The study explores three challenges: the gap between theoretical education and practical training, the lack of digital didactics in teacher education, and the tension between offering meaningful leisure time and achieving educational goals in SAEC. The study explores how SAEC teacher students can be prepared to design scientifically based hybrid learning activities. Grounded in Design for Learning theory, students participated in theoretical and practical lessons and designed hybrid learning activities at a SAEC center. Data from written reflections and interviews show that students were able to connect theory to practice and expressed a willingness to design similar activities in their future careers, as they viewed these activities as a way to integrate planned learning activities with pupils’ interests. These findings highlight the importance of preparing SAEC teacher students, both theoretically and practically, to design hybrid learning activities.

Studien tar avstamp i tre kända utmaningar: 1) det av lärarstudenter upplevda glappet mellan den teoretiska utbildningen på universitetet och den praktiska utbildning de möter på skolor 2) bristen på digitalt inriktad didaktik i många lärarutbildningar och 3) spänningen mellan fritidshemmets uppdrag att erbjuda meningsfull fritid och samtidigt bedriva undervisning som bidrar till måluppfyllelse. Syftet med studien är att utforska hur fritidshemslärarstudenter kan förberedas för att designa läraktiviteter med digitala verktyg (hybrida läraktiviteter) på vetenskaplig grund, vilket kan minska de ovan nämnda utmaningarna. Studien utgår från teorin Design för Lärande (DfL), där undervisning och lärande ses som multimodal design. I studien deltog fritidshemslärarstudenter i teoretiska och praktiska moment på universitetet samt två dagar på ett fritidshem där de designade hybrida läraktiviteter. Empirin består av studenternas skriftliga reflektioner samt semistrukturerade intervjuer. Genom kvalitativ innehållsanalys identifierades, tolkades och kategoriserades meningsbärande enheter i empirin. Resultaten visar att flera studenter gjorde explicita kopplingar mellan teori och praktik. Vidare uttryckte de en vilja att designa hybrida läraktiviteter i sitt framtida yrke, då dessa ansågs vara ett sätt att kombinera barns meningsfulla fritid med planerade läraktiviteter. Dessa resultat belyser vikten av att förbereda studenter, både teoretiskt och praktiskt, för att designa hybrida läraktiviteter på fritidshemmet.

This study is part of the project Exploring Six-Year-Olds’ Meaning-Making in Different Subjects through Multimodal Teaching and Their Creation of Digital Animations. A central premise is that an equitable school system should offer all children the same opportunities to participate in education, express themselves, and develop their learning identities. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate how pupils in multilingual classrooms use various resources in group activities focused on multimodal text creation. The study draws on the theoretical perspective of Designs for Learning (DfL), in which teaching and learning are conceptualized as forms of multimodal design (Selander & Kress, 2010). By designing learning activities that incorporate both analogue and digital resources, teachers create conditions for six-year-olds’ meaning-making and support their right to express themselves in multiple ways—a core aspect of the school’s democratic mission. The following research questions guide the study: · Which resources do pupils use in the group activities when creating multimodal texts? · Which resources appear to constrain or support pupils’ opportunities to make meaning in the multimodal text-creation activities?

Developing a strong learning identity and confidence in one’s abilities early on is crucial, as these factors influence children’s opportunities for lifelong learning and active participation in democratic practices both in and outside of school. Some children risk falling behind as early as the first year of compulsory schooling. Research has identified tensions between children’s literacy practices at home and in school, particularly regarding the use of digital tools, and these contrasts may negatively affect young children’s learning identities (Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016; McTavish, 2009). The empirical material consists of video recordings of pupils’ group-based multimodal text creation, involving both analogue and digital resources. The analysis shows that analogue resources, such as paper figurines, enable pupils who have not yet mastered the school language (Swedish) to demonstrate their understanding of the fairy tale The Three Billy Goats Gruff by retelling it with the support of these materials. In the process of creating the digital animation, the pupils show a high degree of engagement: they interact more with one another than when working with analogue resources, negotiate, ask questions, and contribute in various ways to the shared multimodal text. The preliminary findings highlight the importance of teachers providing access to both analogue and digital resources, as this allows pupils to draw on different competencies and abilities in their meaning-making. This appears to create conditions for democratic learning in which every pupil has the opportunity to express themselves and influence the shared outcome.

This paper explores the ethical challenge of the mandate for educational change within professional development. Drawing on a long-term educational design research project focused on problem solving and problem posing, we examine how collaboration between researchers and teachers evolves across four phases. Initially, researchers led the design and implementation. Over time, teachers became active co-creators, contributing to planning, data collection, and analysis. This shift from research on teachers to research with teachers enabled a shared mandate for change, fostering sustainable professional development. Our findings suggest that change is more likely to occur and sustain when it originates from within the teachers themselves, supported by collaborative structures. The study highlights how educational design research can bridge ethical concerns and promote teacher agency in relation to change.

This article examines how preschool teachers balance fidelity and adaptation when implementing a research-based mathematics education innovation for toddlers (1–3 years old). The empirical material comprises 43 video-documented teaching activities planned and enacted independently by 34 preschool teachers. The analysis focuses on the pedagogical and mathematical fidelity to the core components of the innovation in these teaching activities. Findings show that pedagogical fidelity to the core component of mathematizing, in the sense of embedding mathematics meaningfully in activities, consistently required productive adaptations. Sometimes these productive adaptations were combined with mathematical fidelity, sometimes not. The study contributes to understanding how fidelity and adaptation can coexist productively — or non-productively — in implementation of an early mathematics education innovation.

The mathematics teaching that young students encounter affects not only the mathematics they are given the opportunity to learn but also their view of what mathematics is, how mathematics is taught, and how they view their own ability to learn mathematics. In this article, we explore how six-year-old students’ participation in an intervention focused on problem solving and problem posing is associated with differences in their views of what it means to be taught and to learn mathematics. We compare drawings of mathematics classrooms created by students from different classes, some of whom had participated in the intervention and others who had not. The results reveal notable differences in the actors and objects included in the drawings. The control group commonly drew textbooks, teachers, and mathematical symbols, whereas the intervention group also depicted other aspects, such as collaborative settings and manipulatives. Thus, a more diverse view of mathematics education appeared in the drawings of the students who participated in the intervention. We argue that these differences may be related to students’ experience with problem solving and problem posing, as well as to critical aspects of these activities, such as creativity and autonomy.

In this study, we elaborate on whether – and if so, how – students’ creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, may strengthen their meaning making in combinatorics while engaging in problem solving. An intervention was conducted in two Swedish preschool classes (six-year-olds) involving 25 students. The results indicate that creating a digital animation did not primarily enhance  problem solving but rather served as an aid for students to redesign their analog knowledge representations, enabling them to further engage with the mathematical content. A conclusion is that the creation of analog and digital representations, in combination, contributed to students’ explorations of combinatorics and that, when integrated into a learning-design sequence, digital animations enhanced students' understanding of combinatorics. This conclusion should be seen in relation to the small scale of the study, which means that more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings.

The title of this special issue intertwines three main themes: early years mathematics, play, and interactions. This special issue brings together research which focuses, on the one hand, on each of these themes individually, but also shows how these themes must be considered together. Below, we outline the importance of research in early mathematics education, different views on playfulness, and how various types of interactions can bring about meaningful engagement with mathematics. Throughout, we point out what has been done in the field and describe how this special issue makes a significant contribution to research in early childhood mathematics education.

In mathematics education, student collaboration is often emphasised as desirable. The focus of this paper is on students’ positioning during collaborative problem solving and problem posing on the mathematical content combinatorics. The study utilises the Learning Design Sequence model for lesson design and positioning theory as an analytical framework. In a sequence of lessons, students worked with both problem solving and problem posing, using different ways of representing their solutions, such as pictures, physical objects, and digital animations. Two cases of collaboration between 6-year-old students are used to illustrate their positioning during this sequence of lessons. One conclusion is that, when collaborating, students’ experiences of each other as learners in general and mathematics learners in particular have influence on their positioning which in turn may influence their possibilities of meaning making in mathematics.

This study investigates the teaching of early years mathematics within an intervention using play-responsive teaching (PRT). It focuses on ways sequences characterized as play-responsive mathematics teaching (PRMT) and mathematics teaching (MT) address the nature of the mathematics that is made available to learn. A previous study revealed that when teachers and children engaged in play-responsive teaching (PRT) with an emphasis on mathematics, particularly cardinality, three distinct sequences were identified: play without mathematics, mathematics teaching without play (MT), and play-responsive mathematics teaching (PRMT). In this article, the two latter sequences are analyzed with a focus on teaching quality. In this context, the quality of teachers' mediation refers to how preschool teachers make mathematical content accessible to children and how they support children's meaningful participation in the learning sequences. The results indicate both advantages and disadvantages of play-responsive teaching. Specifically, MT sequences were rich in terms of the mathematics that was made available to learn, caused by a structured use of artifacts. In the PRMT sequence, however, children's agency and responsiveness in mathematics were more prominent than the mathematics that was made available to learn. Thus, the content and scope of the two sequences complement each other by offering diverse learning opportunities. While mathematical content occasionally recedes in PRMT, the children remain engaged in the activities. Furthermore, integrating play with mathematics makes mathematics important and meaningful for the participating children.

This paper presents a study on the ways Swedish 6-year-old students depict combinations when solving a combinatorics problem-solving task. The task posed to the students was: How many different sandwiches with one slice of bread and one topping can you make with two types of bread and three types of toppings? The empirical material analyzed in the paper consists of documentation from 155 students from four different schools. The results show that students drew sandwiches or drew lines between pictures of the bread and toppings to depict the different combinations. Duplicates did not occur often, and when they did occur, students detected these and did not include them in their final answers. Six-year-old students used systematic strategies, often leading to a result that was in line with the problem, and thus, they found all the solutions.