En introduktion till ett temanummer om vuxnas lärande och demokrati. Ger en kort introduktion till forskningsområdet samt presenterar fyra artiklar som ingår i temanumret.
Participating without attending. Compulsory schooling in change. Compulsory schooling in Sweden was introduced in 1842. However, its meaning has changed over time, both in terms of who it applies to, how long it applies and how it can or should be implemented. During the 2000s, compulsory schooling has become synonymous with the obligation to be present in school and attend class. There are stu-dents who for medical, mental and social reasons can not go to school and fulfill their school obligation. In order to ensure that these students receive the education they are entitled to, a new chapter was introduced in 2020 in the Swedish Education Act, enabling distance learning. The purpose of the article is to learn more about how the educational policy framework of school attendance and everyone’s right to education can affect the meaning of compulsory schooling, and how this discursive change can have consequences for students, schools, and society. To achieve this, government policy texts on distance education and school attendance published in 2017-2021 are analyzed. The consequences that are perceived to follow from teaching beyond the school area are also discussed here. One consequence that is highlighted is that the school’s democracy mission ends up in danger. The analysis is inspired by Carol Lee Bacchi’s approach WPR (What’s the Problem Represented to be)
All children in Sweden have the right to attend school from the year they reach the age of six. But are all children obliged to be there? Sweden have had compulsory schooling since the end of the 19th century. This means that there is an obligation to be in the school and attend its activities. A changed governance of the school during the last decades of the 20th century, from centralized to decentralized, opened up for the possibility of local school practices to define how the compulsory schooling should be interpreted and applied. In this article we scrutinize whether this has opened for potential inequalities regarding compulsory schooling in Sweden. In doing this we analyze law and policy documents that in different ways prescribe how deviations from school duties, so-called school absence, should be handled and by whom. The purpose of the article is to elucidate the effects of state-formulated guidelines regarding the management of school absence in Swedish compulsory school. Inspired by Carol Lee Bacchis’ WPR (What´s the Problem Represented to be) analysis, we interrogate how departures from compulsory schooling are portrayed as a problem and what meaning are ascribed to compulsory schooling - not least from an equality perspective.
In Sweden and among Swedish popular movements, there has long been a great willingness to share experiences from establishing the “Swedish model” of welfare and democracy with countries in other parts of the world. In this sharing of experience, popular adult education has played an important role. Over the years, there have also been several attempts to spread the “Swedish model” of education of this kind, i.e. study circles and folk high schools. Here, we analyse a large-scale project to establish Folk Development Colleges (FDCs) in Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the ways in which Swedish popular adult educators have described the project. In theoretical terms, the article is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing importance of the legacies of colonialism in today’s society. One of the main conclusions drawn is that, in the process of “exporting” the idea of popular adult education around the world, there is an ongoing formation of national self-images in contrast to images of “the Other”, involving a constant risk of reproducing ideas from a colonial past.
The “justified” bully. Conceptions of bullying drawn from school cinema activities. The present paper addresses how bullying is co-constructed among teenagers in a Swedish school. The ethnographic data consist of pupilproduced film manuscripts, essays and video recordings of pupils’ group conversations, made after they had watched one of the films Evil or About a Boy during school hours in Years 8 and 9 of compulsory education (age group 14–15). The films and the follow-up work were presented by the teachers as being about bullying. The use of fiction as an educational tool was shown to free the pupils from possible real-life experiences of bullying in the discussions. Being perceived as different was seen as a reason for being bullied; however, the pupils admitted that the “real” reason would be not liking someone’s personality, i.e. because they had too much self-esteem or were scared. The bully was discussed as either being “evil”, i.e. wanting to exercise power, or “justified”, i.e. claiming rights. Both the evil and the justified bully were seen as products of circumstances, rather than as responsible for their actions.
The theme of the article is knowledge and learning within the Swedish workers’ trade union movement. The aim of the article is to describe how the movement have viewed learning and schooling historically, and to discuss the current point of view. Knowledge useful to the movement has always been seen as the most valuable. The interpretation of what knowledge that is and how it best is learned has varied. Today trade unions at the workplaces are expected to have the capability to formulate needs of knowledge and to conduct learning independently. The everyday work in two local trade union boards have been studied and analysed by socio cultural theory of learning in order understand what learning the everyday activities shape. The article presents important aspects of the result. Contemporary changes in working life mean continuous demands of new knowledge. The local trade unions studied cannot handle these demands of learning on their own. It’s discussed as overpowering demands of learning.
In Sweden, there are no specific academic paths leading to a political career and many local elected leaders develop the knowledge they need in other ways. The aim of this article is to find out which kinds of knowledge they value and how they develop these. Using the results from questionnaires and interviews with local social democratic leaders, four groups of knowledge that constitute symbolic capital in the field of Swedish local politics are identified: ideological, communicative, organisational and academic. Some types of knowledge are communicated openly, whilst others are hard to pinpoint and even contradictory, which tends to exclude some members. Both long-term members and newer members find attending party training useful to develop the knowledge they need to get elected and fulfil their political assignment.
In Sweden and among Swedish popular movements there has long been a great willingness to share experiences from establishing the “Swedish model” of welfare and democracy to countries in other parts of the world. In this sharing of experience popular adult education has had an important role. Over the years, there have also been several attempts to spread the “Swedish model” of popular adult education, i.e. study circles and folk high schools. In this article, we analyze the large-scale project of establishing Folk Development Colleges (FDC:s) in Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s,by emphasizing the ways in which Swedish popular adult educators have described the FDC project. Theoretically, the article is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing importance of the legacies of colonialism in today’s society. One of the main conclusions in the article is that in the process of “exporting” the idea of popular adult education to other parts of the world, there is an on-going formation of national self-images in contrast to images of “the Other”, where there is a constant risk of reproducing ideas from a colonial past.
All or nothing? A study on children’s rights in Swedish teacher education. In 2020, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is incorporated into Swedish law. In the proposals for new legislation, capacity building was emphasized to generally develop knowledge about children’s rights among professionals at all levels. This article explores the content and aims related to children’s rights in syllabi for Swedish teacher education. 49 programme study plans and 313 syllabi at twelve universities were examined. Results suggest that the teaching of children’s rights in teacher education programs focuses on values rather than knowledge. University syllabi closely mirror national aims, often using exact wording with little effort to elaborate or concretize these aims. The content is expressed in general terms, and courses provide little guidance in what teachers need to know to be prepared for human rights education. Further, it seems that knowledge about children’s rights is considered more important for preschool and primary school teachers, than for teachers in secondary and upper secondary school.
En diskussion av didaktikens plats i lärarutbildningen i anslutning till de tre nationella rapporter om lärarutbildning som publicerades 1996.
The institutional cultures of the preschool class. Based on the assumption that teachers are policy actors, this study aims to identify the meanings given to the preschool class’s institutional cultures in teach-ers’ articulations about the preschool class. This is done by analysing the values and attitudes that the teachers emphasize as being central to the preschool class’s mission and teaching. The study builds on group discussions with teachers at five schools. The theoretical point of departure is that institutional cultures are articulated by actors and become a tool for them to understand their own role and context, while also changing their culture through these actions. Institutional cultures are multidimensional and are articulated as a qualifying institutional culture, a flexible institutional culture, and an institutional culture that emphasizes the boundaries of the preschool class.
Nordic popular education (folkbildning) has a history of emancipatory endeavours. At the same time it has also been involved in, and reproducing, different structures of power. By studying participants on a Folk High School course on global development, where intersectional power orders are critically challenged while also permeating and enabling the course, this article addresses this paradox. Interviews are analysed with tools from critical and cultural sociological theory. The purpose of the study is to deepen the understanding of the conditions and significance of critical popular education. The stories depict how the courses become alternatives to more male-dominated elite courses at the Folk High School; how class is mirrored as the course becomes a tool for either upward class mobility or (middle) class reproduction; and how a moral subjectivity is created through a relation to, and distancing from, discourses of tourism and traditional aid.