From physics teacher education to engineering education – new challenges for Johanna Larsson

Johanna Larsson defended her thesis, 'Trainee teacher identities in the discourses of physics teacher education: Going against the flow of university physics', in June 2021. In the thesis she investigates what it means to be a competent physics teacher student in a Swedish context. Through interviews she explores issues of intelligence, 'nerdiness' and gender identity, and how these affect how successful physics teacher students are expected to be. 

At the beginning of this year Johanna Larsson starts a new postdoc position at the division for Engineering Education Research at Chalmers University of Technology. 

How does this new postdoc project relate to your previous research?

–I am partly changing directions as I will be focusing on engineering education rather than physics and teacher education. I am however staying with my focus on questions of vocational education, diversity and identity.

–Two common concerns in engineering education are how to diversify the student body by attracting new groups of students, and how to prepare students to solve challenging problems in our future society. My project aims to investigate what happens in the intersection of these concerns, by asking how real world challenges are formulated in co-construction with successful engineering identities.