Introductory remarks

Åsa af Geijerstam* Over the past 40 years, issues concerning mother-tongue education have been dis-cussed in many countries. Its function, content and identity have been the subject of dynamic discussions among teachers as well as researchers and research students (e.g. Dixon, 1976; Malmgren, 1996). The establishment of a new research field in Sweden The field of research that concerns mother-tongue education in Sweden has tradition-ally been divided into three disciplines and has, accordingly, relied upon three dif-ferent research traditions: literature, language (i.e. Nordic languages) and pedagogy. However, among researchers within the field a need for a more coherent alternative to these three different disciplines grew ever more imminent. As a consequence, the research area “Curriculum studies of Swedish ” was established at Lund University in the 1990s, with Tor Hultman as the first professor within the field. Following this, a graduate school of “Curriculum studies of Swedish ” was initiated in Lund in 1995, while in 2002 a graduate school with doctoral students from all over the country was also established at Växjö University. The application rate for this graduate school was high, which may be seen as a sign of the importance of this field where the traditional borders between the three traditions are crossed. The relevance of the establishment of this new research field cannot be underes-timated. With this, an intention was formulated to bring together not only different research traditions within the school subject of Swedish, but also to draw on research in other subject areas in school. Teaching within all subject areas is conducted in Swedish, and the area “Curriculum studies of Swedish ” was thus intended to include issues of language within different subject areas. Apart from the two graduate schools that were launched, a network was established in 2003. This network, “The national network for curriculum studies of Swedish