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Skolan som försöksverkstad: Spridning av kunskap och erfarenhet av försökundervisning i svenska pedagogiska tidskrifter 1920–1960
Get PDFSchool as an Experimental Workshop: Dissemination of Knowledge and Experience from Experimental Teaching in Swedish Pedagogical Journals, 1920–1960. The purpose of the article is to look at how knowledge about experimental teaching was disseminated through educational journals 1920–1960. Throughout the period, there was an interest from teachers and schools to experiment with new ways of teaching. Educational journals had an important role here to spread knowledge from these experiences. During the interwar period, it was mainly teachers who acted as brokers and shared knowledge of their experiences from experimental teaching. The knowledge shared was often a mix of teachers’ experiences and pedagogical perspectives. During the 1950s, other brokers took up more space, such as researchers and school mangers. Although the journals shared pedagogical perspectives from different countries, rarely individual countries came into focus. Often here too it was a combination of perspectives that are presented via the articles on experimental teaching
The Children’s Scale in Finnish Kindergarten Interiors from 1920s to 1980s
Get PDFThe purpose of this article is to offer a perspective on spatial history in Finnish kindergartens’ surroundings, especially through design that emphasizes children’s scale. The timeline of the article is from the 1920s, when the vocative kindergarten teachers took responsibility for kindergarten design, till the 1980s, when professionals designed kindergartens. The article focuses on the vertical level, which defines the height of children’s activity and how the idea of children’s scale affected interior design during the timeline. One theoretical starting point is Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, which is applied to combine experiential narratives related to childhood, contemporary materials about conversations that took place at the studied time, and spatial regulations and design related to ideological, political, and cultural structures. From the 1920s to the 1980s, children’s scale is highlighted and linked to homelike surroundings with miniaturization in scale to affordances concerning a human body scale, dimensions, and children’s agency. In 1970s, due to the emerge of the Day Care Act, children’s scale extended more broadly to the environment and children’s dimensions than in the kindergarten era
Improving access and quality of maternal and newborn care through the newly established Ayaan Specialist Hospital in Bosaso City, Puntland State of Somalia
Get PDFSomalia has one of the highest maternal mortality ratios globally, constituting an important public health issue for the country. The availability of free and quality obstetric and newborn care services is critical for reducing maternal and newborn deaths. The Ayaan Foundation for humanitarian assistance has established a specialized hospital in Bosaso, Puntland, Somalia and created a cost-free service for normal deliveries and caesarean sections with assistance from the UN Population Fund. The Ayaan Specialist Hospital aims to provide better health and free basic and emergency obstetric and neonatal services to reduce maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality.
The hospital has high standard facilities, equipment, and supplies and is run by a highly specialized medical team implementing advanced quality services and supported by well-trained midwives and nurses that are available around the clock. The hospital has a clinical diagnostic laboratory, medical imaging facilities and provides quality drugs.
Services were initially paid out-of-pocket, which was a problem for low-income clients. Pregnant women now have access to a comprehensive package of services at the hospital regardless of their socioeconomic status. During the initial period of January 2020 to June 2021, only 223 pregnant women attended the hospital; however upon easing the requirement for payment between July 2021 and June 2022, a total of 1,213 women of childbearing age attended the hospital. Among the full-term mothers, 218 had a normal vaginal delivery (36%), while 386 (63%) underwent caesarean section. The majority (84%) of these were treated as situations of emergencies. This approach has successfully increased facility-based births among poor women in the city and its surrounding rural districts.
The initiative to establish the hospital was taken in view of the need to promote a free maternal health care policy to effectively realize universal access to and the full utilization of facility-based delivery across the country
A National Program to scale up investment and reducing the gap in mental health in Somaliland: first year achievements
Get PDFIn Somaliland, mental health has been a neglected sector since the inception of the country almost 30 years ago. Only two years ago, there was no office, no staff, and no funding for mental health. Public mental health services were confined to five public in-patient facilities within the regional general hospitals, with a total bed capacity of 216 beds for a population of 4 million people. All the facilities experienced severe shortages of human and material resources, and proper supervision or control by the ministry did not exist. Lack of adequate and good quality-public mental health services has encouraged the opening of a plethora of unregulated private mental health facilities with poor records of human rights and services. One of the major impediments to improving mental health in the country was a lack of financial resources. In recognition of the deteriorating situation of mental health in the country and public pressure to do something about the problem. In late 2020, the government decided to scale up mental health services through khat taxation. Tax collection started in January 2021, and the first funds were released for use in July 2021. A five-year national program on mental health was then launched on August 1, 2021 underpinned by four main objectives: 1) establishment of leadership and governance in mental health; 2) strengthening existing mental health services and their integration into primary health care; 3) development of human resources in mental health; and finally 4) setting up a mental health information and research system. In this paper, we present early program achievements and their relevance to public health for other countries with similar settings looking to improve their mental health through effective mobilization of local resources
Towards a New Understanding of Swedish School Reforms: A Sociological Analysis of Textbooks’ Role in Reforms of School Mathematics, 1919–1970
Get PDFThis article sheds new light on the Swedish comprehensive school reform implemented in the 1960s (the Grundskolan reform) and the four decades preceding the reform. This reform was typical for the Nordic countries. The presented study concerns reforms in mathematics education and how change was initiated and driven before and during the comprehensive school reform. The analysis has a focus on the role of textbooks in educational governance. The analysis is based on Bourdieu’s field theory and concerns how a new way of preparing and driving reforms of school subjects restructured relationships between the state, textbook producers, and teachers. This article is mainly a synthesis of results from several previous studies on governance of Swedish mathematics education. The analysis reveals not only a new characteristic of the comprehensive school reform (swift and radical rather than slow and successive), but also a bottom-up movement in the school system, which has been commonly understood as top-down, very centralised, and slow moving. The results of the analysis help explain why the Swedish comprehensive school reform gained early acceptance and momentum. Another contribution of this article concerns historical textbook research, particularly regarding how fundamental changes in authorship of textbooks (from visible individual authors to anonymous collectives) can be related to educational governance and changes in power structures
Controlling the “Wilderness” Through a Rationalised Reindeer Husbandry: The Establishment of the Sámi Nomad School in Sweden, 1906–1917
Get PDFThis article discusses the Swedish nomad school system (nomadskola, 1913–1962), targeting the children of the reindeer herding Sámi, in an environmental history perspective. Earlier research has highlighted demographics (especially social Darwinism), national economy, and reform pedagogy as the ideological foundation of the nomad school system. This article shows that the fixing of a frontier between society and wilderness was at the confluence of all of these ideas. Reindeer as a vehicle for domesticating Arctic “wilderness,” furthering economic goals in peripheries, and modernising indigenous livelihoods has been noted in the North American and Russian/Soviet contexts, as well as in Scandinavia for the second half of the 20th century. This connection has not been explicitly made in the research concerning the early years of the nomad school system. The article concludes that the Swedish government did not have the expertise to control and economically exploit the “wilderness” of the high Scandes, but the reindeer-herding Sámi did. Swedish educational authorities launched the nomad school system in order to harness this expertise and make the reindeer herding livelihood more suitable to the needs of the Swedish economy
Review (English): Katharina Sass, Politics of Comprehensive School Reforms: Cleavages and Coalitions
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Giving Language to Taboos: Nation and Religion in Modern Educational Reasoning
Get PDFLike all taboos, nation and religion are so powerful precisely because they are often not brought to language. Educators around the world see themselves as secular, not religious, and rational, not national, and they develop their elegant, moral, and bland arguments precisely on this premise. This is, of course, capable of gaining majority support because it keeps the sociological machinery of educational thinking stably alive, but epistemologically it is unsatisfactory. Educational reasoning is sometimes as elegant as the freestyle of a virtuoso ice skater, sometimes as captivating as a rhetorically gifted village preacher, sometimes as clumsy as a plow horse that thinks it is a dressage horse. Some are the stars in the arena of academic education, others the moralizers, and others the bland extras. This rather simple sociology of educational reasoning emphasizes the different roles that Academics occupy in what Fleck called a “thought collective,” but it obscures that “thought collectives” share common “thought styles” in which, often carefully administered by national professional associations, truth is produced. In education, these “thought collectives” have historically been shaped by two fundamental elements. They are veritable taboo subjects, which are presupposed but hardly ever reflected upon, namely religion and nation