The materials and artefacts utilized by teachers and students play a crucial role in education. In a subject like technology, where many teachers feel they do not have sufficient competence, curriculum materials such as textbooks and teacher guides provide important support for teachers. Teacher guides, in particular, have the potential to support teachers in different ways. The guidance provided in a teacher's guide can be either directive and talk through the teacher, i.e. telling the teacher what to do, or educative and talk to the teacher, i.e. telling the teacher how to do it and why to do it this way, thereby providing the teacher with knowledge to better understand the teaching of the subject. In this study, we analyze a teacher's guide for grades 7-9 to find out what kind of support it provides the teacher. An adapted framework for the design principles of educative curriculum materials was used. The analysis shows that this particular teacher's guide mostly talks through the teacher, giving the teacher directives on how to teach but without explaining why or suggesting other possible ways. The few educative features found are short and not very detailed. The support an educative teacher's guide could providewould give the teacher agency over their teaching and a better possibility to adapt teaching to situations and students. However, we see little of that kind of guidance in the teacher's guide analyzed in this study and conclude by outlining the possible consequences for technology education.

In this study, we provide insights about secondary school students’ conversation about products’ life cycles in relation to three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social, and ecological sustainable development but also what traces of view that appear in these conversations. Production and consumption are part of complex technological systems that affect nature and life on earth, and knowledge about these systems are required to achieve sustainable development. In technology education, students can have the opportunity to talk about products and their life cycles. Hence, this study aims to explore what emerges in students’ conversations about products’ life cycles in relation to sustainable development. Data collection was conducted in Sweden through seven semi-structured interviews, with in total 21 students participating in groups. All student responses have been analysed using thematic analysis to explore dimensions and views of sustainability. Results show that the students discuss with regard to all three dimensions of sustainable development. However, the phases of a product’s life cycle occur to varying extent within the different sustainability dimensions. Additionally, the students also connect dimensions with both harmonious and contrasting perspectives but also talk about the dimensions isolated. When participating students discuss, traces of mainly anthropocentric and technocentric view emerge. This has implications for technology education, where for example deliberative conversations can be used for engaging students in sustainable development.

What pupils learn in school should ideally be useful throughout their whole lives. It should help them in further studies, in working life, and when acting as responsible citizens in democratic society. This is challenging for all subjects, including technology. Technology develops fast. It is most likely that wheels, wedges, and inclined planes will be used in the future, but it is difficult to know which programming languages, sources of energy, and materials that will be relevant a few decades from now. This article describes how these problems are handled in international curricula and standards, and by Swedish teachers, teacher students, and teacher educators. In curricula they are seldom addressed explicitly, but handled by giving deliberately vague descriptions of what students are to learn. The interviewed teachers, teacher educators, and teacher students were unused to think about future-compliant or timeless knowledge. When prompted to do so during the interviews, they found it easier to describe timeless skills than timeless factual knowledge. Prominent among their suggestions were abilities related to engineering design processes, technical problem solving strategies, fundamentals of computer programming, and engineering mechanics.

 In literature, teaching for an authentic learning experience is seen as rewarding and interesting, promoting better understanding of for example sustainable development and fostering students’ independence. Some upper secondary schools emphasise authentic teaching and learning on their websites, showcasing how students engage in authentic tasks. We are interested in examining how authentic teaching is implemented in practice and what enables it. Therefore, we investigate a specific practice where authentic teaching occurs, and we follow students and teachers. We want to understand what may be required to implement authentic teaching. The research questions were: What characterises authentic teaching and learning when students on the technology program work on their design projects and individual pieces of work? How is authentic teaching and learning facilitated? Students in Year 3 of the technology program engaged in a project where they studied residential apartments’ resource use and climate impact using sensors. They visited the energy research team, learned about the technology and data collection, and completed own upper secondary school projects related to sensor technology, programming, and data analysis. These were meant to be characterised by authenticity according to the school’s procedures. Data was collected through interviews, observations, and analysis of video material, sound recordings, and field notes. The analysis revealed that the teaching exhibited characteristics of authentic learning, facilitated by early exposure, teacher empowerment, and strong support from management and resources. The results thus show both the characteristics of how the teaching is organized and how teachers handle students’ learning, as well as the organizational factors at the specific school that enable it.

Knowledge linked to programming has been extensively strengthened in curricula and syllabi in Swedish compulsory school, mainly regarding the subjects of mathematics and technology. The introduction of this content requires that technology teachers be trained in programming and how to teach it. In this chapter, we present an observation study of a professional development course for practicing teachers in compulsory education, focusing on introductory programming. The whole professional development course context, including the teachers’ teaching practices and presentations of classroom projects, is explored as a discourse with the aim of finding governance steering strategies, normative values and knowledge content. The analysis shows that norms and values from the programming discourse within this professional development course become more important than the participating teachers´ professional view on how classroom teaching should be conducted. The code-content knowledge is taken for granted, but the artifacts tend to take away the focus from the specific code-content. A gender perspective is also highlighted, where coding is regarded as suitable for the stereotypical image of a female student. The overall aim seems to be that the students should find programming fun and interesting.

This study aims to understand how students manage higher technical education and contribute to research on institutional culture, STEM education, and students’ educational strategies by identifying patterns of how students navigate within one university’s engineering education. To achieve this, we define and use the concept of technical science capital and habitus reconstruction. We collected data through a survey sent to engineering students who have followed an engineering program’s intended linear progression and those who have taken a ‘detour’ within the same cohort at one specific Swedish university. The survey had a high number of qualitative questions, including free text answers that captured students’ narratives. The results indicate that having a large amount of technical science capital alone is not enough for students to be successful in their studies. The university culture has its own structure, which can be intolerant. Within this culture, specific social skills and experiences are desirable, which provides students from a particular background with a greater opportunity for success. Despite possessing high technical science capital, students from other social groups or cultures face challenges. We discuss various measures that could make higher technical education more engaging. This study is limited to one Swedish university, and future studies could include a broader sample that represents several universities.