Learning a completely new language as an adult is hard for most people. But doing it in one’s free time after intensive working days as a teacher, and as a native English-speaker in a country where almost everybody is happy to speak English – can be even more of a challenge.
Ms Harder knows all about this. In 2015, with a brand-new American teaching qualification in her pocket and a dream to work abroad, she arrived at IES school Borås, directly from her home in Minnesota.
“I started at SFI quite soon after arriving in Sweden, but there were 50 of us in the class and the teaching was pretty unstructured, so I lost my motivation and quit the classes,” explains Ms Harder, who returned to the US to teach after two years in Borås.
Missed IES Borås
But she missed both IES and Sweden so much that just a year later she returned to IES Borås to teach.
“I missed the culture and the sense of cohesion of the school,” she comments.
Ms Harder’s realisation that she wanted to stay in Sweden motivated her to restart her SFI lessons again in 2020 – and this time things went much better. She believes one important reason for her success was having a really good teacher. After three years of intensive Swedish studies, Ms Harder passed her Swedish exam, which was the equivalent level to year three at upper secondary school. In spring 2024, all her efforts paid off when she received a Swedish teaching certification after a time-consuming process of submitting piles of documentation to the Swedish National Agency for Education, which also performed an assessment of her experience.
“I like setting myself challenges, and this was a real challenge. The fact that I now speak Swedish has helped me both professionally and personally. Being a student again and experiencing the challenges of learning a new language – and not least, understanding the difference a good teacher makes – has given me insights that I’m convinced have now made me a better teacher.
“It has also helped me personally as I can even communicate with other people who aren’t comfortable speaking English. It gives me a deeper understanding of Swedish culture as well,” she says.
Ms Harder has lived in Gothenburg for the past three years, where she teaches and is head of English at IES Johanne-berg, and is the mentor-teacher for a year-seven class.
“More and more of the international teachers at our school study at SFI, which is encouraged by our principal and IES centrally. I also try to get all my colleagues to follow in my footsteps,” she says.