Teacher's didactic work at folk high school

Marketisation of education is a global phenomenon (Ball, 2007; Ball & Youdell, 2008; Burch, 2009). The market model of delivery with roots in the world of business and the expressed intention of making education supply more economically effective characterize large parts of the education system in the western welfare state (Beach & Carlsson, 2004). Sweden has one of the most marketized education systems in the world (Fejes, A., Olson, M., Rahm, L., Dahlstedt, M., Sandberg, F. 2016; Lundahl, 2016) where the state and teachers monitor and control the upcoming workforce through evaluations, audits, effectiveness measurements and documentation (Bornemark, 2018).The Swedish folk high school is a separate educational form in the Swedish education system whose purpose is to provide education and popular education and has not been affected to the same extent by the discourses of marketization and has still a great space of freedom when it comes to organizing, planning and conducting teaching. The folk high school is not regulated in the education act and is therefore not covered by nationally defined curricula and grades and are even given ample space to locally design courses, content and teaching methods, to determine the school's orientation and have the freedom to recruit and hire teachers (Arvidsson, Höghielm, Rubensson, & Svanberg Hård, 1988). The aesthetic courses at folk high schools do not have a statutory purpose to competence supply for the labour market or to prepare for higher artistic studies and thus the teachers have great freedom to shape the teaching's design and content without the obligation to document or grade the participants' achievements.This is a unique situation in the Swedish education system. But how do teachers shape and implement teaching without a nationally defined curriculum with course objectives as benchmarks for each course?The overall aim of the dissertation project is to create knowledge about and understanding of teaching at aesthetic courses in folk high schools by examine how this is being done. The teachers' experiences in a widely meaning, as well as the institutional autonomy of the education system and the assessment practitioners who are being certified, represent important aspects when it comes to create knowledge about the teaching at aesthetic courses in folk high schools.

I draw on different forms of data such as observations of teachers, interviews with teachers and principals as well as material arrangements in form of text material such as course descriptions, marketing materials and evaluations. This data is analysed by using didactic questions such as what, how, when, why, which, for example, have been identified by Jank & Meyer (Jank & Meyer 1997, s 17f).

The theoretical framework makes it possible to study the teacher's interpretation space in relation to a specific subject of teaching but also the principles of what is taught and how it should be unfold and also the teachers' perceptions of a subject of teaching and how it affects teaching.