender entails the risk that they will be treated more as men than as the nursing assistants they are training to be, which may hamper their professional socialisation.

The present study examines the assessment conditions, assessment content and assessment processes of a school-based course within a teacher education program in Sweden. The empirical base consists of supporting documents for assessment, eight student-teaching conferences with teacher educators, mentors and student teachers, and interviews with the teacher educators. The analysis tools used are a theoretical framework of teacher knowledge as well as models for assessment of vocational knowledge. The results show that the assessment is exclusively expressed formative, and only student teachers’ procedural knowledge from a knowledge-in-practice approach is assessed. One assessment model characterizes the assessment processes where the formal learning objectives are not standard for the assessment of the student teachers. This means that teacher educators and mentors not easily can check the students’ vocational actions against learning objectives, but need to base their assessments on their own knowledge and experiences as teachers.

The issue of this study is how assessment in Individual Education Plans (IEPs) is expressed through targets and strategies for future learning, given to pupils in Swedish compulsory school. Drawing on socio-cultural perspectives and using qualitative content analysis as a method, the IEP is viewed as a tool for learning, and two models for analysing the textual aspects of this tool are developed.The results show that the being aspect – pupils’ personality and behaviour – is involved in target-strategy combinations in various ways. They also indicate difficulties in formulating targets and strategies that are concrete and individual. The content of the target-strategy types are discussed in relation to the tool-for-learning aspect. An increased focus on learning targets and concrete strategies, and a view of the individual as part of an adaptable learning environment, is suggested in the conclusion.

In recent decades, the Swedish educational system has become an expanding ‘school market’. The free school choice, the voucher system, and a rapid increase in upper secondary schools, have paved the way for strong competition between schools. Based on interviews with 77 upper secondary school students, this article aims to explore student perspectives on the increasing marketisation of education in Sweden with particular focus on their school choices and competition between schools. The findings show that market forces have an impact on the every-day student school life. Many students found it hard to navigate the ‘sea of options’ and asked for as much objective information as possible, in order to avoid inadequate or wrong decisions. In line with greater competition between schools, many students tended to choose “safe options” in order to avoid schools running the risk of bankruptcy or closing down. The analysis indicates that the students, both in their choices of schools and in their present situation as school marketers, promote segregation trends.

When discussing children’s leisure-time centers in Sweden, talk about their activities is often couched in terms of meaningfulness. This appeal to «meaningfulness» can be seen as a useful but also a troublesome rhetorical resource. When educational authorities formulate institutional assignments, they must accommodate opposing views and yet meet certain political recommendations. An analytical perspective both informed by Michel Foucault’s writings on ‘governmentality’ as well as Michael Billig’s notion of ideological dilemmas will in this study be harnessed. Principally, this study investigates the ideological tension between democracy and authority, which the governmental authority, ‘The Swedish Schools Inspectorate’, must take care of in its linguistic work. This paper argues that the concept of meaningfulness is used in order to bridge various contradictions surrounding the democracy-authority dilemma.

This theoretical article posits a critical educational perspective on school bullying, whereby focus shifts from the individuals involved to the structural aspects of schooling. The article draws inspiration from critical pedagogy and the sociology of education to critically consider how power relations in schools relate to school bullying through a theorization of the importance of four features of schooling outlined by Duncan (2013): compulsion, compression, control, and competition. The article suggests that rather than merely studying the negative social interactions of individuals or groups of individuals, there needs to be more critical consideration of the educational context within which bullying occurs.

In the present article, based on a qualitative analysis, we focus stereotypes held by students on college preparatory academic programmes. Two stereotypes are in focus: those that these students attribute to themselves, and those that they attribute to students in vocational programmes. 224 students in grade 3 were involved. The stereotype of the academic student that emerged characterised emphatic language skills that provided an opportunity to develop one’s intellect and participate actively in society. The stereotype of the vocational student was the antithesis of this. Vocational students were said to lack language ability and interests and to have an undeveloped or under-developed intellect due to not engaging in the same kind of language acts as academic students. The students also associated their skills with effort, interest and hard work as opposed to being innate.

This study explores learning when professionals return to education and use their professional work experience to fulfil their study objectives. The research question is: How do students learn from experiences in two contexts-a master’s course at a university and their organisations of employment-by attending a blended learning course? The study builds on Engeström’s (2001) expansive learning model of two interacting activity systems, namely, the students’ master’s degree programme and their professional workplaces. As the study context is an online learning environment it follows a "netnographic" approach. The findings show that the students integrated requirements from their university studies with interventions in their professional work situations. The online learning environment enabled reification of reflections which the students could use later in their study and supported them to become more skilled professionals and influencers in their organisations of employment. © Universitetsforlaget.

In this paper, we present exemplarity as an alternative to the dominant evidence framework, and as the proper foundation for pedagogical reflection and action. This paper focuses attention on how exemplarity can serve to elicit and develop educational judgement. In other words, rather than evidence, teachers need good and bad examples of ways of acting and being to shape and sharpen their educational judgement. By turning to the exemplary approach, the space of reflection is widened, and educational judgement is challenged and provoked. The paper highlights how teacher judgement is formed through the challenge of examples

This paper presents Gert Biesta’s ontological critique of ‘the global evidence movement’, and performs a critique of his use of systems theory as a foundation for his ontological counter-position. We attempt to show how systems theory, as well as the prevailing understanding of evidence based education, are inadequate for describing and conceptualizing educational processes. Through his use of systems theory as a starting point for an educational ontology, Biesta approaches an acceptance of a functionalistic and anti-humanistic position, which we show is incompatible with educational processes, and thus inappropriate as a foundation for an ontology of education. As an alternative, we offer a reading of Hannah Arendt, and present her concepts of natality and plurality as more suitable starting points for a formulation of an ontology of education.

“Nowhere is the intention of the individual more evidently surpassed then by what the subject finds”, Jacques Lacan writes in his Report to the Congress held at the Instituto de Psicologie della Universitá di Roma in the year 1953. This Congress was marred by deep controversy ending up in the vote of ‘no confidence’ against Jacques Lacan, the president of the Societé Psychoanalytique de Paris who was then obliged to resign.

In the quotation an antagonist, opponent, enemy, challenger by Lacan is supposed to be derived from inside in one and the same instance. This is puzzling. Usually, we regard the subject as an entity identical with itself and furthermore an ethical integer. Three questions immediately arise as regards to the quotation above: what does the term “subject” actually mean, what is Lacan referring to when he writes “what the subject finds” and what is meant by “surpass”? A “subject” going beyond its own intentionality could refer to a kind of homunculus, a Cartesian Cogito. With this hypothesis we are rather near to a solution. Though, Lacans structuralist approach generally paves the way for the poststructuralist movement. Thus, according to Lacan the subject which “finds” (something) is „structured like a language“ (Lacan: Seminar XI). At the same time it is not a conscious subject as one might think, rather it is meant to be an unconscious subject. Here language is not seen to be a representational system as we generally think of it, but rather refers to a kind of tacit knowledge.

This article reveals how templates that emerge from opaque albeit often inclusive policy processes in transnational forums (EU, OECD & the Bologna Process) affect education reform policy in Scandinavian countries, such as Denmark and Sweden. The open method of coordination is the mother template of the political technologies (standards, performance indicators, scorecards, best practices) that are instrumental in fashioning reforms. This template commits countries in consensus-making ways to comparison, and normalizes the competitive incentive of mutual peer pressure. The authors draw on post-Foucauldian governmentality-studies to scrutinize policy documents and literature on policy reform to display the forces make up reforms, which to date have not figured prominently in national debates.

This study examines pupils’ social relations and especially social exclusion in leisure-time centres (LTCs). Based on categorization of the material from the field, exclusion has emerged as a key action in pupils’ relationships with each other. The result shows various types of exclusion events and how exclusion is made possible in the LTC context. In LTCs, the events of conditional participation, invisibility, and rejection are actions through which pupils in LTCs exclude other pupils. No or little teacher presence is characteristic of these events, and the pupils themselves are left to negotiate inclusion and exclusion with each other. For some pupils, this means a socially vulnerable situation, and these events can be interpreted as social actions that may lead to, or be interpreted as, bullying.

This article explores how any success in encountering difference a discourse on tolerance might have in education, depends on how it deals with different meanings of otherness. By making a distinction between tolerance of diversity and tolerance of difference, it proposes a way of responding to this challenge that takes the otherness of the Other seriously. The point made is that to promote tolerance on the basis that we can already tell the tolerable from the intolerable, risks excluding the very possibility of welcoming something new and unforeseen that may alter the perception we have of ourselves and the world.

How is it possible that bullying continues to be a common phenomenon in schools, despite the fact that so many teachers, students and parents, through diverse anti-bullying programs, have been engaged in trying to stop it? This question is addressed in this article through a philosophy of education-based analysis of the phenomenon of bullying. The article builds on results from two research projects financed by the Swedish Research Council, and offers a critical reading of the so-called norm-critical (Swedish normkritiska) approaches to bullying. As a result of the analysis made, the article shows how the inequality of the institution itself reproduces the conditions for bullying, and that in order to change those conditions, individual actors in the everyday life of schooling need to confirm their equality.