Swedish Educational System Research Articles

Teachers' Experiences with School Choice: Clashing Logics in the Swedish Education System

This paper explores the school choice reform in Sweden, a country where a drastic shift in education policy has taken place that includes fast expansion of market solutions and strong state support for competition. Although there are studies examining the school choice reform, few focus on the effects of this reform from a teacher perspective, especially so in the context of Sweden. To this end, this paper examines how Swedish upper secondary teachers in independent (private) and public schools experience their work in relation to school choice reform. This study uses qualitative interviews of 58 teachers from five municipal and three independent upper secondary schools. Its theoretical framework relies on Freidson's distinction between the logic of the profession, the bureaucracy, and the market. The findings indicate that the traditional position of teachers—a position that must negotiate the tension between the logic of the profession and the logic of the bureaucracy—is now in fact challenged by the logic of the market. This study argues that values linked to the logic of the market are imposed on the teachers, and these market values clash with the teachers' values, values based on the logic of the profession.

Students with reading difficulties/dyslexia: a longitudinal Swedish example

The aim of this study was to investigate the longitudinal development of students having difficulties with reading and their decoding ability in Swedish compulsory school. Another aim was to relate this to the experiences of educational activities expressed by students and parents. The decoding ability was assessed by a word chain test given at three occasions and was compared with results on a letter chain test. Retrospective interviews were performed with students and parents. The decoding ability tended to improve for most of the students over time, although some of them failed to improve or even decreased their scores, indicating a lack of environmental adjustment. Special educational support was according to students and parents organised in small and often very heterogeneous groups where the students sometimes received adequate support but often felt deviant from friends in their regular classes. The responsibility for helping the children with their schoolwork was allocated to the parents. Research in this area demonstrates the necessity of a well‐structured and stimulating learning situation. Yet, the development of these students’ decoding abilities, personal experiences, and parental involvement indicate that competence and resources at school regarding children at risk for developing reading difficulties are often lacking in the Swedish educational system.

Värdefull eller värdelös?

Useful or Useless? Fundamental Values and Gender in Swedish as a School Subject
 Lately there are numerous studies that emphasise the limits of gender and fundamental value questions in various teaching aids. In Swedish as a school subject, this kind of research is insufficient, which is noteworthy since several researches today regard Swedish as a subject that deals with issues such as democracy and dialogism in a decisive way. This article analyses three recently published text books aimed at literary history in Swedish as a school subject for upper secondary school with a focus on fundamental values. In the Swedish educational system, fundamental values is a central concept that illuminates matters connected to democracy, norms and values, and gender and equality are particularly significant issues. The study, which is both quantitative and qualitative, will be based on questions of intersectionality. Recurrent questions are thus how various authorships are presented based on gender, class, nationality and sexual preference. The results show that the analysed text books predominantly include a white, western, male discourse while discourses of women, non-European and national minorities clearly are excluded. Furthermore, men and women are valued differently. Stereotypical images of masculinity and femininity that are belitted, and sometimes even sexist, are constructed in the analysed course material. There is also an othering of non-European authors where non-European women are twice as marginalised. These evaluative points of departure, explicit and implicit, strengthen and manifest traditional gender roles and a heterosexual matrix which implacably go against the fundamental values of the Swedish educational system.

Defining, acquiring and transacting cultural capital through assessment in physical education

Assessment is a powerful message system in education, but one which has not received sufficient research and critical or theoretical attention in the field of physical education. Drawing on the physical education and health (PEH) assessment experiences of 16-year-old students in the Swedish education system, the focus in this paper is on what students learn about the purpose, practice and possible consequences of summative assessment. By studying their beliefs about grades and perceptions of the criteria for receiving a high grade in PEH, the aim is to analyse what values students comprehend and learn as important in the subject. Our conclusion is that the students learn, through and as a consequence or outcome of assessment, the valued characteristics and behaviours necessary for acquiring the institutional cultural capital of high grades, as well as information about the value of their capacities and their relative value within the field of PEH.

Did the Egalitarian Reforms of the Swedish Educational System Equalise Levels of Democratic Citizenship?

In the mid-1990s an extensive reform of the Swedish educational system was initiated in order to create a ‘school for everyone’ intended to function like a ‘social equaliser’. The new unified gymnasium initiated longer educational programmes with an extended curriculum of social science courses. This article examines whether the well documented gap in levels of democratic citizenship indicators between students in theoretical and vocational gymnasium study programmes persisted after this massive reform. Given the vast amount of empirical research that has shown that education promotes democratic citizenship, the reform could be expected to result in a decreased civic gap. However, contrary to the conventional wisdom in research on the impact of education, little evidence is found linking the initiation of longer educational programmes with more social science courses to an increase in the levels of the examined dimensions of democratic citizenship. The egalitarian reform of the Swedish gymnasium, which provided more civic education, did not produce hypothesised positive effects on any of the dimensions under study (i.e., political participation, political knowledge and political attentiveness). Rather, results support the pre-adult socialisation models since the gap between citizens from theoretical and vocational gymnasium study programmes remained after the unification of the educational system.

Architects of their own future? Swedish career guidance policies

ABSTRACT Few studies have researched career guidance and information policies, particularly at the regional and local level. This article analyses Sweden's national governance of career guidance in schools from 1950 to 2007, and governance at the local level in today's highly decentralised Swedish educational system. The analysis is based on national policy documents and on survey data from Swedish municipalities. It is concluded that the current situation is characterised by traditional ambitions to offer a universal service to all young people, combined with increasing local fragmentation in the provision of educational and vocational guidance.

Mångkulturalitet och kulturmöten i högskoleutbildning - möjligheter och svårigheter

Multiculturality and cultural encounters in higher education – opportunities and challenges. One of the aims of the Swedish education system is multiculturality (multiculturalism), or the promotion of students’ abilities to understand other cultures and reflect on the relations between different cultures, including their own. This article discusses the meaning of multiculturality as a goal of higher education, and the ways in which university teachers can seek to achieve it. A distinction is drawn between multicultural understanding as mere tolerance and as a dialogical process in which the participants reflect critically on their own culturally conditioned presupposi-tions. The article also discusses the cultural encounter in higher education between teachers trained in an academic tradition and students coming from non-academic groups with a so-called anti-swot culture. Keywords: higher education, multiculturality, multicultural education, cultural encounters, educational goals, anti-swot culture.

Teacher Education in Social Science in Sweden in Historical and Comparative Perspectives

In this paper, we will examine teacher education in social science. In the Swedish context, teacher education is part of the university system, but teacher education in social science is differently organized than social science education for other students. Teacher education in social science today is also, as a result of the deregulation at all levels of the Swedish educational system in the 1990s, locally designed and there are significant differences between universities. The aim of this paper is twofold. The first aim is to explore the roots of the current situation in the history of teacher education in social science in Sweden from the mid 1900s and into the early 2000s. The other aim is to describe and discuss comparatively how this education is organized at different Swedish universities today. The analysis revolves around questions about disciplinarity, organization and teacher education as a “trading zone” between the traditional academic disciplinary organization of social science and the conceived needs of the school subject Civics.

The Free Schools “Riddle”: Between traditional social democratic, neo‐liberal and multicultural tenets

The question of what role free schools should perform in the Swedish educational system has been a contested subject between three ideological, theoretical, political and policy tenets. The first, “contribution to pedagogical diversity in a controlled school market” reflects a traditional social democratic view. The second, “contribution to a better education on a competitive school market” reflects a neo‐liberal approach. The third tenet, “contribution to the maintenance of groups' and individuals' cultural and religious identity” reflects a multicultural view insisting on the thesis that a family's cultural and religious identity should be a steering motive for the school choice. The aim of this article is to take a closer look at what the three tenets that constitute the “riddle” contain—including their claims, responses to critics, arguments and empirical evidence—and to discuss some of their practical impacts on the shaping of educational policy.

Beyond stereotypes? Talking about gender in school booktalk

The Swedish educational system states that work in schools should depict and mediate equality. One way of achieving this is through fiction, which according to the syllabus provides students with knowledge about the living conditions of women and men during different epochs and places. The present paper examines gender in a Swedish school, analysing ‘book club’ discussions, using a discursive approach. The data consist of video-recorded teacher-led booktalk sessions, involving small groups of pupils in grades 4–7. It was found that the teachers and/or the pupils invoked gender issues in all book club sessions. The fictive events were, at times, discussed in gender-stereotyped ways. Yet, the teachers and pupils also transcended gender stereotypes in several cases. In many of those cases, there was a generational pattern, in that the participants tended to apply less stereotyped thinking when talking about fictive characters of their own age.

Time to learn, time to develop? Change processes in three schools with weak national time regulation

This article analyses change of time use and time allocation in three schools participating in a Swedish five‐year national experiment in which State regulation of teaching time was weakened. Participating schools could freely decide how to use and distribute teaching time. The experiment was launched at a late stage in a 25‐year decentralisation process. During this period, the Swedish education system has become one of the most decentralised ones among the OECD countries. Based on a four‐year longitudinal study, the initiation and implementation of more goal‐oriented and flexible time allocations in the three schools were analysed. When removing the time schedule one would expect schools to change both time allocation and pedagogy. However, in all three schools, change concerned the latter rather than distribution of teaching hours across subjects, pupils and so on. In particular, change was about replacing traditional subject‐based teaching by thematic, cross‐disciplinary studies and introducing working forms resulting in increased autonomy, but more responsibility on the part of the pupils. It is concluded that the additional weakening of time governance did not have any dramatic effects on initiation and implementation of school development. It primarily resulted in a confirmation, legitimisation and to some extent speeding up of existing change efforts. More generally it led to increased possibilities of information, networking and attention.

Equal Opportunities in Educational Systems: the case of Sweden

Education is stated as a basic right, but school attendance can become a burden for pupils experiencing school failure or difficulties. The aim of this article is to reflect about general and specific factors of the Swedish educational system and to identify facilitators and obstacles to the possibility to offer equal opportunities to all pupils. Findings from research and trends in the official statistics are related to social and educational theories in order to identify their meanings and implications.

Education and assessment in Sweden

Education and assessment in Swedish schools have been affected by several reforms during the last two decades. The educational system has moved from centralization to decentralization and a goal‐oriented approach has been introduced on all educational levels. This paper provides an historical overview of the Swedish educational system, educational and assessment policies and principles, to explain why and how the reforms have been carried out. This is followed by a discussion on the effects and consequences of recent reforms, based on findings in recent education and assessment research.

From poverty to prosperity: the impact of socio-economic change on finnish elementary education in the late 18th and early 19th centuries

The present study describes the private pursuit of improved Finnish elementary education in the time of Gustavus (1771–1808). In those days, the Government did not have enough resources to reorganise the Swedish educational system as a whole; therefore, the most efficient way to promote elementary education was to rely on private initiatives. The common course of action was to collect a school fund, invest the money and use the yearly interest to found a school by employing a professional teacher. Here three different cases representing different socio-economic backgrounds to school reform in 18th century Finland will be discussed more closely. The three cases, the Elima¨ki county school, the Ahlman school and the Fort Sveaborg, are manifestations of different answers to the same two questions: how to improve elementary education and why should it be improved?

Two Remarkable Identities, Called Twos, for Inverses to Some Abelian Integrals

Remark. The reason for this strange terminology is that in the Swedish educational system the first of the aforementioned formulae is, at least informally, referred to as the trigonometric One (trigonometriska Ettan); more recently, we learnt from various colleagues that a similar terminology is used in other European countries as well, for instance, Poland and the Czech Republic. For example, for certain functions called sinualis and cosinualis and denoted Sm and Cm, Erik Lundberg [6] proved, in 1879, the notable formula p p

From monocultural to intercultural educational research

In this article, the author looks at the Swedish educational system and the consequences that the Swedish multicultural society has had for this system. The author especially focuses on the consequences that multiculturalism has for research into educational issues and how research itself needs to become intercultural.

Decisive Factors for Language Teaching in Sweden

This paper aims to examine why language teaching holds a prominent position within the Swedish school system. This statement applies to foreign languages as well as to home languages (or immigrant languages) and Swedish as a second language for immigrant children and adults. The Swedish educational system (comprising the social milieu and the school milieu) is here conceived as incorporating some specific constituent features that have led to the implementation of a generous language policy. This assumption turns out to be particularly obvious in the case of immigrant education. In fact, the analysis of the Swedish educational system illuminates different stakes at several levels - commercial/economic, social, political/ ideological, historical, linguistic, educational and cultural - for language teaching as a whole.

The Problem of School Failure in Sweden

SUMMARY The opening of the article points to the importance of a broad contextualisation of the understanding of school failure, which needs to be understood both on the educational-political level, as well as on the economical, practical and organisational levels. Questions of justice in the Swedish educational system are explored and the validity of this broad focus is examined through a historical discussion of the rhetorical and traditional idea of a school for all. The point of this analysis is critically to point to a gap between this idea and the practical situation in schools. Connected to this analysis, two important reform themes within the Swedish school today are discussed: those of individuality and decentralisation and their implications for school failure. The latter part of the article contains a statistically based analysis of school failure in Sweden. The ambitious political goals of the compulsory school are described and analysed and the problems in attaining this goal are highlighted. The heart of the problem is connected to differences in value systems, determining what is important knowledge within different cultural backgrounds.

The qualitatively different conceptions of 1 mol

The present paper arises from a series of studies we have carried out concerning the conceptions of ‘the mole’ held by different actors in the Swedish educational system. It is a report of the results gained in a study with 28 experienced chemistry educators, all of whom were interviewed individually. A qualitative analysis of the protocols has revealed four separate fundamental meanings of ‘the mole’, described by means of four categories (Fo, F1, F2, F3), complemented by one theoretical fundamental F4. The fundamentals are incommensurably separated, that is, even if the same words and symbols, such as ‘molar mass’ and ’NA’, are used in different fundamentals, they have separate connotations. The fundamentals are validated by historical meanings of ‘the mole’. In the individual educator, the equivocal use of the term ‘mole’ is typical. Every educator has a ‘gravity point conception’ of mole coincident with one of the fundamentals. But, depending on the context, properties belonging to other fundamentals are frequently incorporated, resulting in logical inconsistencies in reasoning, of which the individual is usually unaware. Our claim is that the fundamentals can be used as tools to make conceptual ambiguities about ‘the mole’ explicit both in individuals and textbooks. They can also be used as starting‐points for descriptions of different teaching models concerning ‘the mole’, as will be shown in a forthcoming article in this journal.

Framed Negotiations and Negotiated Frames

ABSTRACT This is a study of decision‐making processes in the Swedish educational system. The empirical focus is on the Swedish curriculum revision process during the 1970s, specifically the introduction of a new compulsory school subject, technology. The purpose of the article is two‐fold. First, the objective is to demonstrate that this decision‐making process can be fruitfully analysed in terms of negotiation theory. Secondly, the aim is to integrate negotiation theory with frame‐factor theory. In this context, we highlight the analytical distinction between substantive negotiations and meta‐negotiations. The results of two case‐studies point out the existence of both distributive bargaining games and integrative problem‐solving bargaining processes. Organizations are negotiated orders. Furthermore, the importance of ideational structures—dominating configurations of norms and values—as a frame‐factor, constraining the intellectual space of actors in the bargaining process, is stressed.