Doctoral students

I have taught English, mostly in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, primarily at the upper-secondary school level but also at the undergraduate level. My work as an English teacher has centered on both language proficiency and literary studies. I have taught English as an academic language to first and second-year university students, an experience that has made me more aware of the challenges faced by students when employing English, a second language for most, in an academic context. Moreover, I have taught English literature to upper-secondary school students, where I not only dealt with issues relating to English as a second language but also issues regarding cultural translation and exchange.

For my PhD dissertation, I aim to study how language- and literature-based education has historically been used not for the purposes of empowerment but rather cultural disempowerment and invasion. African literary texts that explore the colonial education system provide an insightful window into this historical reality. For the novels selected for my study, I hypothesize, not only expose oppressive pedagogical norms and practices that should be avoided, but also help us identify and harness qualities related to student experience and cultural translation that can propel our efforts in developing empowering education.

I am a newly graduated teacher of Swedish and English at upper secondary school level. However, most of the teaching that I have done is as a teacher of Swedish as a foreign language in adult education.

During my studies at the teacher education program, I came to take an interest in creative writing and its status in the educational system, which is also what I focus on as a doctoral student. Fiction reading plays an important part in the subject of Swedish as well as English, while literary writing has almost no support in the curriculum or syllabi. As a result, creative writing in upper secondary schools seems to be seen as a diversion for the pupils when there is time to spare, regardless of whether the teachers themselves are of that opinion or not. The fact that creative writing has this position (especially in the subject of Swedish) has been established, but not to the same extent on what bases.

In my work, I wish to examine what possibilities and limitations creative writing entails. Literature is an important basis for a democratic society, and giving pupils the tools to express themselves through literature may be a way to equip them with cultural empowerment.

I taught Italian language and culture for a national educational association in Sweden for several years, a formative experience that I pursued while attending a master’s degree in Ethnic and Migration Studies at Linköping University. Before these experiences, I studied Political Science, International Relations and Human Rights at the University of Padua, and I was involved in several research groups - part of civil society - focused on issues such as migration, race and gender in Italy.

In my role as a doctoral student, I focus on the production and re-production of specific forms of oppression such as a race, gender, and class, in the practices of teaching and learning in Sweden. In particular, I am interested in rethinking about these practices taking into account one’s vulnerabilities and personal experiences - in relation to the forms of oppression - rather than denying/decontextualising them by displacing them to other spaces and bodies. Moreover, I am particularly curious about the possibilities and creative alternatives in addressing and challenging the forms of oppression mentioned above in these specific contexts.

In my spare time I like designing and sewing clothes, spending time outdoors, making to-do lists and reading books.

I have recently completed a master’s degree in Bilingualism at Stockholm University. During my time there I developed an interest in multilingualism linked to marginalized identities and silenced ideologies in different social processes. In the program I focused mainly on multilingualism and multiculturalism linked to youth, migration, and education, and have in that way encountered decolonial perspectives on language. For my master’s thesis I explored adolescents’ experiences and desires regarding their multilingual repertoires, as well as the school’s role in constructing and maintaining positive ideologies of multilingualism. Earlier I took free courses in linguistics and literature at Lund University, which led to a bachelor’s degree in Italian Studies. I have also been working for a long time with researchers in linguistics both from Swedish and foreign universities as a research assistant within the frame of different projects.

For my doctoral project I plan to study the entanglements of dominant and silenced ideologies about multilingualism and literature, and how these are made visible through languaging practices in a school environment. I am especially interested in the employment of languaging practices and their influence for (dis)empowerment of students in identity construction, meaning making and learning processes. Studies engaging with marginalized individuals’ identities and forms of knowledge have lately become more broadly represented in western research. My project falls into this tradition and builds on decolonial perspectives on multilingualism, literature, and education as an attempt to give voice to adolescents’ subjective understandings and experiences on these dimensions.

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I am a certified teacher and have taught Swedish, Swedish as Second Language and English in secondary school (grades 7-9) for 15 years. For the last 11 years, I have been affiliated with the Faculty of Education and society at Malmö University, and for the past seven years, I worked fulltime in teacher trainee programmes for Swedish and Swedish as a Second Language with a didactic focus.

I am interested in multilingual students: they need to develop basic literacy in the target language at the same time as they encounter different subjects and languages. Many multilingual students are newly arrived students aged 16-19 who study at language introductory schools. What characterises language introductory schools is that it is a heterogeneous group of students with highly diverse educational needs and varying schooling backgrounds. Despite the increasing number of students in this programme, how the learning best remains under-researched. My particular area of interest is examining in what ways teachers may utilise students’ resources and strengthen their self-confidence for future studies in Sweden. During my PhD studies, I want to explore teachers' didactic approaches to academic writing and incorporation of fiction and non-fiction in the subject of Social Sciences.

In my free-time I like working in the garden and walking in the forest.

For fifteen years, I taught Swedish and English at an upper secondary school in Sweden which besides national programmes also offers the International Baccalaureate programme. I met students from across the world: one of my last groups consisted of thirty students who had lived in sixteen different countries and spoke eighteen languages between them. A challenge shared with other language and literature teachers is how to make the most of this diversity and help create classrooms that recognize, utilise and create mutual respect for the students' various backgrounds and contexts.

Swedish and international research suggests that there are teachers who hesitate in broaching the subject(s) of diversity and who do not feel that they can offer a literature education that can help students engage in issues related to various cultures and social justice. My research will focus on what happens when an approach such as culturally responsive pedagogy is recontextualised in a Swedish teacher education context. How does a culturally responsive literature education compare to other approaches pre-service upper secondary teachers in Sweden have studied and experienced? Can engaging in reading literature in digitally connected groups encompassing undergraduates from across the globe help pre-service teachers become aware of important aspects when planning how to work with literature with their future students?

In my spare time, I enjoy reading a book with a cat in my lap whilst eating candy.

My teaching experiences inspire my interest in research. After undergraduate studies in
Classics, I trained as a teacher in my home city, London. The provision of Classics in the UK
is fraught with debate around class, student background and the subject’s instrumental value on the increasingly crowded curriculum. These themes continued for me in my 9 years as a mother tongue teacher in Stockholm. I taught English to students aged between 5-19 in dozens of secondary schools and gymnasiums in Stockholm, alongside colleagues with over 70 different languages. My work underpinned my Master's research, focussing on identity and investment in learning English (a high status language) in mother tongue classrooms (a low status medium). In addition to this I co-authored an article about opportunities for student agency during distance learning and read a Magister in pedagogical leadership.

As a doctoral student I am researching Pierre Bourdieu, in particular his theories of cultural capital, habitus and field. With these as theoretical foundations my thesis aims to explore the power dynamic between English and other languages in Swedish secondary schools and the effect that the unspoken ubiquity of English has on provision of study guidance and language teaching, as well as multilingual students’ identities.

When I’m not being a massive nerd, I actually continue being a massive nerd. I read science fiction as part of a regular reading group, play saxophone badly, badminton well, and enjoy travelling.

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I am a certified preschool teacher and I have worked in preschool for 17 years. I mainly worked with children aged 3-6 years, and equal treatment and teaching in preschool are issues that have always been close to my heart. After taking some independent courses, for instance in equal treatment, documentation and picturebooks in preschool, I wanted to invest more wholeheartedly in my studies, which led to a master's degree in pedagogical work with a focus on younger children's learning at Linköping University.

My research interest concerns the use of picturebooks in preschool. Storytelling and reading literature for children have historically had an important place in preschool, and reading different kinds of literature, preferably picturebooks, in different contexts and in different ways is still a common, recurring feature. My interest concerns both the content of the picturebooks - what is read and how these books are selected and what interaction takes place between the children and the adults during the reading. I am also interested in how the design of literature activities affects interactions and children's meaning-making. An increased knowledge about this can contribute to the development of how teachers can create opportunities for an increased understanding of language, culture and literacy for preschool children.