Digital technologies today are an obvious and integral part of people's everyday lives. Not least, it affects today's school and its pedagogy. GRADE focuses precisely on the digitalisation that takes place within pre-school, primary and secondary school and the after-school center, where there is a great need for new knowledge and competence.
In the spring of 2017, the Swedish Research Council made a call for the organisation of national graduate schools within four priority educational science areas. In the field of Digital Technologies in Education, six universities – the Umeå University (host), the University of Gothenburg, the University of Gävle, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the Mid Sweden University, and the University West – together wrote an application granted by the Swedish Research Council in the autumn of 2018.
Today GRADE constitutes a complementary network organization for postgraduate education at the partner educational institutions and subject areas. Through a clear collaboration with the aim of providing support and structure for the doctoral students’ projects, GRADE coordinates its course offering, conducts higher seminar activities and provides workshops. The universities that are part of GRADE collaborate to provide courses that utilize their common expertise in areas such as research methods, research ethics, theoretical perspectives, analytical tools, and design issues. The universities also cooperate with regard to supervision of doctoral students and other activities.
A basic starting point for GRADE is an interdisciplinary approach. Didactics, Informatics, Education, Educational Work, Media Technology, and Applied IT are the subject areas that are represented in the research school and which all contribute with different perspectives in research directed at the digitalization of schools. An ambition is also that the knowledge that stems from the activities of GRADE should be relevant for Swedish teacher education.
Doctoral students have been admitted to the doctoral level within the subject areas at the participating universities and GRADE provides at least four courses on an annual basis. Courses, seminars, conferences, and supervision take place on different campuses and at a distance within the network. GRADE is a collective, dynamic and intellectually stimulating educational environment to which doctoral students, postdocs, and senior researchers at the universities are welcome.
