Forskningsområder

I am an educational researcher specialising in pedagogy and leadership, with a focus on upper secondary education and on how school organisation and teacher professionalisation shape one another.

My research is based on a simple idea: to understand leadership in education, we need to look closely at how schools are organised and how teaching takes shape in practice. I therefore study educational leadership as something that emerges in the interaction between policy, organisational structures, and everyday professional work.

I see school leadership as something that happens close to practice. It is created through the ongoing coordination of teaching, collaboration, and organisational work—often across changing roles that are only partly formalised. From this perspective, leadership does not only work through formal authority, but also through everyday interactions, shared understandings, and negotiated ways of working.

In my empirical work, I explore how leadership takes shape in and around the core practices of education. This includes studying how teachers and leaders handle organisational demands in their daily work, and how teacher collaboration is formed, maintained, and sometimes challenged through shared experiences, expectations, and local cultures.

This research builds on my earlier work on teaching quality and teacher professionalisation, where I have analysed how teachers and student teachers develop professional awareness, and how ideas about good teaching are shaped and negotiated in both schools and teacher education. I also draw on studies of teachers’ work and career paths, including the conditions that support or hinder long‑term professional engagement.

Across my work, I aim to develop a clearer understanding of educational leadership as part of everyday professional practice. This means shifting attention away from leadership as something tied only to formal roles, and instead seeing it as something that develops through how teaching, collaboration, and organisation are connected in practice. In this way, leadership becomes a shared and ongoing process that shapes how schools define quality, knowledge, and professional responsibility.