Kamilla Klefbeck
Contact
Name and title: Kamilla Klefbeck
Phone: +46812076595
ORCID0000-0002-0119-5490 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of Special Education Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room F1273Albanovägen 28
Postal address Specialpedagogiska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
About me
Kamilla Klefbeck holds a Ph.D. in Education. Her research interests originate from the didactic encounters with children, adolescents, and adults with intellectual disabilities (ID), as well as ID combined with autism. From 1997 to 2017, she worked in special primary and secondary education and as an educator within day activity centers. Between 2018 and 2022, she completed her doctoral studies through the national research school SET (Special Education for Teacher Educators), funded by the Swedish Research Council (Dnr. 2017-06039). On May 25, 2022, Kamilla defended her dissertation titled Gaining Access to Learning Processes: Professional Development for Teachers of Students with Intellectual Disabilities and Autism in Special Schools.
The dissertation provided implications for how teachers in Compulsory Schools for Students with Intellectual Disabilities can develop their teaching to enhance student participation and learning. Since defending her dissertation, Kamilla has continued her work exploring professional development for teachers in adapted compulsory schools, focusing on student participation and learning.
Kamilla Klefbeck teaches in the Special Needs Teacher and Special Education programs and supervises master's students in special education at Stockholm University. She has previously taught special education in teacher education programs (from undergraduate to advanced levels) at Kristianstad University.
Since her PhD defence (2022-05-22), Kamilla has continued to deepen her research on teachers’ professional development in compulsory school for students with intellectual disabilities, with a particular focus on students’ participation and learning. She has collaborated with a municipal school to implement her research findings by testing tools for knowledge assessment in practice (published in Klefbeck, 2024).
During the period 2026–2029, she leads a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) that aims to develop knowledge about how guardians’ experience-based understanding of students’ communication can be integrated into teaching practice. The project focuses particularly on adolescents with intellectual disabilities and autism, whose communicative expressions are often bodily and context-bound.
Through participant-oriented research methods combined with models for instructional development, the project examines how jointly developed strategies influence communication between students, teachers, and guardians. The aim is to contribute empirically grounded knowledge about approaches that strengthen students’ participation and make teaching more responsive to different ways of expressing oneself. The study is conducted in close collaboration with families and educators to enable an in-depth analysis of communicative processes in concrete teaching contexts.