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EDUCATION
INQUIRY
Volume 3, No. 4, December 2012
CONTENT
Editorial
THEMATIC SECTION
Åsa af Geijerstam Curriculum studies of mother tongue education in Sweden.
Introductory remarks
Caroline Liberg, Jenny W Folkeryd & Åsa af Geijerstam Swedish – an updated school
subject?
Britt Jakobson & Monica Axelsson ’Beating about the bush’ on the how and why
in elementary school science
Kent Adelmann The art of Listening in an Educational Perspective.
Listening reception in the mother tongue
Anders Sigrell ’Whenever I put on a black jacket, I get dandruff’. On metonymy as a device
for constructive argumentation analysis
OPEN SECTION
Peter Farruggio & Michael D. Guerrero Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualizing
a response in the US borderlands
Joakim Lindgren, Agneta Hult, Christina Segerholm & Linda Rönnberg Mediating
school inspection – Key dimensions and keywords in agency text production 2003-2010
Mattias Nylund The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research.
The case of Sweden’s Vocational Education
Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils:
measured by the CTAS
Umeå School of Education
Umeå University
Sweden

Education Inquiry
Education Inquiry is an international on-line, peer-reviewed journal with free access in the field of
Educational Sciences and Teacher Education. It publishes original empirical and theoretical studies
from a wide variety of academic disciplines. As the name of the journal suggests, one of its aims is
to challenge established conventions and taken-for-granted perceptions within these fields.
Education Inquiry is looking for lucid and significant contributions to the understanding of
contextual, social, organizational and individual factors affecting teaching and learning, the links between
these aspects, the nature and processes of education and training as well as research in and
on Teacher Education and Teacher Education policy. This includes research ranging from pre-school
education to higher education, and research on formal and informal settings. Education Inquiry
welcomes cross-disciplinary contributions and innovative perspectives. Of particularly interest are
studies that take as their starting point, education practice and subject teaching or didactics.
Education Inquiry welcomes research from a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches,
and invites studies that make the nature and use of educational research the subject of inquiry.
Comparative and country-specific studies are also welcome.
Education Inquiry readers include educators, researchers, teachers and policy makers in various
cultural contexts.
Every issue of Education Inquiry publishes peer-reviewed articles in one, two or three different
sections. Open section: Articles sent in by authors as part of regular journal submissions and published
after a blind review process. Thematic section: Articles reflecting the theme of a conference or
workshop and published after a blind review process. Invited section: Articles by researchers invited
by Education Inquiry to shed light on a specific theme or for a specific purpose and published after
a review process.
Education Inquiry is a continuation of the Journal of Research in Teacher Education, which is
available in printed copies as well as electronic versions and free access at http://www.use.umu.se/
forskning/publikationer/lof/
Editors
Professor Nafsika Alexiadou, Umeå University, Sweden
Associate Professor Linda Rönnberg, Umeå University, Sweden
The editorial board
Professor Marie Brennan, Victoria University, Australia
Professor Bernard Cornu, Directeur de la Formation – CNED, Directeur de CNED-EIFAD, France
Professor Per-Olof Erixon, Umeå University
Professor David Hamilton, Umeå University, Sweden
Professor Brian Hudson
Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Professor Martin Lawn, University of Edinburgh, UK
Assistant Professor Eva Lindgren, Umeå University, Sweden
Professor Lisbeth Lundahl, Umeå University, Sweden
Professor Kirk Sullivan, Umeå University, Sweden
Associate Professor Manya Sundström, Umeå University, Sweden
Professor Gaby Weiner, University of Edinburgh, UK
Professor Pavel Zgaga, University of Ljubliana, Slovenia
Language Editor
Murray Bales, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Guidelines for Submitting Articles
See Education Inquiry’s homepage: http://www.use.umu.se/english/research/educationinquiry
Send Manuscripts to: EducationInquiry.Editor@adm.umu.se
©2012 The Authors. ISSN online 2000-4508

Editorial
EDU.
INQ.
Nafsika Alexiadou & Linda Rönnberg, Editors
Every issue of Education Inquiry publishes peer-reviewed articles in one, two or three
different sections. In the Open section, articles are sent in by authors as part of regular
journal submissions and published after a blind review process. In the Thematic section,
articles may reflect the theme of a conference or workshop and are published after
a blind review process. The Invited section feature articles by researchers invited by
Education Inquiry to shed light on a specific theme or for a specific purpose and they
are also published after a review process. This issue of Education Inquiry contains a
Thematic and an Open section.
Thematic section
The thematic section in this issue concerns Swedish mother-tongue education. Åsa
af Geijerstam initially offers some introductory remarks in “Curriculum studies of
mother-tongue education in Sweden. Introductory remarks”.
Then, Caroline Liberg, Jenny W Folkeryd, and Åsa af Geijerstam analyse the current
and previous curricula of Swedish and Swedish as a second language in their
article “Swedish – an updated school subject”, arguing that the old traditions strongly
influence the most recent curriculum from 2011. The traditions tend to focus on the
formal aspects of language, especially in the early years, and socio-political perspectives
of literacy learning and mother-tongue education are invisible in the early years
of schooling. The authors also argue that we need an extended view of what can be
included in mother-tongue education and how this may be captured with a more
delicate meta-language to talk about these issues from a research perspective.
In “‘Beating about the bush’ on the how and why in elementary school science”,
Britt Jakobson and Monica Axelsson examine teacher instruction on scientific literacy
tasks and teacher expression of ultimate and subordinate purposes during one
teaching sequence of a science unit. They use a Practical Epistemology Analysis and
Systemic Functional Grammar and transcribed audio recordings of teacher instruction,
students’ pair work and written texts. In conclusion, students are mainly involved
in hands-on activities and aspects of scientific literacy are not so emphasised. The
dominant focus is on “doing”, and the authors argue that this is creating uncertainty
and that the learning direction is not always in line with what the teacher intended.
Next, in “The art of listening in an educational perspective. Listening reception
in the mother tongue”, Kent Adelmann aims to provide further insights on listening
reception as one of the four language arts in Swedish as a school subject. A Swedish
example is contrasted with mainstream listening research in the USA. The results
indicate that listening research in the USA is indeed influential, but an alternative
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theoretical framework for listening is also offered. By combining an educational
approach and an alternative theoretical framework the concluding argument is
that it is possible to work with an expanding and including perspective in listening
research and listening education.
Finally, Anders Sigrell’s article “‘Whenever I put a black jacket on, I get dandruff’.
On metonymy as a device for constructive argumentation analysis” starts from that
mother-tongue teachers teach argumentation analysis. To this end they use, among
other things, a stylistic meta-language, i.e. the tropes and figures of style and Sigrell
discusses different ways of approaching the labelling of expressions as “metaphors” or
“metonymies”. The argument is that a more pragmatic view on the figure metonymy,
indicating some kind of contextual togetherness or contiguity, could aid and sharpen
the argumentation analysis. As metonymy is a potential carrier of possibly insidious
assumptions and attempts to persuade, highlighting this is also a way to make the
persuasive power of language explicit to students.
Open section
We have four papers in the open section. Firstly, in “Neoliberal teacher preparation:
Conceptualising a response in the US borderlands” Peter Farruggio and Michael D.
Guerrero contend that neoliberal capitalism has promoted the spirit of competition
among schools, educators and students through a policy of high stakes accountability
for immediately measurable educational outcomes. As part of this trend and in the
USA, teacher educator programmes are increasingly made accountable for the impact
of their programme completers on student achievement by using standardised test
scores. As a response, some programmes have begun to rethink their practices but
the authors argue that there is little empirical evidence that improvement is available
to teacher educators, particularly for those committed to the preparation of working
class Mexican-origin bilingual education teachers. In this article, the authors describe
the creation of a context-specific signature border pedagogy aimed at preparing effective
bilingual teachers in a majority Latino public university in the South Texas
Borderlands.
Secondly, Joakim Lindgren, Agneta Hult, Christina Segerholm and Linda Rönnberg
analyse how school inspection in Sweden is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible
national authorities, first by the National Agency for Education and from 2008
the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. In their article “Mediating school inspection – Key
dimensions and keywords in agency text production 2003–2010” they look at four
dimensions and key concepts conveying dominant ideas of inspection and education,
and the results suggest that the rhetoric and ideas of school inspection changed when
the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School Inspectorate.
Post-2008, a language with the intention of detecting shortcomings and supporting
an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent and the article finally
discusses some of the implications that this development may entail.
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Next, in “The relevance of class in education policy and research – The case of Sweden’s
vocational education” Mattias Nylund examines contemporary policy trends in
upper-secondary vocational education in Sweden. The article first discusses the more
general matter of the relevance of class and how class can be understood in contemporary
society. Second, the author demonstrates how problems arise when vocational
education is removed from its class context, illustrated by contemporary policy trends
in Sweden. This case not only shows that issues of class are largely ignored, but also
how policies are adopted that are likely to augment class inequalities.
Finally, in “A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish
grade 3 pupils: Measured by the CTAS”, Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin
Linnanmäki and Camilla Svens-Liavåg conducted a cross-national study to examine
the dimensionality of the Children’s Test Anxiety Scale (the CTAS) and to see if there
are differences in test anxiety between Swedish and Finnish pupils, and whether
these differences are ‘real’ differences or a result of differential item functioning.
The results indicate partial measurement invariance with respect to nationality and
gender, demonstrating that the CTAS accurately measures latent constructs. However,
no differences were found in the levels of test anxiety experienced by Swedish
and Finnish pupils and, even if girls reported higher levels of autonomic reactions
related to test anxiety, no gender differences in thoughts and off-task behaviours were
identified. Finally, the article discusses methodological limitations of the study and
implications of the results.
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 471–475
EDU.
INQ.
Curriculum studies of mothertongue
education in Sweden
Introductory remarks
Åsa af Geijerstam*
Over the past 40 years, issues concerning mother-tongue education have been discussed
in many countries. Its function, content and identity have been the subject of
dynamic discussions among teachers as well as researchers and research students
(e.g. Dixon, 1976; Malmgren, 1996).
The establishment of a new research field in Sweden
The field of research that concerns mother-tongue education in Sweden has traditionally
been divided into three disciplines and has, accordingly, relied upon three different
research traditions: literature, language (i.e. Nordic languages) and pedagogy.
However, among researchers within the field a need for a more coherent alternative
to these three different disciplines grew ever more imminent. As a consequence, the
research area “Curriculum studies of Swedish” was established at Lund University in
the 1990s, with Tor Hultman as the first professor within the field.
Following this, a graduate school of “Curriculum studies of Swedish” was initiated
in Lund in 1995, while in 2002 a graduate school with doctoral students from all over
the country was also established at Växjö University. The application rate for this
graduate school was high, which may be seen as a sign of the importance of this field
where the traditional borders between the three traditions are crossed.
The relevance of the establishment of this new research field cannot be underestimated.
With this, an intention was formulated to bring together not only different
research traditions within the school subject of Swedish, but also to draw on research
in other subject areas in school. Teaching within all subject areas is conducted in
Swedish, and the area “Curriculum studies of Swedish” was thus intended to include
issues of language within different subject areas.
Apart from the two graduate schools that were launched, a network was established
in 2003. This network, “The national network for curriculum studies of Swedish”
*Department of Education, Uppsala University, Sweden, e-mail: asa.af.geijerstam@edu.uu.se.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 417–475
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Åsa af Geijerstam
(henceforth SMDI) has since then, on a rotating basis, had its residence at different
universities. In the first application for funding for this network, the aims of the
network activities were formulated. These involved issues such as: (1) supporting
and promoting the initiation of research projects within the field; (2) discussing the
structure and content of graduate and postgraduate studies within the field. The
argument that may have been and is still the most central as a motivation for the
network concerns (3) the need for research with a didactic focus within the area of
mother-tongue education in Swedish schools, and the increasing need for teachers
as well as teacher educators with a PhD degree.
Today, the SMDI network has over 100 members, most of them researchers within
the field. An annual conference is organised, and eight proceedings from these conferences
have been published.
International collaborations with other researchers and networks within the field of
mother-tongue education have been and remain very important to the network. The
“International Mother Tongue Education” international network has, for instance,
played an important role for many researchers in the field. There is also close collaboration
with networks for mother-tongue education in the other Nordic countries,
and a Nordic network was also recently founded, namely the “Nordic network for
research on mother tongue education” (NNMF).
To sum up, curriculum studies of Swedish are a growing field of research that attracts
researchers from several different traditions. In a relatively short period, the
research area together with the SMDI network and conferences have gained a stable
position in educational research as well as in language studies and literature studies.
Curriculum studies of Swedish – research with many facets
The content of the conference proceedings over the past 10 years paints a comprehensive
picture of curriculum studies of Swedish as a field of research. Research within
the field has of course also been presented at other conferences and in other fora,
but this presentation will chiefly focus on the research presented within the network.
The research questions posed within this area are central for the mother-tongue
subject as well as for other subject areas. They are concerned with different areas
such as literacy, multimodality, literary education, the potential of orality in school,
mother-tongue education from a Nordic perspective and assessment. Liberg (2012)
provides an overview of the approximately 100 papers published in the conference
proceedings. This overview demonstrates that although one can find a broad
perspective on curriculum studies of Swedish by reading them, there are still some
educational traditions that give rise to a bias when it comes to research topics chosen
and research questions asked.
In this thematic section of Education Inquiry, some of the less well-represented
research topics are given space. The SMDI network includes researchers that represent
different ways of studying mother-tongue education and language in school. The four
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Curriculum studies of mother-tongue in Sweden
papers in this thematic section cannot be said to represent them all, yet all four touch
upon different areas that are central to the field of study, and all four make important
contributions to the field.
One important topic that is not well represented in the previous conference proceedings
concern questions about mother-tongue education in preschool and in
the early years of schooling. It is also the case that mother-tongue education in the
early years has traditionally had a focus on early literacy – i.e. learning to read and
learning to write. The different traditions of the subject of Swedish are discussed in
this thematic section by Caroline Liberg, Jenny W Folkeryd and Åsa af Geijerstam in
their article “Swedish – an updated school subject?”. In their analysis of the current
and previous curriculum for Swedish and Swedish as a second language, they argue
that the old traditions still strongly influence even the latest the curriculum (from
2011). The traditions mentioned are: (1) a focus on the formal aspects of language,
especially in the early years; and (2) that the socio-political perspectives of literacy
learning and mother-tongue education are invisible in the early years of schooling.
The authors also emphasise the need for an extended view of what can be included
in mother-tongue education and – from a research perspective – that this extended
view may be captured with a more delicate meta-language that can be used when
discussing issues concerning mother-tongue education.
Another research topic of interest to develop is research on language issues in
subject areas other than mother-tongue education. Questions on reading, writing,
speaking and listening are traditionally associated with mother-tongue education in
school. However, during the past 20 years a growing number of studies have been
performed with the basic assumption that language is the key to understanding and
presenting content as well as managing activities in all subject areas. Students have to
be able to handle the specific wording and grammatical structure within each subject
area (e.g. Halliday & Martin, 1993; Schleppegrell 2004 and Jakobson & Axelsson, this
issue). In their article “‘Beating about the bush’ on the how and why in elementary
school science”, Britt Jakobson and Monica Axelsson address such research issues by
examining teacher instruction on scientific literacy and teacher expressions of ultimate
and subordinate purposes in a science unit in grade two. In their article, Jakobson
& Axelsson study 8-year-old pupils and thus also provide an important contribution
to knowledge on language development and written language development in the
early years of schooling, an area which has so far not been thoroughly investigated.
There is also a need for more comprehensive research on speaking and listening.
The majority of the research in the field concerns reading and writing. Further, there is
more research on reading than and on writing and, among the papers in the proceedings
that actually concern speaking and listening, listening is the least represented.
In light of this, the article in this issue “The art of listening in an educational perspective.
Listening reception in the mother tongue” by Kent Adelmann makes a relevant
contribution to the field of listening research. In this article, Adelmann discusses
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Åsa af Geijerstam
how we as researchers and teachers can adapt international listening research to a
Scandinavian context. He also offers an alternative theoretical framework for listening
research based on the work of the Russian scholar Bakhtin. Adelmann points to
a fact that is relevant to many areas of research concerning the teaching of Swedish
in a school context; there is a need for the development of theory and method. Since
the field has an interdisciplinary approach, theory as well as research methods are
drawn from different traditions.
The article “‘Whenever I put a black jacket on, I get dandruff’. On metonymy as a
device for constructive argumentation analysis” by Anders Sigrell also emphasises
questions of theory and method. With a basis in rhetoric, Sigrell discusses different
ways of approaching the labelling of expressions as “metaphors” or “metonymies”. He
argues for a more pragmatic understanding of metonymy – one that emphasises the
information structure of metonymies compared to metaphors. By providing examples
from e.g. posters, Facebook updates and verbal debates where the use of metonymies
is used to convey more or less hidden assumptions, Sigrell argues that a more pragmatic
view of metonymy can help us detect attempts to convey conceptions about
reality that are not made explicit. The persuasive power of language has to be made
explicit for students, Sigrell argues, and the classical tropes can, in a more pragmatic
interpretation, provide important meta-reflective tools for working with this.
Research questions on mother-tongue education are of the utmost importance in
contemporary society. Both society and education are continuously changing, and the
role of mother-tongue education and language in school is challenged by political and
social expectations of education. Research concerning questions on different aspects
of mother-tongue education and language in school is thus crucial for deepening our
knowledge and critically investigating this field.
Åsa af Geijerstam is Assistant Professor in curriculum studies at the Department of Education at
Uppsala university. Her research interests include reading and writing development in different
educational practices. She has participated in research projects on reading and writing across the
curriculum and reading comprehension in international tests.
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References
Dixon, J. (1967) Growth through English: A report based on the Dartmouth seminar 1966. Reading:
National Association for the Teaching of English.
Halliday, M., & Martin, J. (eds.) (1993) Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. Pittsburgh,
PA: Univ of Pittsburgh Press.
Liberg, C. (2012) Svenska med didaktisk inriktning – forskningsämne och nätverket. Svensklärarföreningens
årsskrift 2012. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur
Malmgren, L.-G. (1996) Svenskundervisning i grundskolan. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Schleppegrell, M.J. (2004) The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 477–493
EDU.
INQ.
Swedish – An updated school
subject?
Caroline Liberg*, Jenny Wiksten Folkeryd** & Åsa af Geijerstam***
Abstract
The focus in this article is the extent to which the school subject of Swedish in the new national
curriculum in Sweden introduced in 2011 (compulsory school) has been updated in relation to
ways of discussing mother tongue education. Discourse analysis is used to analyse the syllabus for
Swedish from 2011. A comparison is made with the previous syllabus from 1994 in order to see if
any changes have been made. The main finding is that the syllabus from 2011 is primarily updated
with fundamental aspects of the genre approach. This is interpreted as a reason for the observed
foregrounding of language and downgrading of literature in the curriculum. Further, two traditions
of the teaching of Swedish in school are discussed. The first tradition concerns the focus on the
formal aspects of language. The second tradition concerns the invisible socio-political perspective
in the lower grades, and this perspective’s low-key character in the upper grades. It is concluded
that these traditions are still alive and strongly influencing the curriculum.
Keywords; syllabus for the subject of Swedish, discourse analysis, mother tongue education
Introduction
Over the past 40 to 50 years, research has been conducted and dynamic discussions
have taken place in the field of mother tongue education in many countries. Limitations
of the traditional content of this education have been highlighted, while alternative
and more extended ways of talking about and performing education have been discussed.
Motivations for this discussion, as well as discussions concerning other school
subjects, have been and still are the changes in society which lead to new demands on
education and the education system (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Herrlitz, 1994). Such
changes include globalisation and an increasingly multilingual society. Changes also
include the constantly evolving technology in society that has led to an ever increasing
extension of the compulsory as well as non-compulsory education system. The third
aspect of the changes in society is the ever more pronounced requirements concerning
equity and the equal access to ways of pronouncing one’s own voice, and interacting
with other people’s voices. The fourth and last aspect concerns the rapidly changing
media landscape in which everyone is e.g. required to be able to navigate in a flood
*Department of Education, Uppsala, Sweden, e-mail: caroline.liberg@edu.uu.se. **Department of Education, Uppsala, Sweden,
e-mail: jenny.folkeryd@edu.uu.se. ***Department of Education, Uppsala, Sweden, e-mail: asa.af.geijerstam@edu.uu.se.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 477–493
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Caroline Liberg, Jenny Wiksten Folkeryd & Åsa af Geijerstam
of information. In light of this background, it is of interest to see whether, and if so
how, the changes in society and subsequent discussions of education have affected
syllabuses and other types of regulations concerning mother tongue education. An
important outcome of the research concerning mother tongue education is the ways
of talking about these issues, i.e. a metalanguage is created to highlight different
aspects of mother tongue education.
In this article we focus on the Swedish situation and the syllabus for teaching the
national language Swedish 1 . How much has the school subject Swedish been updated
in relation to changes in society and ways of discussing mother tongue education?
This question is of crucial interest since a new national curriculum for the compulsory
school, preschool class and the leisure-time centre was introduced in 2011 and
syllabuses in all subject areas have been revised. This syllabus for Swedish from 2011
will be compared with the former syllabus from 1994 (here the revised version from
2008 will be used) in order to see if any changes have been made (Skolverket, 2008,
2011a). Initially, an overview of the discussions concerning an extended mother tongue
education will be provided together with a description of the analytical framework
employed to approach the syllabuses for the school subject Swedish. The results of
the analyses will finally be reviewed in light of the discussion concerning an extended
mother tongue education.
An extended view on mother tongue education
Traditionally, the content of mother tongue education has been language and literature.
Basic language skills of reading, writing and talking have dominated primary
grades. In secondary grades the main focus has been on the reading of literature, more
specifically classical literature, and learning about the authors. In the formation and
homogenising of nations, in e.g. the nineteenth century in Europe, mother tongue
education became, as Herrlitz (1994:1) puts it, “an especially powerful weapon in the
fight for standardization and homogeneity”. Beginning in the 1960s this content of
mother tongue education has been questioned and discussed, partly because of the
above mentioned changes in society.
In a series of seminars, starting in Dartmouth in 1966 and proceeding for ten years,
teachers and researchers in the USA, UK and Canada met and discussed the question
of what the school subject English is and can be (Dixon, 1975). Later on, representatives
from Australia joined these seminars. A significant outcome of the seminars was
the identification of three main models of the teaching of English (Dixon, 1975:1). The
first model is described as being formed in an era when initial literacy was the prime
demand. This model aims at teaching the basic skills. The second model focuses on
the cultural heritage and is said to fulfil the function of civilising and socially unifying
content mainly through literature studies. Both of these models were found to
dominate much of mother tongue education. The third and current model, as Dixon
expressed it in 1975, concerns personal growth. This model was seen as a response
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Swedish – An updated school subject?
to the limitations of the two first models, and to some changes in society such as the
increasing recognition of the socio-political contexts in which young people live. In
this way, the seminars tried to define the school subject English by emphasising the
activities we engage in through language, and not only to single out language skills
or cultural heritage.
Similar discussions as those taking place within these Anglo-Saxon seminars are
found in a Swedish context beginning from the early 1970s. Limitations of the skills
model and cultural heritage model when it came to engaging students in learning language
and reading literature were discussed in terms of a crisis of the school subject
Swedish (Brodow et al., 1976). This Swedish discussion around the subject of Swedish
primarily took place in a group consisting of school teachers and researchers at
Lund University called “Pedagogiska gruppen” (in English the Pedagogical Group;
henceforth: PG). The knowledge produced by members of PG and other researchers
has provided a detailed picture of Swedish mother tongue education from both
a historical and contemporary perspective (see e.g. Bergöö, 2005:35-74). Similar to
the Anglo-Saxon context, the personal growth model was very much in the focus of
the PG’s early discussions as an alternative to the models that were dominating in
schools, i.e. the skills model and the cultural heritage model. The personal growth
model was implemented through intervention studies so as to show its strength. In
this model, students’ experiences are used as a launching pad, while the abilities
which the students are expected to develop concern cognitive, communicative as
well as social-psychological aspects (e.g. Malmgren, 1996:89-90). In the mid-1980s,
members of the PG joined forces with colleagues in other countries around Europe
and formed a network on European soil: “The international mother tongue education
network” (henceforth: IMEN; see e.g. Herrlitz, 1994). One aim was to conduct
comparative studies in order to illuminate teaching practices in different countries
and thereby strengthen and enrich the analysis. However, limitations of the personal
growth model were gradually identified in the Anglo-Saxon seminars as well as in
the PG and IMEN. As a consequence, in IMEN a fourth way of discussing mother
tongue education was added to the former three: critical literacy (Ball, 1987). Political,
economic and ideological aspects of language use and literature were at the centre of
this model. In later writings within the Swedish context, Swedish as a school subject
has been discussed as a subject concerned with democratic issues (see e.g. Ewald,
2007; Molloy, 2002) as well as radical aesthetics (Aulin-Gråham et al., 2004). These
positions have been based on a critical literacy perspective, often combined with the
personal growth perspective.
Democratic issues such as those discussed above also lay at the centre of discussions
starting in the early 1980s among a group of teachers and researchers in Australia.
A key issue for this group was the question of students’ possibilities to gain access
to the dominant texts in society. The genre approach was developed as an answer to
this issue (see e.g. Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Martin & Rothery, 1980). In this model,
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Caroline Liberg, Jenny Wiksten Folkeryd & Åsa af Geijerstam
the linguistic characteristics of five fundamental genres – narrating, instructing, describing,
explaining and arguing – are taught explicitly. This is done in order for the
students to become aware of linguistics structures of different genres and to be able
to produce texts in accordance with the purposes they are serving in specific contexts.
The genre approach shares the aim of increasing student power with Freire’s critical
pedagogy (Luke, 1996:313). Luke (1996:321) states that the genre model, Freire’s critical
pedagogy as well as the personal growth model all share the tendency to totalise
power, i.e. “power is treated as something which can be identified, transmitted and
possessed”. As an alternative, Luke (1996:332-333) proposes that the emphasis has to
be put on the relationship between knowledge, texts and difference and the continual
interrogation of power since power is sociologically contingent.
Already in the early 1990s, Luke together with Freebody (Freebody & Luke, 1990)
presented a model of literacy they named “The four resource model”. They tried to
abandon a simplistic view of literacy teaching and suggested that a reader or writer
takes on four different roles. In later writings, they have replaced the term “role” with
the term “family of practice” since “role” tends to have the connotation of individualising
and to be defined a priori for someone to “fit into”. With this shift in terminology
they wanted to “foreground how literacy as a social practice is necessarily tied
up with political, cultural, and social power and capital” (Luke & Freebody, 1999:4).
Literacy thus comprises a repertoire of practices that allows learners to take part in
code-breaking, meaning-making, the use of texts, and critical text-analyses including
text transformation, i.e. practices central to mother tongue education. The practices
are described in the following way (Luke & Freebody, 1999:4-5):
• break the code of written texts by recognizing and using fundamental features
and architecture, including alphabet, sounds in words, spelling, and structural
conventions and patterns;
• participate in understanding and composing meaningful written, visual, and
spoken texts, taking into account each text’s interior meaning systems in
relation to their available knowledge and their experiences of other cultural
discourses, texts, and meaning systems;
• use texts functionally by traversing and negotiating the labor and social relations
around them – that is, by knowing about and acting on the different
cultural and social functions that various texts perform inside and outside
school, and understanding that these functions shape the way texts are structured,
their tone, their degree of formality, and their sequence of components;
• critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not
ideologically natural or neutral – that they represent particular points of views
while silencing others and influence people’s ideas – and that their designs
and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways.
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Similar views on language, language use and, more generally, literacy as found in Luke
and Freebody’s model of literacy practices can also be identified in other researchers’
ways of discussing literacy. In a more detailed study concerning writing research and
the tradition of the teaching of writing, Ivanič (2004) identifies different types of discourses,
or ways of talking about these aspects. According to Ivanič (2004:240), these
discourses of writing research and the teaching of writing also correspond quite well
to discourses of reading research and the teaching of reading. Both the writing and the
reading discussed include situations where non-fiction as well as fiction texts are in
focus. The analysis used by Ivanič is based on a multi-layered view of language where
the textual aspects of language are “embedded within, and inseparable from, mental
and social aspects” (Ivanič, 2004:222). The metaphor of ‘layers’ is used to capture
the sense of embeddedness. The ‘text’, which consists only of the linguistic substance
of language, is at the centre of this multi-layered view of language. It includes visual
and material as well as linguistic characteristics (layer 1; cf. code-breaking). The next
layer includes what happens in the minds of people. It focuses “on ‘languaging’: the
mental processes of meaning-making, and in relation to multimodal meaning-making,
the focus is on ‘design’” (Ivanič, 2004:223) and what type of content is created in the
meaning-making (layer 2; cf. meaning-making). The next layer (layer 3; cf. the using
of texts) encloses the immediate social context in which language is being used: the
purposes for language use as well as the social interaction. The last layer (layer 4; cf.
critical text-analyses) “goes beyond the material facts of language and language use
(represented by layers 1–3) to identify why they are the way they are, sometimes also
with a sociopolitical agenda for contestation of the status quo and action for change”
(Ivanič, 2004:224). It involves a critical eye on traditions, norms and values and thereby
the identities, power positions and privileges associated with different situations of
speaking, reading and writing. These layers of language correspond quite well to Luke
and Freebody’s four literacy practices. In a Swedish context, Liberg and Säljö (2010)
base their discussion on a similar view of language and languaging when discussing
the concept of basic skills in a more extended way than is traditionally done. Further,
Ivanič as well as Liberg and Säljö stress in a similar way as Luke and Freebody that an
extended pedagogy takes account of all four practices (Luke & Freebody, 1999), layers
(Ivanič, 2004), or dimensions (Liberg & Säljö 2010).
Analysis
The research discussed above has created different ways to talk about mother tongue
education, i.e. a metalanguage has been developed. The metalanguage created within
these more comprehensive views of language and languaging will form the basis for
the following discourse analysis of the two syllabuses of the subject Swedish in Lpo94
(revised version 2008) and Lgr11 (Skolverket, 2008, 2011a). More specifically, Ivanič’s
models will be used in order to discuss the different sections in these syllabuses in
terms of which layers and thereby which aspects of the school subject are foregrounded
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in these sections. The goal of the analysis is to present a description and comparison
of the discourses as they are constructed in the syllabus of the subject of Swedish in
Lpo94 and Lgr11.
Syllabuses in Lpo 94
In the curriculum for the compulsory school system, the pre-school class and the
leisure-time centre Lpo94 (Skolverket, 2008), the syllabuses are organised in six main
sections. Initially, the aim of the subject and its role in education is expressed. This
section covers how the subject contributes to fulfilling the goals of the curriculum
and gives general reasons for studying the subject in question. Following this more
general introduction to the subject, goals to aim for clarify the orientation of the work
in school. These goals specify the qualitative development desired in school and serve
as the main basis for the planning of teaching as they give the direction the subject
should take in terms of developing students’ knowledge. The third section presents
the structure and nature of the subject, thus commenting on the core of the subject
as well as specific aspects and perspectives of the subject. Following these sections,
the minimum goals that all students should have attained by the end of the third,
fifth and ninth year in school are specified. Below, these sections will be commented
on from the analytical perspective presented above.
The subject of Swedish in Lpo94
The two sections Aim of the subject and Structure and nature of the subject are similar
in the sense that they both focus on the overall purpose of speaking, reading and
writing different types of texts in various contexts (layer 3). In these sections there is
also a focus on the traditions, norms and values associated with different situations
of speaking, reading and writing (layer 4).
This can, for example, be seen in the following quotation from the section Aim of
the subject where the focus is put on the importance of language for the development
of identity and how the subject should develop an understanding of cultural diversity
(Skolverket, 2008:83) 2 :
The subject of Swedish aims at strengthening the pupils’ identity and their understanding
of people from different cultural backgrounds.
The importance of language as well as literature (expressed and presented through
various texts and forms of expression) for developing identity and cultural understanding
is further stressed in the section Structure and Nature of the subject (Skolverket,
2008:85):
Work with language and literature creates opportunities for satisfying pupils’ needs to express
what they feel and think. It provides common experiences to reflect over and discuss.
It provides knowledge of the Swedish language, of different cultural heritages and our sur-
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rounding world. Assimilating and working through a text does not necessarily imply reading,
it may involve listening, drama, role plays, films, videos and looking at pictures.
As can be seen from the above example, language and literature are treated as equally
important. However, in the sections which more directly specify the qualitative direction
desired in school, the subject is to some extent differently constructed. For example,
in the section Goals to aim for, the discourse comments on all of the four layers
described in the initial part of this paper. Yet a specific emphasis is put on speaking,
reading and writing texts with different purposes in various contexts (layer 3). Language
rather than literature serves as the focus of discussion (Skolverket, 2008:84):
The school in its teaching of Swedish should aim to ensure that pupils develop their ability
to read, understand, interpret and experience texts of different kinds and adapt their reading
and work on texts to its purpose and character.
This difference in what is foregrounded in the subject of Swedish becomes even more
prominent when comparing the sections discussed above with the sections that specify
what all students at a minimum should have attained by the end of the third, fifth
and ninth year in school.
In the goals to be attained by the end of the third year the attention is turned more
towards the craftsmanship of reading and writing and, more specifically, decoding
(layer 1) and towards the actual contents of the texts (layer 2). Students should for
example “be able to read with fluency texts that are familiar and closely related to their
specific contexts or, be able to spell correctly, words which they themselves often use
when writing and words which frequently recur in texts related to their specific contexts”
(Skolverket, 2008:87). This could of course be expected from the first school years
when the fundaments of literacy are built. It is notable, however, that the mentioning of
norms and values of the subject is completely omitted in these formulations for grade 3.
When comparing the goals to be attained by the end of the third year with subsequent
years, a progression can be noted that primarily has to do with a shift towards
reading and writing for different purposes and in different contexts (layers 2 and 3).
By the end of year 5 students should, for example (Skolverket, 2008:87-88):
– be able to read with fluency, both aloud and to themselves, and understand events and
meaning in books and non-fiction written for children and young persons, and be able to
discuss their experiences from reading, as well as reflect over texts,
– be able to produce texts for different purposes as a tool for learning and communication
By the end of year nine, students are to a larger extent expected to reflect upon their
activities, as expressed in the following quotation (Skolverket, 2008:88):
– Students should be able to read literature appropriate to their age from Sweden, the Nordic
area, and other countries, and also read non-fiction and newspaper articles on general
subjects, as well as be able to reproduce the contents coherently and also reflect on this.
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In sum, it is noted that the subject of Swedish is to some extent differently constructed
in the different parts of the syllabus. The craftsmanship of reading and writing different
texts in various contexts is foregrounded in the sections which more directly
guide the planning of teaching. Traditions, norms and values and thereby the identities,
power positions and privileges associated with different situations of speaking,
reading and writing are foregrounded in the parts which present the core and the
overall purpose of the subject. These discussions of norms and values are, however,
not operationalised to any substantial degree in the sections that more directly guide
the direction the subject should take in terms of developing students’ knowledge. It is
noted that although literature is commented on in most passages, the more specific
formulations concern the language part of the subject rather than aspects of literature.
Syllabuses in Lgr11
In the curriculum for the compulsory school, preschool class and the leisure-time
centre 2011 (Skolverket, 2011a), the structure and headings for each school subject
differ from Lpo94 (Skolverket, 2008). Following a very short introduction to the subject
in question in the syllabuses in Lgr11, the aim is formulated. This section closes
with a bulleted list that sums up the main aims of the subject. In the next section,
the core content of the subject is presented separately for grades 1–3, 4–6, and 7–9.
Finally, the knowledge requirements are formulated for grades 3, 6 and 9. For grades
6 and 9 the knowledge requirements are formulated in relation to grades A, C and E
in terms of what a student is able to do. The difference between these grades is more
or less a question about grading according to intensity, e.g. using reading strategies
in a basically functional way (grade E), an appropriate way (grade C), and an appropriate
and effective way (grade A). In this analysis, we focus on grade E, i.e. the
lowest grade possible in order to pass.
The subject of Swedish in Lgr11
In the short introduction to the subject of Swedish in Lgr11, it is declared that “Language
is the primary tool human beings use for thinking, communicating and learning”
(Skolverket, 2011a:222). It is also stated that language is a means for developing
identity. A combination of layers 3 and 4 is well represented in this section which in
total consists of five lines of text. The motivation for the subject of Swedish here is
that a rich and varied language is a necessary tool for functioning in a society. On the
other hand, literature as such is not mentioned at all.
In the next section the aim of the subject Swedish is elaborated. Already in the first
line it is stressed that students should receive the opportunity to develop knowledge
in and about the Swedish language. Throughout this section language is much more
foregrounded than literature. When, in the third paragraph, literature is mentioned
for the first time, it is followed by a statement that it is also important that students
develop their knowledge concerning non-fiction texts (Skolverket, 2011a:222):
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In teaching, pupils should meet and acquire knowledge about literature from different periods
and different parts of the world. Teaching should also help to ensure that pupils develop
their knowledge of various forms of non-fiction. When encountering different types of texts,
performing arts and other aesthetic narratives, pupils should be given the preconditions to
develop their language, their own identity and their understanding of the surrounding world.
The predominant aspect dealt with in this section is that the students should meet
different types of texts in various media and develop an ability to adapt language to
different purposes, recipients and contexts (layer 3). Less foregrounded, but still in
focus, are the aspects concerning language structure (layer 1) and students’ ability to
use language and express themselves (layer 2). As seen in the above quote, the possibility
for students to be able to develop their identity and their understanding of
the surrounding world is included in this section. Further, their ability to critically
evaluate information is mentioned (layer 4). All layers are thus represented in this
section, albeit to varying degrees, as well as in the summing up of the aim in five bulleted
lines. In these lines it is stated that teaching in the subject of Swedish should
give students opportunities to develop their ability to (Skolverket, 2011a:222-223):
• express themselves and communicate in speech and writing;
• read and analyse literature and other texts for different purposes;
• adapt language to different purposes, recipients and contexts;
• identify language structures and follow language norms; and
• search for information from different sources, and evaluate these.
The next section describes the core content of the subject. This core content is extensively
formulated in bulleted lists and arranged under five subheadings. These are
Reading and writing, Speaking, listening and talking, Narrative texts and nonfiction
texts, Use of language and Searching for information and critical evaluation
of sources. The same subheadings recur under each grade span 1–3, 4–6 and 7–9. As
in the aim, all four layers are represented in the core content for all grades. But there
is a shift in focus compared to the section describing the aim. The development of
language skills and formal aspects of language, speaking, reading and writing (layer
1) has a much more prominent position in the core content than it had in the earlier
sections. This is even more pronounced in the lower grades than in the upper grades.
The picture found in the core content is largely repeated in the next section concerned
with knowledge requirements. But there is one important exception. In the
knowledge requirements for grade 3 it is not possible to find any instances concerning
critical evaluation or a focus on the traditions, norms and values (layer 4). In grade 6
(grade E) this is something that is touched upon but not clearly expressed. In contrast,
in the knowledge requirements for grade 9 (grade E ) this aspect can be noticed, as is
shown in the following quotation (Skolverket, 2011a:230). (Words in bold are those
words that will be upgraded in the higher grades C and A.)
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Pupils can search for, select and compile information from a relatively varied range of
sources and then apply developed and relatively well informed reasoning to the credibility
and relevance of their sources and information.
Moreover, a commentary on the syllabus concerning the subject of Swedish is published
(Skolverket, 2011b). This commentary claims to provide a broader and more
profound understanding of the syllabus. The analysis shows that the core content
of the curriculum is motivated, reformulated and specified in different ways in this
commentary, but some aspects are more motivated and specified than others. Such
examples include comments on handwriting and the organising and editing of text
by hand and by using computers on one hand, and multimodal texts on the other
hand (layer 1). Another well-motivated aspect has to do with the learning of reading
strategies (layer 2), which can be found in the core content as well as in the knowledge
requirements for all grades. The negative trend in the Swedish results from the
international study PIRLS (Progress in international reading literacy study) is used
as a motive for strengthening this more basic aspect of reading. In general, the results
from PIRLS are referred to quite extensively in the commentary. The position
of literature in the syllabus is also discussed in the commentary and its importance
is stated. The reading of literature is motivated by referring to the development of
students’ identities and for the pleasure of reading (layer 4 and 2). It is worth noting
that in the commentary it is proclaimed that a literary canon is not to be used.
Comparison between Lpo94 and Lgr11
When comparing the syllabus concerning the subject Swedish in Lpo94 and Lgr11
(Skolverket, 2008, 2011a), the difference in structure is quite obvious. The most notable
change is the shift from “goals to attain” in Lpo94 to “knowledge requirements” in Lgr11.
Another important structural difference is the explicit articulation of the core content
in Lgr11 without any correspondence in Lpo94. The layout with five subheadings and
bulleted lists helps to highlight this section of the syllabus. The commentary which is
published separately from the syllabus of the subject of Swedish in Lgr11 has no real
counterpart in Lpo94, except for the short comments and motivations included in the
section concerning the structure and nature of the subject.
One aspect that is less foregrounded in Lpo94 but stressed in Lgr11 concerns
knowledge about the languages in the Nordic area and about the national minority
languages. This content is thoroughly motivated in the separately published commentary
by referring to the fact that students are today less able to understand each
other between the Nordic countries, and that knowledge about these languages
will provide increased opportunities to communicate with people in the Nordic
countries and to study and work in our neighbouring countries. Some regulatory
documents are quoted in the commentary as mandatory motives for teaching the
national minority languages.
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However, several similarities can be found in the syllabuses concerning the subject
Swedish. The first to be noted here is the overall focus on language rather than literature
in both syllabuses, even though this feature is articulated to a larger degree
in Lgr11. There is a tendency in both documents for the subject of Swedish to be
constructed differently in different sections. In sections which deal with the overall
description and aim of the subject, a combination of the purposes for and context of
language use (layer 3) and a critical perspective (layer 4) are emphasised to a larger
extent than in sections which more directly guide the direction the subject should
take in terms of developing students’ knowledge. In those sections, a combination of
formal aspects of language, speaking, reading and writing (layer 1) and the purposes
for, and context of, language use (layer 3) are stressed much more. A final similarity
to be mentioned here concerns the prominent position of the skills of reading and
writing (layer 1) and the neglecting of a socio-political view on language and languaging
(layer 4) in the early grades.
Swedish – An updated school subject?
As stated in the introduction, changes in society have served as important motives
for discussing an extended view on what could be included in mother tongue education.
In this discussion different types of teaching models (Ball, 1987; Dixon, 1975;
Herrlitz, 1994; Luke & Freebody, 1999) have been identified and contrasted. What is
in focus in this article is the extent to which the current syllabus of the school subject
of Swedish has been updated in relation to such discussions and extended views on
mother tongue education.
Analysis of the syllabus of the school subject Swedish in Lgr11 as well as in Lpo94
shows a change in focus when moving successively from the introductory section
of the syllabus over to the knowledge requirements in Lgr11 and the goals to attain
in Lpo94. Similar results are presented by Lundström et al. (2011) who have also
analysed the syllabus concerning the school subject of Swedish in Lgr11, but with a
focus on literature. Superimposed on this change in focus, it is possible to identify an
expanding movement concerning a socio-political view on language and languaging
(layer 4) in fiction as well as non-fiction texts from the early grades and onwards.
These results will be discussed in more detail below.
Three subjects of Swedish
The incoherence in the syllabus found in the analysis of both Lpo94 and Lgr11 opens
up for the interpretation that the subject of Swedish in fact consists of several subjects.
A first school subject of Swedish with quite a wide scope is found in the introductory
sections where the aim is described in the syllabus, and in Lpo94 an overall description
of the structure and nature of the subject is given. These introductory sections in both
Lpo94 and Lgr11 indicate quite an extensive view by emphasising one or more aspects
of the four layers described by Ivanič (2004), i.e. aspects of a text, meaning-making,
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the use of different texts and a socio-political perspective on these three first layers.
Using Luke and Freebody’s (1999) terminology, it could thus be concluded that the
practices of code-breaking, meaning-making, the use of texts and a critical perspective
are all indicated. Even though all of these layers or practices are discussed in these
introductory sections, it is possible to identify a more extensive focus on the use of
different texts than on the other layers or practices. The focus on the use of different
texts implies that literature is seen as just one type of text that should be studied. This
is a first indication in the syllabus, more so in Lgr11 than in Lpo94, that literature is
moved into the background while language and language skills are brought into the
foreground (also see Lundström et al., 2011). This emphasis on the use of different
text-types may be interpreted as a consequence of an increasing interest in the genre
approach in Sweden (e.g. Axelsson et al., 2006; Magnusson, 2008). Further, when a
critical perspective is treated, power does not seem to be viewed as contingent. This
is in accordance with a genre approach according to Luke (1996:333). The critical
perspective is neither explicitly stated to include, as is done by both Ivanič (2004:224)
and Luke and Freebody (1999:5), a contestation of the status quo, action for change,
and possible transformations and redesigning of texts, which are important aspects
of a socio-political agenda.
A second school subject of Swedish is found in the syllabus’ sections which more
directly guide the management of teaching and the development of students’ knowledge
as seen in “goals to attain” in Lpo94 and “core content” and “knowledge requirements”
in Lgr11. Here the emphasis is, to a much larger degree than in the earlier sections,
on formal aspects of language, speaking, reading and writing (layer 1) in combination
with the purposes for and context of language use in different contexts (layer 3).
A somewhat more narrow and specified subject thus emerges in these sections. The
specification concerns more general, formal aspects of speaking, reading and writing,
and of spoken and written texts (phonological/orthographical, morphological and
syntactical) and, more specifically, formal aspects of the macrostructures of different
types of texts. The more general formal aspects have traditionally been strong in syllabuses
of Swedish as a school subject (Bergöö, 2005:35-74). The teaching of skills,
especially reading and writing skills, has long dominated the subject and, as shown in
many current studies, the skills discourse is still quite dominant in teaching practices
(e.g. Skolverket, 2007a:8). This is one important part of the “powerful weapon in the
fight for standardization and homogeneity” (Herrlitz, 1994:1). Further, the focusing
on different types of texts and the specification of their macrostructures can, as stated
earlier, be interpreted as a consequence of introducing the genre approach to Sweden. A
question that could be asked is if this change to include more text-types, and also study
their formal macrostructures, is a more modern version of such a powerful weapon in
the fight for standardisation and homogeneity. In light of Luke’s (1996:321) perspective
on the concept of power within the genre approach as something which can be identified,
transmitted and possessed, an affirmative answer may be given to this question.
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Swedish – An updated school subject?
Lundström et al. (2011:22) have pointed out yet another reason for the imbalance
between literature and language. The area of literature in the Lgr11 is, according to
them, reduced to something measureable in the knowledge requirements and concerns
knowledge about literature rather than what is possible to experience and learn
through literature. This shift is in line with the increased focus on assessment in Sweden,
as well as in many other countries, through national as well as international tests.
The “teaching to the test” syndrome, where the knowledge requirements take over, is
a very imminent danger. Both the impact of results from the international studies and
the way of assessing students’ abilities in these studies must be considered in order
to understand the continued survival of the tradition on teaching language skills.
For example, in the commentary material accompanying Lgr 11 concerning Swedish,
results from the PIRLS international study are used as a motive for strengthening the
more basic aspect of reading, which better lends itself to measurement. Likewise, the
shift in terminology from “goals to attain” in Lpo94 to “knowledge requirements” in
Lgr11 points in this direction.
This second school subject of Swedish identified in the syllabuses can actually be
seen as having two facets when comparing the lower grades to the middle and, especially,
the upper grades of compulsory school. As a consequence, it is possible to talk
about a third school subject of Swedish. As concluded from the analysis of Lpo94 and
Lgr11, one can identify that the presence of the socio-political view on language and
languaging (layer 4) increases from the early grades onwards. In the early grades, a
critical perspective is merely mentioned in the core content in Lgr11, but is not present
at all in the goals to attain in Lpo94 or the knowledge requirements in Lgr11 for grade
3. It is, on the other hand, more explicitly stated in the corresponding sections for
the middle grades, and even more so for the upper grades. However, as mentioned
earlier, the critical perspective does not at all include aspects such as contestation of
the status quo, action for change, and possible transformations and redesigning of
texts (see Ivanič 2004:224; Luke & Freebody, 1999:5).
As shown, a difference in focus between lower and upper grades is identified.
However, it has quite a different appearance compared to the traditional difference
between primary and secondary grades mentioned in the introduction. From the
start of the school system controlled by central government in Sweden in the midnineteenth
century, mother tongue education in Sweden has been divided in such a
way that the teaching of skills, especially reading and writing skills, has dominated
the primary years of school. Later on in school, for those few students who up until
the early 1960s went on to secondary levels in Sweden, teaching was instead centred
on questions concerning literature and the cultural heritage (Thavenius, 1999). “Students
should first learn to read and write, and then go on to read and write in order to
learn” is a saying that captures the heart of this tradition. In a situation like the one
we have today where literature has obtained a much more withdrawn position and
language and language skills have taken on a more prominent position, this saying
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has to be changed. A more updated version would keep the first part intact, and alter
the second part, i.e. “Students should first learn to read and write, and then go on to
learn to read and write in a more critical manner”.
The lack of a critical perspective in the early school years can be connected to two
traditions that still strongly influence teaching in Swedish schools. The first one, as
discussed above, is that teaching in early grades has had, and still has, a strong focus
on formal aspects. A parallel to this tradition is found in studies of early literacy.
Most of these studies have focused formal aspects and very few have studied the
child as an ideological person. Socio-political perspectives are thus invisible or very
much downgraded in preschool and lower grades. “‘Innocent’ children, adults may
feel, should be free from such complexities, free to play on playground and paper”,
says Dyson (1997:166) in her study of students in a primary classroom. She is one of
very few researchers who have shown how children in preschool and primary grades,
through their writing and discussions concerning their writing, can be viewed as
“active contributors to evolving communities that both draw on and influence larger
culture systems” (Dyson, 1997:6). She states that (Dyson, 1997:4):
In this view [a dialogic vision of language developed by Bakhtin (1981, 1986)], learning to
use language involves learning to interact with others in particular social situations and, at
the same time, learning to be, so to speak, within the dominant ideologies or ‘truths’ about
human relationships; that is, it involves learning about the words available in certain situations
to a boy or girl, to a person of a particular age, ethnicity, race, class, religion, and so on.
Updated without losing track of traditions
As can be seen from the analysis and the discussion of the findings, there is a successive
change in the school subject of Swedish from Lpo94 to Lgr11 concerning the
balance between literature and language, with the result that language and language
skills today hold a much more prominent position within compulsory school. In the
present article, this change has been shown to be connected to an increasing interest
in the genre approach in Sweden, and its response to inequalities concerning access
to dominant genres in society. The syllabus of the school subject of Swedish especially
in Lgr11 can therefore be said to be updated with fundamental aspects of the genre
approach. Even though it is possible to identify this updated aspect in the syllabus in
Lgr11, at least two older traditions are still alive and have an even stronger position
today than earlier. The first concerns the focus on the formal aspects of language. In
the application of the genre approach, this formal tradition strikes back. In Lgr11 the
more static “text-type” concept is chosen instead of the more dynamically oriented
“genre” concept in terms of genre as a social process (Skolverket 2011b:16). The different
text-types highlighted are further treated from a formal point of view by focusing
on their macrostructures. The second tradition that is still alive concerns the lack of a
socio-political perspective in the lower grades, and the apparently low-key character
of this perspective in the upper grades.
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Even though there have been intensive discussions around an extended view of what
can be included in mother tongue education, very little of this has had an impact on
the syllabus of mother tongue education in Sweden in its latest version from 2011.
There are several causes of this situation, for example the political agenda in society,
and the test-focused era we are now living in (also see Lundström et al. 2011). What
can be done from a research perspective is to show how these extended views may be
captured and constructed with an even more delicate way of talking, a metalanguage,
about the issues at stake. This seems to be most pressing concerning the socio-political
layer, especially in the earlier grades.
Notes
1 There are two syllabuses in Sweden concerning the national language: “Swedish” and “Swedish as a second language”.
“Swedish as a second language” is an option for all students who have a first language other than Swedish. These students
can thus choose to study either “Swedish” or “Swedish as a second language”. They also have the possibility of studying their
own mother tongue. This last type of teaching is nowadays called mother tongue education in Sweden. This should not be
confused with the English term, which usually refers to teaching the national or standard language. In this article we will
focus on the syllabus of “Swedish” and use the English term “mother tongue education” for the teaching of the national and
standard language, i.e. Swedish.
2 The Swedish syllabuses translated into English are downloaded from the website of the Swedish National Agency for
Education.
Caroline Liberg is Professor in Educational Sciences, specialized in reading and learning processes,
at Uppsala University. The last thirty years she has conducted research in the areas of early literacy
and literacy in different content areas in school.
Jenny Wiksten Folkeryd is Assistant Professor in curriculum studies at the Department of Education
at Uppsala University. Her main research interests include reading and writing development in
early school years, language across the curriculum, text analysis and assessment.
Åsa af Geijerstam is Assistant Professor in curriculum studies at the Department of Education at
Uppsala university. Her research interests include reading and writing development in different
educational practices. She has participated in research projects on reading and writing across the
curriculum and reading comprehension in international tests.
491

Caroline Liberg, Jenny Wiksten Folkeryd & Åsa af Geijerstam
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494

Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 495–511
EDU.
INQ.
‘Beating about the bush’ on the how
and why in elementary school science
Britt Jakobson* & Monica Axelsson**
In this article we examine teacher instruction on scientific literacy tasks and teacher expression
of ultimate and subordinate purposes during one teaching sequence of a science unit. By using a
Practical Epistemology Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar we can provide a view of the
direction learning takes and the consequences for student text production. The material comprises
transcribed audio recordings of teacher instruction, students’ pair work and written texts. The results
show that the students are mainly involved in hands-on activities while aspects of scientific literacy
are not foregrounded. Language use is dominantly spoken and, when written text is requested, no
explicit instruction on how to write is given, resulting in a variety of texts from ‘more-spoken-like’
to ‘more-written-like’ without adhering to scientific genre. Ultimate purposes are never expressed
while subordinate purposes are to some extent made explicit, but obscured by the dominant focus
on ‘doing’, resulting in uncertainty about why the activity is requested. As a result, the learning
direction is not always in accordance with teacher intention.
Keywords: elementary school science, purpose, scientific literacy
Introduction
In this article we examine teacher instruction on scientific literacy tasks and teacher
expression of ultimate and subordinate purposes during one teaching sequence of a
science unit. By doing this we can provide a view of the direction learning takes and
the consequences for student text production.
A central prerequisite for developing the kind of knowledge expected by the school
system is to learn how to use the specific language connected to a subject. Each school
subject has its specific ways of structuring knowledge and students have to be able
to handle the lexicogrammar, i.e. both the words and grammatical structure of the
subject. Science teachers have commonly focused on the technical terms while it is
more the grammar that poses the greatest difficulties for understanding or, as Halliday
and Martin (1993:71) put it, “it is the total effect of wording – words and structures”.
In all subjects, language is the key to understanding and presenting content as well
as managing activities (Schleppegrell, 2004). Lemke expresses this as “the mastery
of science is mainly a matter of learning how to talk science” (1990:153), i.e. learning
how the meanings of words are related to each other, and to understand what is relevant
to talk about in a given situation (Halliday, 1994; Holmberg & Karlsson, 2006).
*Department of Mathematics and Science Education, Stockholm University, Sweden, britt.jakobson@mnd.su.se. **Department
of Language Education, Stockholm University, Sweden, monica.axelsson@isd.su.se.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 495–511
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Britt Jakobson, Monica Axelsson
When the “scientific literacy” concept was introduced (Halliday & Martin, 1993), the
focus expanded further to include reading, writing and later on multimodal ways of
expressing scientific content. An important difference between spoken and written
text is that speech normally accompanies action while written text is contextually more
independent and can stand alone. For a learner, reading, writing and multimodality
involves drawing on grammatical resources other than speaking, such as controlling
the referential items in understanding and creating a context-independent text.
Christie (2003:292) formulates this as “the language of a written text constitutes the
meanings involved, while speech is more typically ancillary to it”. Students have to
recognise the linguistic usage that is relevant in a specific situation and be able to
move between scientific language and everyday language (Carlsen, 2007; Halliday &
Martin, 1993; Martin, 1993; Reveles & Brown, 2008). The acquisition of the linguistic
resources needed for school learning is connected to exposure to reading and writing
experiences. Students acquire speech “naturally”, but for reading and writing they
need a mentor, be it parent or teacher (Wells, 1999). The pedagogical consequence is
that students have to be introduced to and guided through the language of schooling
and to the linguistic patterns of different subjects. In science, the technical language
adds precision and simplifies the scientific discourse while at the same time constructing
reality in a way that results in a distancing from everyday speech (Wells, 1999).
Previous research
The importance of teachers as conversational partners is highlighted by Peterson and
French (2008). They investigated how preschool children’s vocabulary and scientific
understanding were promoted by teachers’ supportive questions during hands-on
science activities. The result shows how teachers’ scaffolding talk enhanced children’s
opportunities to predict and explain what would happen when different colours were
mixed. They conclude that collaborative conversations are important when preschool
children are learning to talk science and learning to investigate scientific phenomena.
The role of scientific inquiry in enhancing students’ learning of science as well as their
linguistic development has resulted in a mixed picture that depends on how language
use is described (Amaral, Garrison & Klentschy, 2002; Dawes, 2004; Haneda & Wells,
2010; Wallace, 2004). Dawes (2004:693) contends that scientific inquiry is beneficial
to learning science as it “involves encouraging children to find ways to verify or establish
a joint understanding”, which hence demands a specific use of language. Likewise,
Wallace (2004) means that scientific language gets its meaning when incorporated
with authentic experiences. Amaral et al. (2002) used the STC programme (Science
and Technology for Children) when investigating how scientific activities in bilingual
classrooms in elementary school hold significance for learning science and for students’
linguistic development. They argue that scientific inquiry enhances English language
learners’ (ELLs) learning of science as well as their learning of English as it promotes
students to talk and investigate in cooperative groups. By working together, students
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‘Beating about the bush’ on how and why in elementary school science
talk about the experiences using words that are somewhat new to them supported by
the teacher. Accordingly, it is argued, students’ vocabulary is increased as they learn to
use new words when involved in scientific activities (Amaral et al., 2002). However, in
her often cited magnetism example, Gibbons (2006) showed the differences between
four texts connected to ten-year-old students’ scientific inquiry in relation to the texts’
situation on a continuum from ‘more-spoken-like’ to ‘more-written-like’. Text one is
spoken, face-to-face, with exophoric references like (this, these, that). Text two is spoken
monologue presenting results from a personal point of view. The third text is written
with a time distance between action and presentation acknowledging the request for
nominal explicitness. Finally, the fourth text is from a child’s encyclopedia making
use of lexical density, nominalisation and process details common to science texts.
The pedagogical point made by Gibbons (2006) is that if science inquiry is to expand
students’ proficiency in expressing themselves on a scientific topic there has to be a
variety of linguistic activities connected to the action. To merely talk when doing the
investigation does not evoke the need to use technical terms or scientific grammar.
Instead, students benefit from a guided sequence with a variety of linguistic demands
when moving from spoken to written scientific language. In this study we will analyse
the various linguistic activities appearing in the science classroom to make evident the
students’ possibilities to move between every-day language and scientific language.
Roberts (1982) analysed textbooks and found seven curriculum emphases which
could be said to answer the question “Why should I learn this?”, i.e. the purpose of
a part of a textbook. Moreover, the significance of an explicitly presented purpose
in science topics has been underscored for students’ possibilities to act in meaningful
ways (Johansson & Wickman, 2011; Wickman & Ligozat, 2011). Johansson and
Wickman (2011) distinguish between proximate or student-centred purpose and
ultimate or overall purpose, which together constitute the organising purposes of a
teaching sequence. They give as an example young students investigating why cars
have tyres. In this situation the proximate purpose of the investigation, learning why
cars have tyres, was made explicit to the students. However, the ultimate purpose,
learning about friction, was implicit, meaning that the organising purposes were not
related. Metz (2004) presents a parallel taxonomy for scientific purposes when she
argues that the goal structure is hierarchical. Her notion of a top-level goal can be
seen as synonymous to Johansson’s and Wickman’s (2011) ultimate purpose and the
suggested sub-goals can be compared to proximate purposes. The sub-goals proposed
by Metz (2004) open up the possibility of dividing proximate purposes into several
subgroups, thereby constituting a hierarchical structure. In this study, we will use
ultimate purpose for the overall purpose, i.e. the purpose of the topic, and subordinate
purposes for the explicitly or implicitly indicated purpose of each activity.
In this article, we examine how ultimate and subordinate purposes of a science unit
are presented to and understood by elementary school students and the consequences
of teacher instruction and literacy tasks for students’ language use.
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Theoretical framework
Practical Epistemology
A practical epistemology takes its stance in Dewey (1938/1997), the later Wittgenstein
(1953/1992) and socio-cultural perspectives. Learning is considered as active and as
a part of the meaning-making process. Actions are seen as situated in whole activities
having consequences for how the ways of learning influence which route learning
takes (e.g. Harré & Gillett, 1994; Wertsch, 1995). This is in line with Lave (1996),
who argues that learning is always taking place. Consequently, experiences from a
specific purpose are continually transformed in interaction with the surrounding
world, which is in accordance with Dewey’s (1938/1997) principle of continuity. Yet
there might be a problem in that learning does not always proceed in the intended
direction demanded by, for example, a teacher (Rogoff, 1990). This can be due to a
lack or indistinctness of purpose. Dewey (1938/1997:67) believed “a purpose is an
end-view”, making it possible to foresee the consequences of our actions. Hence,
purpose is tied to Dewey’s principle of continuity. Moreover, we take our stance in
Wittgenstein’s language-games. Wittgenstein (1953/1992) argued that words obtain
their meaning in use in a specific situation which constitutes a language-game. Accordingly,
we have to study a particular situation, itself situated in a language-game,
in order to understand the meaning of the words used (Harré & Gillett, 1994; Wittgenstein,
1953/1992).
When employing a Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA) the unit of analysis is
similar to that in socio-cultural perspectives, meaning that a PEA is concerned with
actions as situated in whole activities (e.g. Harré & Gillett, Wertsch, 1995). A PEA
comprises four operational terms, i.e. stand fast, relation, gap and encounter (Wickman,
2004; Wickman & Östman, 2002). In order to maintain an interaction, the
interlocutors need to agree on what the discussion is about in a specific situation. The
concept used in a PEA for this agreement is stand fast. That which stands fast is what
is immediately intelligible to the interlocutors and not questioned. Something that
stands fast is not static but changes with a specific discourse in different encounters
between people and between people and the surrounding world, including earlier experiences.
Accordingly, relations to what is standing fast are construed in encounters
and one example to illustrate this came from Maj and Ode when observing a soil test,
sand, using magnifying glasses:
Maj: Look! This is black. Under here it is black...Look! It looks like a worm...It looks like a
worm... Look! It looks like a worm.
Ode: Yeah, a worm.
Maj immediately construed the relation looks like a worm to this, i.e. something
black, which was fully intelligible to Ode, it stood fast to her, which was shown in
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‘Beating about the bush’ on how and why in elementary school science
her saying Yeah, a worm. Accordingly, the girls noticed a gap, under here it’s black,
which to them was strange as sand is usually not black. In construing relations to
what stands fast, there is a need to notice gaps and mostly gaps are filled immediately
as in the above example or questions might be asked in order to clarify the meaning.
If gaps are not filled with new relations, they are said to be lingering. In such situations,
learning either comes to a halt or takes a direction other than that intended
by the teacher. Accordingly, construing relations to what stands fast from a specific
purpose has consequences for what is learned. In this study, this is connected to the
presentation and understanding of the ultimate purpose of the topic and the explicit
or implicit subordinate purposes of each activity.
Systemic functional grammar
Functional grammar builds on Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar
(SFG). Within SFG, the focus is on people’s relations to each other (as opposed to
PEA where a relation is construed with what is standing fast) and how meaning is
expressed in different ways in different situations (Holmberg & Karlsson, 2006). SFG
describes language as systematically organised according to the functions it has to
fulfil (Holmberg, 2011). Language is seen as a system of resources for making meaning
and the focus is on the linguistic choices people make in different contexts. SFG has
contributed to our knowledge of both language development and language education
and has, in Australia, constituted a basis for writing instruction with a focus on minority
and second-language speakers. Over the years, the analysis of written texts has
expanded to all school subjects focusing on the specific genres typical of each subject
(Halliday & Martin, 1993; Schleppegrell, 2004; Veel, 1997). Genres central to scientific
discourse are procedures for observing and experimenting, procedural recounts for
reporting on observations and experiments, reports that classify and describe and
explanations of causes and effects (Martin & Rose, 2008; Veel, 1997). There is an
overall understanding about the difficulties in scientific discourse and Halliday and
Martin present a list of general difficulties characterising English scientific discourse:
interlocking definitions, technical taxonomies, special expressions, lexical density,
syntactic ambiguity, grammatical metaphor and semantic discontinuity (1993). The
pedagogical assumption is that explicitness about a subject’s linguistic demands is
particularly beneficial for learners’ successful achievement (Magnusson, 2009).
An ideational grammatical analysis, i.e. how the grammar describes experiences of
the world, of the teacher’s instruction, students’ speech and writing, will be performed
to reveal how the texts are grammatically construed and how the texts elucidate
content and message. An ideational transitivity analysis of the abovementioned texts
will be made, focusing on the processes and primary participants (Hallesson, 2011;
Karlsson, 2011). Four processes will be distinguished: material, mental, verbal and
relational. The respective primary participants in these processes are actor in material
processes, senser in mental processes, speaker in verbal and carrier, the identified or
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Britt Jakobson, Monica Axelsson
the existing in the relational processes (Halliday, 1994). By analysing process meaning
clause by clause it is possible to see what happens in the texts and how relations
between the participants are built.
The use of both PEA and SFG is an attempt to bring together and combine analytical
tools from the fields of science education and linguistics. The different units of analyses
yield different contributions. When using a PEA one can examine the direction learning
takes in a specific situation. A SFG analysis gives visibility to language use and
registers. Together, PEA and SFG strengthen the analyses and connect the two fields.
The study setting
The material in this study was collected by one of the authors (Britt Jakobson, henceforth
BJ) in a suburban school in Sweden, chosen for its mix of mono- and multilingual
students and the teacher’s science teaching. The participating teacher had joined inservice
courses, which is a prerequisite for using the material in the STC programme
(Science and Technology for Children) to be able to teach science since science was
not included in his teacher education. The STC programme has been developed in the
USA to promote young students’ learning in science and comprises teacher guides,
students’ work sheets and big boxes with the artefacts to be used during hands-on
inquiries. BJ visited one grade 2 class (8–9 years old) during a science unit that lasted
for three months. The 31 students were involved in a hands-on inquiry unit in geology,
Soil, which is part of the Swedish version of STC. The Soil unit involves whole class
interactions as well as pair and small group inquiries. The students were told that the
researcher was interested in them talking science in class and in what they learned
during the discussions. As the students were young, their parents or custodians were
informed and asked to give written consent to their children participating in the study
with the right to withdraw the consent at any time. The students’ and teacher’s names
are fictitious in the study.
In this article, we present the results from one lesson taking place in the middle of
the unit. The reason for choosing this lesson was that the students were involved in a
hands-on inquiry and, in addition, had been asked to write a longer text on the topic
taught, in contrast to generally filling in work sheets. The collected material consists of
audio recordings of pair or small group conversations and students’ written texts during
one lesson that lasted about 2 hours. This means that audio recordings were made
of four group conversations and of the teacher’s, carrying a microphone, instructions,
resulting in about 10 hours of audio recordings, most of which were transcribed. In addition,
the researcher was present in the classroom during the recordings, observing the
students’ actions at large and taking notes of what occurred to facilitate an interpretation
of the recordings. The teacher instruction, students’ oral production presented in
this study are typical of all teaching sequences. The two written texts are representative
for the longer texts written on the above mentioned occasion. Literal translations of
the transcriptions in a written standard from Swedish to English are given in the text.
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‘Beating about the bush’ on how and why in elementary school science
The ultimate purpose of the Soil unit is for students to learn what soil consists of, how
to recognise different types of soil and the significance of soil for living organisms
and human beings. Moreover, a formulated ultimate purpose for all STC units is for
students to practise their communicative proficiency through talking, reading and
writing, as well as recognising patterns and structures in science. The subordinate
purposes of the topic are connected to each individual investigation, explicitly or
implicitly indicated.
Results
According to the STC manual and in order to facilitate students’ learning about soil,
the teacher introduced a number of hands-on activities which the students carried
out. Initially, one example of teacher instruction is presented, i.e. procedure, related
to the ultimate and subordinate purpose. Secondly, we demonstrate what this means
for how students apprehend the subordinate purpose during the following hands-on
activity. Finally, the students’ written texts, i.e. procedural recounts or reports, are
analysed in relation to the subordinate purpose and text genre. The analysis method
used is specified under the subheadings.
Procedure
All of the lessons during the Soil unit started with a revision of the previous lesson
followed by teacher instruction prior to the students’ actions and mostly dealt with
practical issues. The teacher frequently told the students what equipment to use and
how to use it. Although the students were told that the class would work with the
Soil unit, the ultimate purpose was obscured by the focus on procedure. In the middle
of the unit the teacher started by asking the students what they had done during
the previous lesson, which the students expressed in whole class discussion. The
subordinate purpose during the previous activity was to observe what happened to
the different soil types (humus, sand and clay) when shaken in water. The test tubes
now had been left in mugs for a week and the students were instructed to observe the
result. The implicit subordinate purpose was to understand different effects of water
on various soil types. The teacher gave the following instruction:
1. Teacher: What you are going to do now... [distributes a worksheet]. It is like
this that you are going to get back the tests that you did last time. How were
you placed then?... It is like this you see, you are getting back...You are getting
back your tests, you see. So I tell you and you come and get them. But now it
is like this, they have been standing still for a long time, haven’t they ...That is
why it is important that when you get mugs, if you think that this is your mug,
so you just do not get back to your desk. Look! Look! Look! Because if you
shake them then you will be back where you were last week, won’t you? That
is why you have to carry them really carefully and put them down carefully.
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Britt Jakobson, Monica Axelsson
Okay. Do you understand? And what you are going to then, when you have got
the worksheet in front of you, it says “After a couple of days the test looks like
this” [reads]. So you write exactly as last time, “humus, sand and clay”. And
then you sit down and draw exactly what it looks like. And then you can look
through the magnifying glasses to see what it looks like. What differences are
there? Has it become different or is it similar or is it? Do you understand?
2. Several students: Yeah.
3. Teacher: And what kinds of similarities there are. So I will read the name
written on [the test tube] and that person comes and gets it [distributes the
test tubes].
The students were acquainted with the different test tubes, meaning that it was, from a
PEA, immediately intelligible to them what the teacher was talking about. The teacher
started by instructing the students how to carry out the investigation construing
relations as be back, last week and careful to what was standing fast. The teacher’s
request for care was important because if the test tubes were shaken there would be
no possibility of observing what had happened after a week. He went on reading the
text of the worksheet to the students, telling them what to write and draw. Finally,
he explicitly expressed a subordinate purpose when asking them to observe the soil
samples by construing relations in terms of “differences” and “similarities” between
the results a week ago and the current results. Student responses to the teacher’s
instruction indicate that they understood. However, the subordinate purpose “to
understand the effects of water on various soil types” was implicit.
From a SFG analysis, the ideational transitivity analysis of this teacher monologue
focuses on processes and primary participants, i.e. actors, to see what happens in the
text and how relations between participants are built. Four process types are in focus:
material, mental, verbal and relational. As expected in a spoken text of an instructional
type the processes are overwhelmingly material (63%). A smaller portion of the clauses
are relational (28%) and some mental (7%) as well as verbal clauses (2%) appear.
The material processes concretely inform how the students are supposed to act when
receiving their soil samples from last week, e.g.: you are going to get back the tests,
and then you can look through the magnifying glasses. The primary participants in
the material processes are the students addressed as “you”. The relational processes
appear when the teacher makes statements or describes different situations, e.g.: it
is like this. Through these processes the teacher’s point of view is expressed as mere
fact. A common type of primary participant in the relational clauses is the impersonal
carrier “it”. The mental processes are few and address the students’ cognitive
processes, do you understand? The primary participant, the senser, is the student.
The verbal processes are the least common which is quite logical since the text is a
mere monologue by the teacher. The only verbal process is an explicit expression of
what the teacher is doing, so I tell you, with the teacher as the primary participant.
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The purpose of the teacher’s instruction was to get the students to act in a certain
way during the activity. In a written instruction the processes would be expressed
in the imperative, but in this face-to-face instruction it is natural to mainly use the
present tense and address the students with the general ‘you’. Connected to time, the
teacher uses some linking words: when, then. The materials to be used are in front of
the teacher and the students, but still named by the teacher along with a specification
of the methods to use when analysing the samples. Throughout the instruction, the
students are given detailed information on how (carefully, exactly), and when (after
you have got the worksheet in front of you, after you sit down) to act.
Activity
Hands-on activities dominated the Soil unit and during those activities the students
were encouraged to talk to each other in groups or pairs. During those discussions the
students were focused on what to do and what to observe. However, the subordinate
purpose was not always apprehended in the same way, meaning that the students
were engaged in somewhat different activities. At the end of the teacher instruction
described above, the students were told to compare the results from last week with the
tests being left aside and notice differences and similarities (1). Matilda and Bertrand
observed what had happened to sand in water using magnifying glasses:
4. Bertrand: Oh! Look what has happened. Look! The sand is at the bottom.
Almost. [...]
5. Matilda: This is the sand.
6. Bertrand: Has it become like that?
7. Matilda: Look!... But you are stiiiring.
8. Bertrand: Light, light yellow… Cool. Look!
9. Matilda: It looks the same… This one is dirty. No, but stop!
By using a PEA it was shown that Bertrand immediately construed relations to what
was standing fast, i.e. the mixture of sand and water. He was positively surprised by
what he saw, as shown in the relation oh, an aesthetic judgement, construed to sand
followed by Look what has happened. Look! (4). Bertrand was eager to tell Matilda
what he had observed and wanted her to look as well. It is not clear if she shared
Bertrand’s joy. Bertrand continued by construing the relations at the bottom and
almost to sand. He observed that the sand had sunk to the bottom, at least almost,
which was quite intelligible to Matilda (5). Bertrand asked Matilda a question which
she did not answer, meaning there was a lingering gap (6). When Bertrand started to
stir the mixture, Matilda got a little annoyed as they were especially told not to stir
or shake the test tubes. However, Bertrand continued the observation and construed
relations to what was standing fast, i.e. the stirred mixture, in terms of light yellow
and cool. Again he used a positive aesthetic judgement, cool, to emphasise that what
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he saw was something nice and worth observing, which he wanted Matilda to see
as well. Matilda, though, did not seem to share Bertrand’s joy as she construed the
relations looks the same and dirty to it and this one, respectively. It is unclear what
she was referring to, but it is possible that she had compared it to how the mixture
appeared a week ago. It is also conceivable that she again became irritated by Bertrand
continuing to stir the mixture (9). In spite of this, the students proceeded with the
activity and made more observations:
10. Matilda: It really looks disgusting. It looks like that…
11. Bertrand: It looks like my pee.
12. Matilda: Noo, I will say. It looks like mallow.
Matilda construed the relation disgusting to it, i.e. the stirred mixture. Accordingly,
she used a negative aesthetic judgement in order to express her repugnance to the
mixture of sand and water. She also construed the relation looks like, but she did not
complete the sentence. However, Bertrand followed up and construed the relation
looks like pee to it, which Matilda did not agree with. Instead, she construed the relation
looks like mallow, to it. In this situation the students construed relations in terms
of metaphors, i.e. pee and mallow. In that way the students reconstructed their earlier
experiences which were transformed in this situation, meaning that they were able to
discuss and carry on with the activity. However, they did not construe any relations
concerning similarities and differences between the results from last week and the
results from this observation, with one possible exception, i.e. the relation looks the
same construed by Matilda (9). Accordingly, the students proceeded with the activity,
but not in the direction intended by the teacher. Instead, they again observed a
newly stirred mixture, which hindered comparisons between the result of last week
and the current one. Hence, the students’ earlier experiences were reconstructed and
transformed in terms of metaphors (cf. Jakobson & Wickman, 2007). The students
frequently used metaphors when observing the soil tests, meaning that the subordinate
purpose of the activity was implicit to them, i.e. observing differences and similarities
between the different soil tests. When observing the test tube which contained sand,
using a magnifying glass Maj noted that there was something in the sand:
13. Maj: Look! This is black. Under here it is black... Look! It looks like a worm...
It looks like a worm... Look! It looks like a worm.
14. Ode: Yeah, a worm.
15. Maj: Yeah, look!
Maj observed that it, the sand, was black under (13) and then continued construing a
relation in terms of a metaphor, like a worm, to it, i.e. black. The metaphor was quite
intelligible to Ode, who agreed. The students hence construed relations to the soil test
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from their earlier experiences of worms, which were reconstructed and transformed
in this situation without comparing the different soil types. Instead, like Bertrand
and Matilda they compared the soil test to what it looked like by using a metaphor.
Using a SFG analysis it is shown that, parallel to Gibbons’ (2006) first text, these
two texts are also spoken, accompanying the students’ investigation of sand. Bertrand
and Matilda started off by naming the sand and then referred to the tube containing
sand as it. Likewise, Maj and Ode referred to sand as this and it. Since this is a faceto-face
context, the students’ use of an exophoric reference (this, that) is expected and
unproblematic. The task in this activity is to make comparisons and, to accomplish
this, the students used adjectives (light yellow, dirty) or nouns (pee, mallow).
Procedural recount or report?
The students documented their findings during hands-on activities through reading,
writing and drawing on worksheets. The written demands were generally limited and
at most amounted to a single sentence. However, in the middle of the unit there was an
excess of time at the end of a lesson. BJ suggested that the students could write an individual
text. The teacher agreed, formulated and performed the following instruction:
16. Teacher: As well as you can you are going to write “What I know about soil”
and then you are going to write what you have learned so far. Everything you
have learned! Which colours, what it consists of. Everything! Everything you
can remember. Just about soil. About this unit, what we have done sort of.
What have you learned? [distributes writing paper] Your task thus is, as well
as you can, write what you have learned. Colours, forms, how it feels, smells,
what does it consist of? Everything! Everything we have done. If you like you
can tell what you remember that we have done during this STC unit... You shall
write what you have learned and what you have done. Go ahead and write!
In this instruction the teacher explicitly expressed two subordinate purposes: “write
what you have learned and what you have done”. From a SFG analysis, the first purpose
directs the students towards a descriptive report of their present knowledge while the
second is more likely to lead to procedural recounts of the actions that had taken place.
Two student texts are analysed, text 1 by Tammy and text 2 by Kenneth. (Relational
processes in italics, material processes underlined and mental processes in bold).
Text 1 What I [know] about soil
The soil contains ”sand”clay”humus”. When we shake ”sand”clay” humus” then it gets mixed
into different colours. Humus contains dead “plants”animals”trees”shit”bacteria”. Sand
contains “stones” (small, small). Under water there is soil under the sand.
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When asked to write this text the students had spent six weeks building their knowledge
of the field. However, from a SFG point of view, they had not written procedural
recounts or descriptive reports earlier since all writing during the topic had been
confined to short sentences or single words in the worksheets. On one occasion the
teacher referred to descriptions made in Swedish lessons, but no explicit teaching
on science genres had occurred. Accordingly, the teacher did not give an explicit
instruction on how to write; instead, he focused on the two aspects “write what you
have learned and what you have done”.
Tammy’s text is ‘more-written-like’, a text of type three according to Gibbons (2006)
and ‘language as reconstruction’ according to Martin (1984). There is a distance between
the writing and the investigations Tammy has performed on soil and the unseen
receiver of the text is manifested in the opening general statement Tammy provides
as a context for what follows: The soil contains “sand “clay “humus”. By this, Tammy
has acknowledged that “written texts cannot rely on shared assumptions and a writer
must recreate experience through language alone” (Gibbons 2006). The written mode
is also emphasized by the use of quote marks, even if not altogether correct. There
is one material process: shake while the rest are relational: contains, is all in simple
present tense and gets mixed expressing passive meaning. The descriptive language
is factual and precise rather than imaginative; sand contains stones (small).The three
final sentences are generalisations: Humus contains dead “plants”… Sand contains
“stones” and “under water there is soil…” a preferred form of expression in science. The
technical terms are represented by humus, bacteria and plants. Except for the second
sentence, the writing is in a relatively formal and objective style. The use of first person
pronouns (I, we) and the writer’s opinions are not at the core of this type of writing.
Altogether, Tammy’s text is more of a descriptive report than a procedural recount.
The use of a PEA showed that Tammy construed a lot of relations to the soil test.
Tammy construed the relation contains “sand “clay “humus” to what stood fast, i.e.
soil. He continued to construe relations as different colours to mixed soil types and
to humus and sand in terms of what they consist of, i.e. dead “plants” “animals”
“trees “shit “bacteria” and small “stones”. Accordingly, his text was descriptive and
scientifically explanatory. However, there was an unnoticed gap concerning “there is
soil under the sand”, meaning that Tammy did not view sand as soil.
Text 2 What I know about soil
It is brown, black and grey. We have shaken different experiments. It was clay, sand and
humus. Soil is worm, shit. When clay dries – it becomes very hard. Clay is very sticky. Humus
feels – humid. The clay feels smooth. And the sand feels rough. When you shake the
humus it looks like a lava lamp. When you shake the clay then it becomes like a fog. The
sand stays put when you shake it really properly.
When analysing Kenneth’s text using SFG it is obvious that this text also represents
‘language as reconstruction’, but is closer to Gibbons’ type two than three. Material
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‘Beating about the bush’ on how and why in elementary school science
processes describing behaviour, shake, dry, look, stay, are slightly more frequent
than relational in addition to mental processes. Kenneth does not open his text with
a general statement. Instead, he demands shared assumptions by the reader when
he jumps right into it being brown, black and grey. Kenneth’s second sentence, like
Tammy’s, opens with the personal pronoun we, not so appropriate for a descriptive
report. However, there is also a display of factual and precise descriptive language: Soil
is worm, shit, Clay is very sticky. Generalisations are expressed by the third person
pronoun you (Swe. man), when you shake. The technical terms are represented by
experiments, humus, worm and humid. Kenneth’s text is slightly ‘more-spoken-like’
than Tammy’s making it more of a procedural recount than a descriptive report.
From a PEA, Kenneth started by construing relations in terms of colours to it,
soil, and shaken clay, sand and humus to experiments. He went on construing
relations to features of the soil types, e.g. humid, smooth and rough. Moreover, he
construed relations in terms of metaphors: like a lava lamp to the shaken humus,
and like a fog to the shaken clay, thus reconstructing and transforming earlier
experiences. Consequently, the metaphors made him observe certain things about
the mixtures while others were obscured. In addition, he observed certain things
about sand to which he construed the relations stays put and really properly when
shaken, implying that he had made a close observation of what happens when sand
is mixed with water.
Discussion
In this study we have shown the significance of student awareness of the subordinate
purpose (Johansson & Wickman, 2011; Wickman & Ligozat, 2011) of two science activities.
Notwithstanding the fact that the activities carried out differed, one being a
hands-on activity and the other a writing activity, the explicitly expressed subordinate
purpose of each activity had consequences for the students’ proceedings. Although
the students were actively involved in the hands-on activity, the explicitly formulated
subordinate purpose was weakened for the benefit of “doing”, as stressed by
the teacher (1), resulting in the students acting on their own purposes (4-12, 13-15).
Consequently, the learning direction was not always in accordance with the teacher’s
intention (cf. Rogoff, 1990). Instead of comparing differences and similarities between
former and current results, the students compared the current results to something
that was already known to them in terms of metaphors like pee and mallow (11-12).
Accordingly, if students are frequently unaware of the subordinate purpose, learning
may take another route than intended or even come to a halt. This became even more
obvious when for example Kenneth, while wetting the soil samples to roll them into
a ball, asked his classmate: I wonder why we have done this? If students frequently
experience scientific activities as puzzling, not purposeful and with no reference to
their own lives, they might turn away from science, thinking that they do not belong
(Jakobson & Wickman, 2008).
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When involved in the writing activity, the teacher instruction was partly focused on
doing, what you have done, and partly on what the students had learned, what you
have learned (16). This expressed twofold subordinate purpose directed students to
write texts including both the hands-on activities and what had been learned. The
subordinate purpose for writing the text was again partly concealed in the teacher’s
instruction. Hence, the students were given no guidance on how to express themselves
in ‘more-written-like’ science texts using precise technical language and to thus
add a scientific register to their repertoire (Gibbons, 2006; Martin, 1993). Instead,
the unfocused teacher instruction led to the unconscious use of every-day language
without developing the students’ scientific literacy (Texts 1 and 2).
Moreover, in this teaching sequence the ultimate and the subordinate purposes were
not continuous (Johansson & Wickman, 2011; Wickman & Ligozat, 2011), meaning
that the hands-on activity (4-12, 13-15) was out of context as the students were not told
about the significance of the effect of water on soil types in, for example, agriculture,
forestry and the building industry. Instead, the sole focus on subordinate purposes
like differences and similarities between the soil types made the students proceed in
their own ways. Hence, throughout the teaching sequence the students were unable
to bring the different parts together to form a whole in accordance with the ultimate
purpose. Consequently, the ultimate and subordinate purposes were not related in
the teaching sequence (Johansson & Wickman, 2011; Wickman & Ligozat, 2011).
The hands-on activities during the teaching sequence are intended to build the
students’ knowledge of the field. However, opportunities for the students to express
themselves on the topic mainly comprise every-day talk using exophoric referencing
(this, that) without a need for technical concepts and scientific grammar (Gibbons,
2006). Apart from one written task, sustained text is neither read nor written. Yet the
written texts also show a limited use of technical terms and scientific grammar and
thus restricted possibilities for the students to move between every-day and scientific
language (Lemke, 1990; Martin & Rose, 2008).
Further, the activities are neither explicitly fitted into the unit’s ultimate purpose
– to learn what soil consists of, how to recognise different types of soil and the significance
of soil for living organisms and human beings – nor do they fulfil the ultimate
purpose of all STC units, i.e. for students to practice their communicative proficiency
through talking, reading and writing, as well as recognising patterns and structures
in science. Therefore, as argued in Axelsson and Jakobson (2010), the reading of a
short explanatory text from the teacher’s guide on soil creation processes combined
with a graphic taxonomy illustrating these processes would improve the students’
meaning-making.
Guiding students to express their scientific knowledge orally and in writing needs to
be a regular part of science instruction and comprise the joint unpacking and construing
of scientific texts as well as understanding of graphics (Christie, 2003; Schleppegrell,
2004). Students need to be involved in model work on each genre connected
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to a subject. Such modelling might include the deconstruction of nominalisations,
a switching back and forth between every-day and scientific language, summarising
science texts for another audience etc. (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Gibbons, 2006).
The students’ spoken and written communicative proficiency in the material varies
and could possibly be bridged through explicit guidance on how to construct the text
due to the specific situation and genre involved (Veel, 1997).
Britt Jakobson is a Senior Lecturer in science education at the Department of Mathematics and
Science Education, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main interest is aesthetics and language
use in primary science education.
Monica Axelsson is an Associate Professor in bilingualism and Swedish as a second language at the
Department of Language Education, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research concerns second
language acquisition, content and language focusing scientific literacy, and is currently involved in
a project on newly arrived students and learning.
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 513–534
EDU.
INQ.
The Art of Listening in an
Educational Perspective
Listening reception in the mother tongue
Kent Adelmann*
Abstract
The purpose is to contribute to the theory and practice of listening reception as one of the four language
arts in Swedish as a school subject. The object of inquiry is The Art of Listening (Adelmann
2009) as a Swedish example from a Scandinavian context, compared to mainstream listening
research in the USA. The problem explored is: How can we, as researchers and teachers, handle
some of the problems within international listening research and adapt listening research to a
Scandinavian context. Results of the study show that The Art of Listening is mainly influenced by
listening research in the USA, but also offer an alternative theoretical framework for listening by the
Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975). The main conclusion is that with an educational
approach and an alternative theoretical framework it is possible to work with an expanding and
including perspective in listening research and listening education.
Keywords: listening, listening process, listening skills, listening strategies, listening reception,
listening response, dialogue, talk in interaction, conversation, speech
Introduction
Even though scientific research in the field of listening has been overwhelming in the
last few decades, this young branch of science lacks a theoretical framework and has
been revealed to be in an initial discovery stage of theoretical development (Brownell,
1996; McKenzie & Clark, 1995; Wolvin, 2010).
This becomes evident in The Art of Listening (Adelmann, 2009) where I try to
put the research pieces together in an educational perspective and for the purpose of
mapping the development of listening in Swedish as a school subject. Some traditional
problems within listening research in an international perspective thereby emerge,
like the definition of listening (1), the listening process (2), listening reception (3),
different listening skills and strategies for different purposes (4), analytical listening
tools and methods (5), listening response (6) and listening assessment (7).
The aim of this article is therefore to discuss these seven problems as a challenge
to international listening research and to give a Swedish example of a socio-cultural
*Department of Culture, Language and Media, Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University, Sweden.
E-mail: Kent.Adelmann@mah.se.
©Author. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 513–534
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Kent Adelmann
approach founded on qualitative research that could include and invite the participation
of researchers from a variety of disciplines.
The listening field
We need competent listening skills in order to learn. In fact, language learning
comes more or less through listening and children who are better listeners are also
better learners (Lundsteen, 1979). In ordinary education on different levels listening
is necessary for activities like following directions, talk in interaction, retelling
stories (that have been heard), literary conversation, asking questions, (podium)
speech, arguing and taking notes. Thus, the main purpose of teaching listening in
school is learning, and education in listening is as crucial as education in talking,
reading and writing.
The first major research in the listening field was Paul T. Rankin’s dissertation
in 1926, The measurement of the ability to understand spoken language. 1 Another
milestone publication was Factors accounting for differences in comprehension of
material presented orally in the classroom (1948), by Ralph G. Nichols (1907–2005),
who later was called the ‘Father of the Field of Listening’ in the USA. The foundation
of the International Listening Association (ILA) 2 in the 1970s, the establishment of
the International Journal of Listening in the 1980s and the acknowledgement of
the definition of “listening” in the 1990s all indicate the establishment of “listening”
(Library of Congress Subject Headings, LCSH) 3 as a research field. This field consists
of different areas like health, business, education, communication and social sciences,
with the participation of researchers from a variety of disciplines.
In Scandinavia listening studies in education and the mother tongue started in
the late 1990s. The Norwegian researcher Hildegunn Otnes described listening as a
discipline in the mother tongue and pointed out the importance of relational listening
in conversation with concepts like “attention” and “response” (1997; 1999a; 1999b). In
her dissertation (2007) she uses an extended notion of listening in a qualitative study,
examining chat on the Internet and showing the importance of listening strategies
and how the participants indicate listening in different ways.
My own public research in listening started with a historical review where I stated
the simple fact that in the beginning there was “the listening man”, long before man
could talk, and later on read and write (Adelmann, 1998). I also pointed out the
importance of a listening attitude in the development of a democratic school. My
dissertation, Listening to voices: An extended notion of listening in an educational
perspective (Adelmann, 2002), the first one in Scandinavia to deal with listening
reception, is a qualitative study drawing on four investigations 4 . The first part of
the dissertation examines the listening skill in Swedish educational documents and
national curriculum from 1842 to 2000. Results of the study show that the listening
skill is only slowly approaching the same status as talking, but standards for listening
are still missing in the syllabus for Swedish as a school subject.
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The second part explores the semantic listening domains followed by a determination
of the meaning of the ‘listening’ concept in the Swedish language. The study results
outline three distinct meanings in Swedish: the perception of hearing, the constructing
of meaning with attentive listening, and the metaphorical meaning in phrases such as
“listening to voices”. Examples from Swedish concordance show that the listener is
able to listen in different ways and to turn their attention in time and space. Moreover,
the Swedish concept of ‘listen’ covers a wide semantic field and foregrounds three
dimensions, namely social, dynamic and holistic.
The two empirical parts of the study concern listening in the classroom to talk in
interaction with eight Swedish students in teacher education over a six-month period.
The polyphonic classroom is examined through the notion of what I have called ‘reported
listening’, with regard to which voices the participants refer to, their ‘voice response’, and
how they use those voices in talk in interaction, their ‘voice use’. Results of the former
empirical part indicate that some of the students have a broad and some a narrow listening
repertory, and the group seems to be an important contributor to the individual’s
dialogic learning (Adelmann, 2001a; 2001b; Wolvin, 2010:39). Results of the later
empirical part suggest that the voice use principally has an argumentative function and
that some of the students use several different functions and others use only but a few in
their listening profile. Further, four listening positions emerge in the material, namely
the “questioner”, the “refiller”, the “synthesiser” and the “inquirer” (Adelmann, 2003).
When I published the first Scandinavian textbook about listening, The Art of
Listening: Pedagogical listening in school and education (Adelmann, 2009), I tried
to present listening as a modern reception discipline in the mother tongue, equal to
the language arts of talking, reading and writing. In doing so, I had to handle some
of the traditional problems within listening research and adapt the traditional and
historically dominant American listening research to a Scandinavian context. In the
following I therefore outline some of the consequences and present seven points of
departure in listening reception 5 .
The definition of listening
Theory is closely related to a clearly defined concept of listening. In 1996 the International
Listening Association (ILA) approved the following definition:
Listening: the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken
and/or nonverbal messages (Purdy & Borisoff, 1997:6).
This definition was also accepted by the National Communication Association (NCA)
as a point of departure for listening goals in the “K-12 standards and competencies
document” (Competent Communicators, 1998:1). But in the Scandinavian context
there are two fundamental problems with that definition: the transfer model of communication
and the individual psychological perspective.
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Firstly, there has been a tendency within traditional language research to look upon
listening as a skill that is more or less separated from speech or an aspect of talk
in interaction with a focus on speech. In the first case, the approach is usually a
communication or information processing model where the listener is answering
when addressed, which means that the listener is the ‘receiver’ of a ‘message’ from
a ‘sender’ in a very simple and plainly transmitting system. This transfer model of
communication, the so-called conduit metaphor (Linell, 1988; 2011), seems to imply
that listening is one distinguished process where a fixed meaning is cognitively constructed
prior to the delivery of the message to the receiver. 6 In the second case, the
listener takes a more active part in talk in interaction and supports the talker verbally
and/or nonverbally with different kinds of feedback while listening (Ericsson, 1997;
Green-Vänttinen, 2001).
But in a dialogical perspective (Bakhtin, 1984; 1999) talk in interaction with the
oral activities talking and listening appears not to involve discrete activities, easy to
separate from one another, but can instead be described as a continuous process or
multiple processes (Brownell, 1996). Listening clearly does not stop while you are
talking, so from a dialogical perspective talk in interaction can be viewed as a simultaneous
process of expression and reception (Adelmann, 2009:63) where the listener
talks and “[s]peaking is listening” (Michael Holquist in Adelmann, 2002:122). Thus,
listening and talking are dialogical and intertwined processes. A definition of listening
influenced by the conduit metaphor, with the concept of listening as one process
and notions like ‘receiver’ and ‘message’ (or ‘sender’), is therefore misleading when
it comes to describing the dialogical part of listening.
Secondly, the ILA definition of listening seems to imply an individual psychological
perspective. But listening is much more than an individual psychological process because
“[t]he listener is imbued with and constantly imbibes the sociocultural-linguistic
environment” (Purdy, 1991:60-61). The listener is clearly not alone in “constructing
meaning”, but part of the contextual dimension of culture and society, where we
construct meaning together and are all the time influenced by the meaning that is
already constructed. Listening is therefore not solely a psychological activity, but also
a social and relational process in a relational context (Rhodes, 1993), or maybe rather
in different dimensions of contexts (Adelmann, 2002; Linell, 1998).
In a Swedish classroom the talking and listening is very much a social activity within
a group, with listening and linguistic actions like attention and verbal and nonverbal
responses. The social and relational dimensions of listening are also observable,
which is important when it comes to the listening process (2), listening reception
(3) and listening assessment (7). Thus, we can argue that the ILA definition lacks “a
social, a dynamic and a holistic dimension” (Adelmann, 2002:289), with a dialogical
and relational communication perspective. One could also say there is a need for an
expanded model of the definition of listening, including the dialogical perspective
and the contextual dimension of culture and society.
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But even though there are some differences among experts in the listening field there
is also some consensus regarding a definition of listening (Brownell, 1996; Glenn,
1989; Lundsteen, 1979; Wolvin & Coakley, 1996). If we look for commonalities among
experts we can conclude that listening is a discrete activity (Spearritt, 1962), similar
to but separated from reading, and a complex process (Brownell, 1996) where there
is an important difference between hearing and listening. But the listening process
includes hearing, and the listening process is completed with a response, overt or
covert, verbal or nonverbal. From a Bakhtinian perspective, one could add that the
response is oral or written and comes immediately or (much) later (Bakhtin, 1999).
The listening process
Different definitions of listening would lead to different models of the listening process.
One widely respected and used model is constructed by Judi Brownell (1996) and consists
of six components in the so-called HURIER listening process. The six components
are Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating and Responding.
According to the HURIER model we have six listening tasks, and there are of course
many skills of listening reception associated with each of the six components, “skills
that either indicate or facilitate each stage” (Brownell in Wolvin, 2010:147).
Since the listening process is chiefly about covered processes that cannot be observed
directly, all listening process models are more or less hypothetical constructions.
Analogous to research in the reading process the researchers conclude that
listening has taken place and that listening processes are in existence according
to observed phenomenon or behaviour. But listening communication is not solely
composed of internal processes (like understanding, remembering, interpreting and
evaluating) since certain dimensions of listening are relational and therefore also
observable. Not only is auditory and/or visual perception controllable, but so too are
different kinds of attention and response. 7
Listening is a social and contextual act. Our communication partner can only judge
our listening qualities by our situational listening behaviours. This means that “effective
listening” (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996) must also be seen as “the listener’s adaptability
to that context” (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984, in Ridge, 1993:9). Brownell (1996:266)
points out that it is important to “respond in a manner that will facilitate shared
meanings, contribute to accomplishing tasks, and develop satisfying relationships”.
In the Swedish classroom the assessment of speech or conversation only concerns
the observable part of the listening process model. This implies that the attention
and the response from the listening teacher to the listening student or, the listening
student to the listening teacher or, another listening student, enable the teacher and
the student to be aware of their repertory of verbal and nonverbal responses. They can
improve and develop the repertory, or consciously choose a listening and a response
strategy in different kinds of situations, and this capacity facilitates different kinds
of interaction in various kinds of contexts.
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According to the National Agency for Education in Sweden, the basis for assessing
the level of knowledge should be grounded in observable skills. This means that in
the Swedish classroom the listening model in practice is usually reduced to observable
skills like hearing, with attention, and responding, with verbal and/or nonverbal
response. The observable part of the process allows us to make assumptions about
the internal process, the intrapersonal communication, but we focus on the external
process, the interpersonal communication. The observable part of the process also
means that it is easier to validate the listening process (Fitch-Hauser & Hughes, 1988),
which is important when it comes to listening reception (3), listening response (6)
and listening assessment (7).
But maybe our focus on listening-centred communication in the classroom from
a behavioural approach has made us pay less attention to the importance of the covered
processes and the intrapersonal communication in the listening process, like
understanding, remembering, interpreting and evaluating. If we look at the listening
task of remembering, for instance, current attention and working memory research
by Torkel Klingberg (2007; 2011), a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Sweden’s
Karolinska Institute, huge consequences for learning and listening in the classroom
become apparent. Thus, perhaps it is time for traditional classroom research in the
subject of Swedish, including my own, to comprise and invite not only pedagogy, psychology
and social sciences, but also disciplines like information technology, sound
technology and cognitive neuroscience.
Listening reception
From a language perspective, we have an oral language and a written language. In
the oral language as well as in the written language we have two different activities:
the oral language is about talking and listening, while the written language is about
writing and reading. Consequently, in our language as a whole we have four language
arts, namely reading, writing, talking and listening. One could also say that the
expressive part of the language consists of the activities talking and writing, while
listening and reading belongs to the receptive parts of the language. Thus, in the
mother tongue we have (at least) two reception disciplines – listening and reading
(Adelmann, 2002:266; 2009:52).
If we look at it this way, modern research about reception in the mother tongue
started at approximately the same time for both reading and listening. In the 1920s
I.A. Richards (1967 [1924]) conducted his famous research in the science of literature
about English students’ poetry comment and literature experience, while in 1926 Paul
T. Rankin made a milestone within listening research with his dissertation about
The measurement of the ability to understand spoken language. But since then, the
reception disciplines have seen quite a different development during the last century,
with listening reception being in the shadow of reading research 8 and, for example,
the Reader-Response Theory in the 1970s and 1980s 9 .
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Without reception there is no listening, no listening process, and no interpersonal
communication. Reception theory has a long tradition in mass media audience study
and is also vital within aesthetic reception analysis, but unfortunately modern listening
research seems to lack a reception theory or a theoretical framework for reception
theory (Purdy, 1988). The French philosopher Roland Barthes (1991:43) has pointed out
that there is no specific spot for listening in the encyclopaedias of the past, that there
is no acknowledged discipline of listening. In fact, according to the Italian philosopher
and psychologist Gemma Corradi Fiumara (1990:1) we are in the tradition of Western
thought “faced with a system of knowledge that tends to ignore listening processes”.
In the Swedish classroom, in the subject of Swedish, there is usually a lot of talk
about reception, but it is more or less an understatement that it is solely about the
reception of written texts, about reading, and not about listening to oral texts or utterances,
live or recorded. Accordingly, I argue that there is a need for the discipline of
listening and for a listening reception theory, or a theoretical framework for a reception
theory. I consider that Bakhtin (1984; 1999) offers such a theoretical framework
for a reception theory, with an extended notion of dialogue, including both oral and
written texts, both intrapersonal and interpersonal dialogue. With a Bakhtinian notion
of dialogue there is also an obvious parallel and comparison to the discipline of
reading and literature reception.
“Listening to voices” (Adelmann, 2002) could metaphorically be described as a
wandering between different listening worlds on our way through life. On that road
we have to show an openness to each other as listeners, to be able to build genuine
human relations (Gadamer, 1979:324). James E. Sullivan (2000:78) has outlined
four steps toward what he calls “good listening”, and in an adapted Swedish version
(Table 1) it looks like this:
Table 1. Listening reception model, or developing listening reception (Adelmann,
2009:108)
1. Being aware about my own listening world
2. Stepping out of my own listening world
3. Entering into somebody else’s listening world
4. Sensing somebody else’s deepest thoughts and feelings, and
enriching my own listening world
5. Returning to my own listening world and giving an adequate
response
6. Being aware about my changed listening world
Thinking about listening reception in these terms is close to the German philosopher
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), when he speaks about the interplay between the
known and unknown, and the meeting between two listeners’ different horizons of
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understanding (1979). It is also close to the approach to reading reception taken by
the American professor of education, Judith A. Langer (1995). The differences are
primarily about the importance of oral response and awareness, that is, being aware
that every single talk in interaction has the potential to change our listening world.
Until further listening research has been done, this could be an embryo of a useful
and workable listening reception model.
This approach also makes it possible to use analytical listening tools (5) from different
disciplines like reading reception, and to connect the listening response (6) to
a Listener-Response Theory.
Different listening skills and strategies for different purposes
Many of today’s well-known listening standard books were published in the 1980s,
like Listening (1996 [1982]) by Andrew Wolvin and Carolyn Gwynn Coakley. A major
part of that book is about developing purposeful listening skills with a “taxonomy
of listening that describes how listeners function at various listening purposes or
levels” (1996:151). The Wolvin-Coakley listening taxonomy provides an important
framework for dealing with specific skills in, for example, listening education and
listening development.
The taxonomy includes five basic purposes for listening in a hierarchy with three
levels. The first level includes discrimination, the second comprehension, while at
the third level we can listen for a therapeutic, critical or appreciative purpose. The
taxonomy is formed graphically “as a tree, with discrimination as the root of the listening
hierarchy and comprehension as the trunk, supporting the other [three] listening
purposes that shape our behaviors as listeners” (1996:152-153).
There are, of course, many skills of listening reception associated with each of the
basic purposes for listening, and for each skill one can employ different listening
strategies in order to achieve that purpose or improve that skill. If one listens for a
discriminative purpose one can, for instance, use one’s skills in phonological awareness,
and if one listens for a critical purpose one can improve one’s critical listening
with, for example, strategies for loaded words.
Table 2. Major notions and listening types (Adelmann, 2009:158)
Notion
Attention
Sensitiveness
Criticism
Empathy
Social appreciation
Social devotion
Listening type
Discriminative listening
Comprehensive listening
Critical listening
Empathic listening
Appreciative listening
Devotional listening
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The Art of Listening in an Educational Perspective
In an adapted Swedish version (Adelmann, 2009), the first three listening types (Table
2) correspond with those of Wolvin and Coakley (1996) but, since the listening type
therapeutic listening includes listening with empathy, in an educational and professional
perspective I prefer to label that listening type ‘empathic listening’. From a
Swedish perspective (Crafoord, 2003), one can also divide the social spectra of appreciation
into appreciative listening, including gossip and small talk, and devotional
listening, including love and fan clubs. This means that the Wolvin-Coakley definition
of appreciative listening as listening for “sensory stimulation or enjoyment through
the works and experiences of others” (1996:363) is expanded towards a social and
dialogical perspective.
These six listening types can be described as three clusters on two levels (Fig.
1). Just like Wolvin and Coakley (1996), there is a basic level but it includes both
discrimination and comprehension, forming an understanding basis for the other
listening types with attention and sensitiveness. The remaining four listening types
gather around the clusters of distance or closeness.
Distance
criticism
&
empathy
Closeness
appreciation
&
devotion
Understanding
sensitiveness & attention
Figure 1. Relation between listening levels and listening types (Adelmann, 2009:173)
On the higher level, and hopefully but not necessarily after understanding, the listener
can choose different positions in the listening field from distance to closeness (Fig. 2).
However, the different listening types can have a higher or lower degree of distance
or closeness. Consequently, criticism seems to have a higher degree of distance than
empathy, empathy (in the therapeutic sense) seems to have a higher degree of distance
than appreciation and, finally, devotion seems to have a higher degree of closeness than
appreciation. This means the listener always has the possibility of taking a position,
consciously or unconsciously, positively or negatively, along a continuum between
distance and closeness.
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Kent Adelmann
Distance
Closeness
Criticism Empathy Appreciation Devotion
Figure 2. A listening field with listener positions from distance to closeness (Adelmann,
2009:174)
In summary: In the adapted Swedish version (Adelmann, 2009) the taxonomy is
reduced to two levels (Fig. 1), has an increased number of listening types with an
expanded social and dialogical perspective (Table 2), and can be viewed as a listening
field with listener positions from distance to closeness (Fig. 2).
Thus, the Wolvin and Coakley listening taxonomy (1996) provides a framework
for listening understanding, or not understanding, while positioning in the listening
field. In the Swedish classroom these six listening types can also be used as analytical
listening tools (5), which means we have six types of listening responses (6).
Analytical listening tools and methods
In Voices of the Mind, professor James V. Wertsch is concerned about the development
in the discipline of psychology (1991:4):
We need to develop the type of theoretical frameworks that can be understood and extended
by researchers from a range of what now exist as separate disciplinary perspectives.
Furthermore, and perhaps even more important, we need to formulate methodologies that
do not automatically exclude the participation of researchers from a variety of disciplines.
In my opinion, this can also be said about the discipline of listening where, as mentioned
earlier, there is a need for the participation of researchers from a variety of
disciplines in the listening field.
The works in linguistics and literature by the Russian scholar Mikhail M. Bakhtin
(1895–1975) have been used by a wide range of researchers from a wide range of
perspectives and disciplines. His works seem to include several disciplines and can
therefore perhaps serve as an example of a possible theoretical framework within the
discipline of listening to. Thus, in Listening to Voices (Adelmann, 2002) the works
of Bakhtin (1984; 1999) are used as a theoretical framework.
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Figure 3. Overview of the structure regarding analytical listening tools in Listening to
Voices (Adelmann, 2002)
The object of inquiry is the documented part of an earlier reception expressed in an
open and explicit response, which I term ‘reported listening’ (Figure 3). The concept
of “inter-textuality” from the discipline of literature is adopted as an analytical listening
tool to identify the polyphony of voices in the classroom (Figure 3). I also adopt
some rhetorical terms, from the discipline of rhetoric, as analytical listening tools
to identify the student’s purpose in using different voices (Figure 3). Thus, in the
Swedish classroom, and in an educational setting, we need to use analytical listening
tools from different disciplines like, for instance, literature and rhetoric, and this
is impossible without some kind of wide theoretical framework like the Bakhtinian
dialogical and including perspective.
This is a study from a teacher’s and not a student’s perspective, but as a teacher
I am interested in my students’ receptivity in listening and have to start with their
experience of listening. This means that in my classroom I can track the way the
students are using their contextual resources, which voices they have actually heard
(seen or experienced) and are referring to. This is their voice response (Figure 3) 10 .
I can also actually hear how they are using those voices, the way they are recontextualising
(Linell, 1998) the voices into a dialogical and relational response. This is
their voice use (Figure 3) 11 .
Founded on many examples of voice response and voice use in different educational
settings, the teacher is able to create descriptive patterns of a student’s individual
listening repertory (Adelmann, 2002:163, supplement 1) and listening profile (Adel-
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mann, 2002:224, supplement 2) (Figure 3). These patterns of receptivity, finally, can
then be used as a starting point for listening assessment (7), developing the students’
listening repertory and listening profile through listening response (6).
Listening response
A dividing line among researchers runs between those who emphasise the intrapersonal
process and those who claim that interpersonal activities like behaviour and overt response
are an important part of the listening process. Consequently, in some listening
models (Wolvin & Coakley, 1996) listening excludes overt listener responses, while in
other listening models (Brownell, 1996) listening includes overt listener responses.
Since World War II there seems to be a common view in different disciplines on
communication as dialogue (Johannesen, 1971). 12 This dialogue philosophy or approach
involves famous names and roots like the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber
(1875–1965), the American psychologist Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) and the Russian
philosopher Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) 13 :
“Being heard as such is already a dialogic relation” (Bakhtin, 1999:127).
“To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree,
and so forth” (Bakhtin, 1984:293).
The concept of utterance is central to the theory of Bakhtin: “Any utterance is a link
in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (1999:69). There are no
voiceless words, no words that belong to nobody, he argues. Hence our everyday
speech is imbued with dialogical relations to other people’s words. This means that
every utterance is in an interplay with different voices from different contexts in the
present talk in interaction. In other words, there are dialogical relations between
both people and contexts. Thus, there is no sharp border between text and context.
In every utterance there are “echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which
it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance
must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere
(we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense)” (Bakhtin, 1999:91).
The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language
meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He
either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares
for its execution, and so on (Bakhtin, 1999:68).
Every utterance has both an author and an addressee, but they are both giving
responses. The author gives a response to the preceding utterances and (perhaps)
the addressee gives a response to the author. When the addressee is responding the
author, the addressee also gives a response to the preceding utterances so the talk in
interaction is actually voices and contexts in interaction through people’s responses.
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We can conclude that, even though Bakhtin never presented an explicit response
theory, one may say that in his theory about language as social communication the
notion of response is very central.
As a listener I always take a ‘responsive attitude’, and I always provide a response,
no matter if I am participating in a conversation or am silently responding to myself
in front of a television or computer. The American researcher Laura A. Janusik (in
Wolvin, 2010:205) points out the difference between a listener “placed within the
context of a conversation” or involved “in listening in a passive linear context, such as
watching television”. In the Bakhtinian model it is different but still dialogical. This
mean that “the listener … takes an active, responsive attitude toward it [the television]”
(Bakhtin, 1999:68), gives a response, overt or silent, now or later, and (perhaps) the
response becomes “a link in the chain of speech communion” (Bakhtin, 1999:84).
Another American researcher, James J. Floyd (in Wolvin, 2010:135), discusses
problems with different kinds of dialogic listening and points to “the distinction between
monologue and dialogue”. However, in the Bakhtinian model all language use
is dialogical since one’s participation is monologic or interactive. This means we are
not talking about what dialogue is but what it does to our communication. According
to Bakhtin (1999), a dialogical perspective on utterances does not imply a listening
type or a general approach to listening but a constitutive feature of our production
of utterances as listeners.
In the Swedish classroom, with this dialogical perspective as a theoretical framework,
one can actually hear which voices the students have been listening to, are
referring to and are using while they are constructing a voice of their own. From a
learning perspective, one can say that the polyphony of voices in the classroom is responses
that (in some way) reflect different dimensions of contexts in time and space
(Adelmann, 2002). I thus suggest there is need for a Listener-Response Theory with
an extended notion of dialogue, like Bakhtin’s.
As mentioned, different listening skills and strategies for different purposes (4) can
be used as analytical listening tools and methods (5). This means that we can hear
and assess at least six types of listening responses in the classroom (7).
Listening assessment
In neither Sweden nor Scandinavia is there (to my knowledge) any college or university
that has a “practical framework for listening across the curriculum” or anything
similar to the team of educators at Alverno College in the USA (Kathleen Thompson
et al. in Wolvin, 2010:266). At some colleges and universities in Sweden, especially
where there is a strong tradition of rhetoric, listening is more or less visible. Listening
usually appears in professions like service industries, health care, journalism, helping
professions, organisation leaders and education, but generally as an aspect of talk in
interaction with a focus on speech, where the listener takes a more active part. Thus,
listening is commonly not seen as an acknowledged reception discipline.
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At Malmö University, in the Faculty of Education and Society and at the Department
of Culture, Language and Media the first official lectures and exercises in listening
were held in the introduction course for all students in 2007 and in the subject of
Swedish in 2009. In spring 2011, for the very first time a one-day course in rhetoric
and listening for teachers in the field was held and in autumn 2011, finally, some
parts of The Art of Listening (Adelmann, 2009) were made compulsory reading for
students who are becoming teachers in the subject of Swedish for primary, secondary
and upper secondary school. But the notion of ‘listening’ is never mentioned explicitly
in the syllabus for teacher education in the subject of Swedish, and consequently there
are no standards for listening and no listening assessment according to the syllabus
during the entire education.
At Alverno College listening has been an important part of courses in communication
since 1973. But:
In retrospect, we now realize that we were preparing students for and giving them practice in
listening to formal, usually well-prepared podium speeches, and, by default, not acknowledging
and working with other types of listening interactions that people have every day in their
professional, social, and interpersonal lives (Kathleen Thompson et al. in Wolvin, 2011:267)
I would argue that this situation is very similar to ours in Sweden today. Normally, it
is easy to gain some understanding for preparing students for lectures and podium
speeches, with ‘active’ listening, note taking and relevant questions. But it is hard work
to convince superiors, colleagues and students that listening reception is essential in
day-to-day work during education and with observations and interviews in the field,
as well as listening across the curriculum in their professional lives as teachers.
On the other hand, in contrast to the USA in Sweden we have a common national
curriculum and a common national syllabus in every subject in the classroom. In
2011 Swedish schools obtained a new curriculum and syllabus in primary school,
secondary school and upper secondary school from the Swedish National Agency for
Education. In the subject of Swedish in compulsory school, the core content comprises
five major areas, of which the second for the first time (Adelmann, 2002) is called
“Speaking, listening and talking” (Curriculum, Lgr11). The notion of ‘listening’ is never
mentioned explicitly among the Knowledge requirements, but it may seem obvious
that one needs some listening skills if one is to “receive simple oral instructions” (at
the end of year 3), to maintain the dialogue and to adapt to purpose and recipient (at
the end of year 6) and, finally, to take “the dialogues and discussions forward” and
adapt to purpose as well as recipient and context (at the end of year 9).
Teaching the subject of Swedish at upper secondary school should, among other
things, stimulate pupils’ personal growth through the four language arts of talking,
writing, reading and listening. The subject should aim to support the pupils in developing
knowledge in and about nine major areas, of which the first and the third
are about speaking, prepared conversation and arguing, rhetoric and adaptability to
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The Art of Listening in an Educational Perspective
purpose, recipient and context (Läroplan, GY 2011). In the Core content, the notion of
‘listening’ is explicitly mentioned once during year 1, namely talking about listening in
different ways and adapting to the situated communication, and the rhetoric process
is a main point during year 3. The notion of ‘listening’ is never clearly mentioned
among the Knowledge requirements, but pupils are supposed to adapt to purpose,
recipient and situated communication, have contact with the audience, argue and
use the rhetorical tools.
During both compulsory school and upper secondary school the National Agency
for Education holds national examinations in subjects like Swedish, English and
Mathematics. In the subject of Swedish the examination concerns both oral and
written language, even though the test in written language is more important for
the final grade. This means that the Swedish teacher in the subject of Swedish has to
train, assess and grade the oral skill. But unfortunately we, like the rest of the Western
world (Barthes, 1991; Fiumara, 1990), focus on speaking and have a very weak
tradition (if any) when it comes to listening. This signifies that the teacher can put a
grade on the speech without necessarily assessing the listening competence, neither
of the speaker, nor the recipient(s).
Compared to Alverno College (Kathleen Thompson et al. in Wolvin, 2011) and
the listening standards recommended by the National Communication Association
(Competent communicators, 1998), we might still be in the 1970s but compared to
the preceding curriculum (Adelmann, 2002) it is actually a step forward. When the
Core content (Läroplan, GY 2011), for instance, calls for listening in different ways
and adapting to the situated communication, the answer might be learning different
listening skills and strategies for different purposes (Adelmann, 2009; Wolvin
& Coakley, 1996).
Further, the oral part of the national examinations in the subject of Swedish has
also taken a step forward (Brännström, 2011) since oral language is now almost as
important for the final grade as written language. But listening is still not an acknowledged
reception discipline compared to and equal with reading 14 , and standards for
listening assessment in the national examinations in the subject of Swedish are still
missing in the instructions from the National Agency for Education 15 .
The existence of a common syllabus in Swedish and national examinations in oral
language give us a great opportunity to strengthen and acknowledge listening reception
and to move the perspective in oral language from solely talking to including
listening reception. This means that we are primarily interested in giving the National
Agency for Education examples of standards for listening assessment and supporting
the teachers in the field to assess and grade listening competence in speech and
conversation (Adelmann, 2009).
The basis for assessing the level of knowledge should be grounded in observable
skills, according to the National Agency for Education. In ordinary education and
on a daily basis it is therefore possible to save and document the students’ listening
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Kent Adelmann
experiences in a portfolio as a listening diary (Adelmann, 2012). Just like the abovementioned
patterns of reported listening (5) there will eventually emerge some results
or reflections as a starting point for listening development 16 .
If we assume that students learn and experience how to read and listen in different
ways in school, then we know they have an understanding of that you actually can read
and listen in different ways. Thus, if you can listen in different ways, like the listening
types (Table 2), then it seems reasonable to say that you are also able to respond in
different ways, for instance like the corresponding listening responding types. This
means that when it comes to listening assessment the examples of different listening
skills (4) mentioned earlier make it possible to observe, hear and document six
types of listening responses (Table 3), adapted to purpose, context and school year.
The listening teacher will of course be able to hear (and see) if a student makes an
effort to understand through attention and sensitiveness (Fig. 1), using for instance
adequate feedback, relevant questions, and paraphrasing (Adelmann, 2009). It is also
possible for the teacher to hear if a student first tries to understand or immediately
jump to conclusions with, for example, a critical statement. When the listener (believes
that he/she) understands and chooses, for example, a critical position, the teacher
turns the attention to things like the listener’s competence in examining if the person
is trustworthy, examining the source of information, handling feelings and giving a
suitable response (Adelmann, 2009). In this way it is possible to show how the six
types of listening responses can be operationalised for the student 17 .
Table 3. Listening response types? (Adelmann, 2009:237)
Basis for assessing listening development
no. 4
Students name:
Date:
Activity: Place: Time:
Assessing the skill to give a listening response in different ways
Goal
Achieve the goal
The student listen and gives insufficiently partly almost completely
Discriminative response
Comprehensive response
Critical response
Empathic response
Appreciative response
Devotional response
Comment:
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The Art of Listening in an Educational Perspective
This also corresponds with one of the three listening standards by the National
Communication Association (NCA), namely “the ability to use appropriate and effective
listening skills for a given communication situation and setting” (Competent
Communicators, 1998:3) 18 .
Conclusion
As the observant reader has noticed, there is no dividing line between the American
tradition and my perspective of the Scandinavian context, although there are some
important and interesting differences. While mainstream listening research in the USA
on the whole seems to be quantitative and psychological with a focus on the individual,
the main listening research in Scandinavia is qualitative with a socio-cultural approach
and maintains an interest in the individual’s dialogic learning in groups with different
contextual resources. This also becomes evident when one looks at most issues of
The International Journal of Listening over the last decade or so, or reads Andrew
D. Wolvins’ (2010:33) introduction to Listening and Human Communication in the
21 st Century, where he states that there is a “lack of qualitative listening research” 19 .
My works (Adelmann 2002; 2009) are primarily based on American research but
they also formulate a qualitative approach and introduce an alternative theoretical
framework for listening reception in Swedish as a school subject and as a research
field. Further, The Art of Listening (Adelmann, 2009), with its extended notion of
dialogue, could be read as a critical review of some fundamental domains for international
listening research and as an attempt to include and invite the participation
of researchers from a variety of disciplines. 20
Thus, to sum up the seven points of listening reception in the adapted Swedish version:
• The review of some fundamental domains for listening research entails both
criticism and self-criticism (1–2, 4, 6 and 7).
• With an educational approach and an alternative theoretical framework it
is possible to work with an expanding and including perspective in listening
research and listening education (1–7).
• The need for a listening reception theory and a Listener-Response Theory
makes it necessary to present a temporary and adapted reception model based
on some American and Russian models (3–6).
• The need for strengthening listening reception in the mother tongue, equal
to reading and the other language arts, makes it obligatory to present (and
practice) some analytical listening tools and to support both the National
Agency for Education and teachers in the field with some tools for assessing
and grading listening competence and development (4–5 and 7).
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Kent Adelmann
From my point of view and in an educational perspective, in this article I have revealed
a pragmatic way to adapt and temporarily solve or avoid some of the traditional
problems within international listening research in my efforts to present listening as
a modern reception discipline in the mother tongue of Swedish.
Thank you for listening!
Kent Adelmann is a Senior Lecturer at Malmö University and PhD with the dissertation Listening
to Voices (2002). In The Art of Listening (2009) he develops a Swedish model for listening as a
reception discipline in the mother tongue. His latest book, Listening Management (2012), turns to
the leadership and develops listening leaders, organizations and environments. His main interest
concerns listening, listening reception, talk in interaction, dialogue, and interdisciplinary research
with psychology, cognitive neuroscience and sound and media technology.
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The Art of Listening in an Educational Perspective
Notes
1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Kent.Adelmann@mah.se
The 1926 dissertation, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, is unpublished, but the abstract is
published in Dissertation Abstracts 12:847-48, 1952. There are also excerpts and résumés from the dissertation in some
published articles: “The Importance of Listening Ability” in The English Journal College Edition 1928, 17:623-30; “Listening
Ability” in Proceedings of the Ohio State Educational Conference, Ninth Annual Session, Ohio State University in Columbus,
Ohio, 1929:172-83; and “Listening Ability: Its Importance, Measurement and Development” in Chicago Schools
Journal, January 1930a, 12:177-79, and June 1930b, 12:417-20.
2 http://www.listen.org/
3 Since 2004 the corresponding subject heading in the Swedish database Svenska ämnesord (SAO) is “lyssnande” http://
libris.kb.se.
4 The dissertation passed in the subject of The theory and practice of teaching and learning Swedish [Svenska med didaktisk
inriktning, SMDI], originally a research subject at the University of Lund (1995) but nowadays (2011) also examined
at Malmö University. This means that SMDI is both a research subject and a network of different traditions in the subject
of Swedish.
5 Most of this article was presented for a different purpose as a paper at the 32 nd Annual International Listening Association
(ILA) Convention, 31 March–2 April 2011, in Johnson City, Tennessee, USA.
6 The transfer model of communication originates from information theory where information is stored, processed and
transmitted within technical systems, like Shannon and Weaver’s signal transmission theory (Linell, 2011:138).
7 This also implies that “understanding the relational dimensions of listening may contribute to understanding intrapersonal
communication” (Rhodes, 1989:565).
8 Ralph G. Nichols (1948:154) points out that: “The encyclopedia? of Educational Research reports that 1951 scientific
studies relating to reading has been published in the United States and England by 1939. In contrast, only fourteen scientific
researches related to classroom listening comprehension were found”.
9 The Reader-Response Theory is represented by famous names like Fisher (1980), Iser (1978), Langer (1995) and Rosenblatt
(1995 [1938]).
10 Right now, in my written voice response, I am referring to Bakhtin, that belongs to my contextual resources.
11 Right now, in my written voice use, you can read how I am using Bakhtin while I am arguing for an expanding and including
perspective in listening research and listening education.
12 This dialogical perspective, however, is not mainstream theory, where variants of transfer theory have dominated linguistics
and philosophy throughout most of history, “usually combined with some sort of a code theory of language” (Linell,
2011:135).
13 This also means that many of the dialogic approaches to language (like Gadamer, Mead, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Goffman)
do not originate from mainstream linguistics (Linell, 2011:194).
14 It is interesting to notice, for example, that in both the national syllabus for compulsory school in the subject of Swedish
and in the supporting material from the National Agency for Education there is an emphasis on reading strategies, while
specific listening strategies are never mentioned.
15 The listening perspective (including references to Adelmann 2002 & 2009) are represented in a supporting and test material
from the National Agency for Education, called Språket på väg I and II (2011), for compulsory school in the subjects of
Swedish and Swedish as a second language, grades 6–9. http://www.skolverket.se/prov-och-bedomning/ovrigt-bedomningsstod/2.6011/2.1195/svenska-och-svenska-som-andrasprak-1.106467
16 For examples of reported listening, with the individual student’s listening repertory and listening profile, I refer to my
dissertation (Adelmann, 2002).
17 For other examples of how to operationalise the six types of listening I refer to my textbook (Adelmann, 2009).
18 According to the NCA, competent listeners also demonstrate: knowledge and understanding of the listening process, and
the ability to identify and manage barriers to listening.
19 It is interesting to notice that Chapter 2 about qualitative research comprises about 12 pages, while the following chapter
about quantitative research encompasses 40 pages.
20 It seems appropriate to add that my paper was warmly received at a public session at the 32 nd Annual International Listening
Association Convention, in Johnson City, Tennessee, USA, 1 April 2011.
531

Kent Adelmann
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 535–550
EDU.
INQ.
‘Whenever I put a black jacket on,
I get dandruff ’
On metonymy as a device for constructive
argumentation analysis
Anders Sigrell*
Abstract
Mother-tongue teachers teach argumentation analysis. To this end, among other things, they use
a stylistic meta-language, i.e. the tropes and figures of style, to analyse arguments as well as more
aesthetic communication. The best-known trope is the metaphor. In this article it is argued that a
more pragmatic view on the related figure metonymy could sharpen our tools for argumentation
analysis. Metaphor is about resemblance or similarity; metonymy is about some kind of contextual
togetherness or contiguity, “The White House has decided to decrease the military presence in
Afghanistan”. Since the information focus in the metonymy is somewhere other than on the name
shift, it makes it a potential carrier of possibly insidious assumptions and attempts to persuade.
Such possible instances could be “Prices go up” or “Pensions go down”. The metonymy concept can
help us see that pensions do not go down; someone has decided to lower them.
Keywords: metonymy, metaphor, argumentation analysis, rhetoric, teacher education
The mother-tongue subject in the Swedish elementary and high school is a combination
of Literature and Scandinavian studies. At university level, literature studies and
the study of the Swedish language are normally split between separate departments.
Accordingly, trainee teachers will have to study what for most of them will be a single
subject at different departments, a solution that might not be the most beneficial. As
an attempt to gather researchers with an interest in the overarching goal of identifying
how to improve the education of our trainee teachers, and thus to reduce the possible
shortcomings of this split, The Network for Research on Swedish as a Didactic Subject
(SMDI) was formed in the south of Sweden in 2003. This is not the place to tell the
story about SMDI, but it is noted that the network has so far been very successful,
including for instance the running of annual well-attended conferences.
The split between the two parts of the mother-tongue subject was of course never
complete. One of the bridges that has interested researchers from both fields has
*Department for Communication Studies,University of Lund, Sweden, anders.sigrell@kom.lu.se.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 535–550
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Anders Sigrell
always been the Elocutio part of the so-called Partes model, which survived under
the name of Stylistics. The word ‘survived’ refers to the downfall of Rhetoric starting
at the end of the 18 th century. 1
Elocutio deals primary with the level of style, and the tropes and figures of speech.
Perhaps the best-known trope is the metaphor. At any university library you will
find a number of books on the metaphor. But you will hardly find anything on the
metonymy. In this article I try to make the case that a highlighting of the metonymy
concept could amount to a substantial contribution to our toolbox for constructive
argumentation analysis. Further, I suggest adopting a more pragmatic understanding
of the metonymy – one that emphasises the information structure of metonymies
compared to metaphors, rather than the different topoi from which to construct a
metonymy.
Definition
The standard definition of metonymy usually contrasts this trope with the more familiar
metaphor. The difference being that metaphor deals with resemblance: “a visual
expression where likelihood or inner resemblances motivates that an entity (vehicle)
is being changed to something else (tenor) (my translation from the Swedish National
Encyclopedia). “You are a pig” could be a typical example. Metonymy, in contrast,
is “a stylistic figure where one expression is changed for another, which stands in a
certain relation to the more common expression” (ibid.). A typical example could
be “The whole saloon burst into laughter”. There is, in other words, another type of
relation than resemblance. It could be cause for effect, part for whole, or closeness
in time or space etc.
If you look up Quintilian’s chapter on tropes (Institutio Oratoria Book 8 Ch 6), it
starts by stating:
By a trope is meant the artistic alteration of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to
another. This is a subject which has given rise to interminable disputes among the teachers
of literature, who have quarrelled no less violently with the philosophers than among
themselves over the number of the genera and species into which tropes may be divided,
their number and their correct classification. I propose to disregard such quibbles as in no
wise concern the training of an orator
We see here how Quintilian regards rhetoric as being primarily a productive device,
how to choose language as constructively as possible. It is not surprising since his
quest is to provide guidelines for the training of an orator. “My aim, then, is the education
of the perfect orator” (Quintilianus, 1. Preface.9). But this production focus is
at odds with the understanding of rhetoric we find in many ancient Greek sources,
where rhetoric was seen just as much as a device for constructive analysis of persuasive
communication. See, for example, Aristotle Book 2 Ch 24 where he analyses arguments
that, although they might be convincing, we are not to be persuaded by since
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‘Whenever I put a black jacket on, I get dandruff ’
they lack some kind of argumentative quality. Throughout Aristotle arguments are
analysed in a depth we do not find in Quintilian or other Roman writers. 2
Rhetoric as a meta-reflective device
As mother-tongue teachers we teach argumentation analysis, and use among other
things a stylistic meta-language to analyse arguments as well as more aesthetic
communication, i.e. the tropes and figures of style (Rydén et al. 1995: 191 ff; Perme
2000: 242 ff; Wiklund 2009). If we have a production-oriented view on how to use
the meta-language that Rhetoric has to offer, we might miss sharp tools that could
serve to analyse persuasive communication. The objective of argumentation analysis
has traditionally been combined with a negative focus, ‘how to avoid being fooled’
(for example, see Ejvegård 2005). It should be stressed that argumentation analysis
could be just as important when it comes to not missing virtuous influence. The
overarching goal with such an activity can be said to be that we should acquire tools
that enable us to reflect on how to achieve our communicative intentions, as both
senders and receivers: “That we all to a greater extent than before should hold the
views we want to entertain, and to a greater extent act according to our intentions”
(Sigrell 2011b: 177). This formulation may sound a little provocative, and of course
it demands a number of restrictive conditions to be meaningful. One such condition
has to do with the indissoluble relation between rhetoric and ethics. The result of a
well-executed investigation may morally oblige us to abandon notions and patterns
of behaviour that we had been fully satisfied with earlier.
The listener’s responsibility for the communicative act has gained some attention
lately (for example, see Adelmann 2009 or Sigrell 2011a). The most fundamental
rhetorical assumption is that we choose language. This assumption could take its
theoretical starting point in the arbitrariness of language, that there is no logical force
obligating us to exercise a specific language choice. We choose completely freely, an
enormous freedom, and an enormous responsibility. If we choose completely freely,
we are completely responsible for our choice of wordings. Once again we see the relation
between rhetoric and ethics. But this is a truth with modification. We choose
completely freely, yes, but only from the repertoire we can choose from. Copia is the
rhetorical term for this repertoire. It follows from this that rhetoric as a didactic subject
is there to help us choose as constructively as possible, and to help us enlarge our
copia. For the former, Rhetoric offers us a meta-reflective language that can help us
reflect on the terms and outcome of the communication situation. For the latter, we
have different kinds of rhetorical exercises (for example, the progymnasmata exercises
that have gained so much interest lately; for example, see Eriksson 2002 or Sigrell
2003a/b, 2005, 2006). It is worth mentioning that the Latin copia gives rise to both
the adjective “copious” – that we should strive for as large copia as possible – and the
verb “to copy” – that we will enlarge our copia through inspiration from good examples
(this, of course, has to be practised, in writing, reading, speaking and listening).
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Anders Sigrell
That we choose language comprises how we, as receivers, choose to perceive what
others say, how we listen. To speak is a right, rights entail obligations, responsibility
for what we do with language, and what language does to us. Philip Melanchthon
puts it well in this paraphrased quotation from his Elementorum rhetorices duo libri
“Rhetoric is not an art of how to speak well, or even the art of how to teach others
how to speak well; it is foremost an art of how to understand, and thereby be able
to make decisions in difficult matters” (my translation, pp. 22-23). 3 Thus, from the
point of view adopted in this article, rhetoric is an art that can be taught (techné,
see Nordkvelle 2002). The meta-reflective vocabulary of rhetoric can be used for
production-oriented as well as reception-oriented teaching. One significant form of the
latter is argumentation analysis, and one significant form of meta-reflective language
is tropes. They are clearly meta-reflective tools that can enable us to articulate what
we do with language, and what language does to us. They are not just topics for how
to formulate and convey a message as constructively as possible, but also devices for
how to understand what thought a sender wants to share with me as a receiver. Now,
it is time to return to one of the master tropes, the metonymy.
Metonymy
In spite of his negative understanding of the genera and species of tropes quoted
above, Quintilian sets off to define the major tropes. The definition and formation
of subgroups of metonymy deal with the kind of material that can be used to form a
metonymy. He lists eight different types of relations (Book 8 Ch 6 23-28). They are:
symbol for a thing being symbolised, cause for effect, effect for cause, controller for
controlled, creator for creation, place for activity, container for contained, possession
for possessor, and object used for user. Not all of his examples are immediately clear
to the contemporary reader, containing names of ancient Gods and persons one is
supposed to be familiar with. More current examples could be:
“The old lecturer finally gave up his pointing stick” (he quit teaching, symbol for a
thing being symbolised). “Clinique, the face cream that erases the years” (wrinkles,
cause for effect). “He took a swig of courage” (alcohol, effect for cause). “Bush bombs
Iraq” (US Air Force, controller for controlled). “I love Strindberg” (his writings,
creator for creation). “Kremlin denies all invention in Georgia” (place for activity).
“How about a glass?” (Whisky, container for contained). “The world’s best backhand
has landed” (Söderling, possession for possessor). “The media loves Björn Ranelid”
(journalists, object used for user).
Another example of the effect for cause-type is the title-metonymy of this paper,
“Whenever I put a black jacket on, I get dandruff”. Our thinking is metonymical; if
something happens after something else we tend to assume a causal relationship. This
tendency could be put to argumentative work. The Swedish tabloid Expressen once ran
the heading: “Olof Palme [former Swedish Prime Minister] plays tennis with Harry
Schein every Thursday. He is now Governor of the National Bank”. A heading where
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‘Whenever I put a black jacket on, I get dandruff ’
no one can deny facts, but nevertheless constituting a very insinuating formulation
since nearly everyone will read this as a causal relationship. 4
That something questionable is attributed as the cause of something that happens
after some event falls within the definition of the post hoc ergo procter hoc-fallacy. “I
told you our economy would be disastrous if we got a conservative government, and
now look what has happened”. This could be a typical example of the mentioned fallacy
since there could be other reasons for a bad economy than the economic policy of the
government. From one angle, this could be seen as a clear example of the rhetorical
perspectivism telling us that every single entity can be looked at from a number of
viewpoints. Every formulation can be rightfully attributed a number of denominations,
and even a number of different tropes can be used to denominate the very same
expression. This also applies to the subgroups of metonymy. There are no clear-cut
lines between them. “The appendix in 3:4 wants an urinal”, could for instance just as
well be put under ‘object for user’, in line with “The ham-sandwich wants his bill”, as
under ‘possession for possessor’ or even ‘symbol for a thing being symbolised’. The
reversed relation is also applicable; a number of different formulations could end up
under the same denomination. A couple of the denominations with a clear resemblance
to metonymy are worth mentioning here: metalepsis, antonomasia and synecdoche.
Related figures
Apart from metaphor, a number of familiar tropes could fulfil the role of metonymy
when it comes to denoting certain formulations. As a concept, metonymy is so vague
that it sometimes is tempting to view it as some kind of waste paper category. Yet,
some scholars have attempted to pinpoint differences clear enough to warrant a term
of their own. Quintilian mentions, among others, metalepsis (Book 8 Ch 6, 37). According
to him, it is a figure of speech where one thing is referred to by something else,
which is only remotely associated with it. It could be a metonymical substitution of one
word for another, which is in itself figurative. Often the association works through a
different figure of speech, or through a chain of cause and effects. It could even refer
to the combination of several figures of speech into an altogether new one. The material
to form a metalepsis from might, for example, be drawn from literary references,
resulting in a sophisticated form of allusion (another trope that will not be dealt with
here). Quintilian writes that it is a trope by which we claim acquaintance (ibid.). An
example could be “I have to catch the worm tomorrow”, alluding to the proverb of
the early bird. In “He is such a lead-foot” the chain goes via lead equals heavy, and a
heavy foot presses the accelerator, making the car go faster; ending up in the meaning
‘He drives too fast’. Another cause-effect example of metalepsis is “pallid death”,
creating a new adjective from what you become after death to describe death itself.
Far-fetched cause-effect relations make metalepsis suitable for humoristic effects.
An elegant example is Bellman’s Epistle no 23 Alas my mother. The epistle starts
with the protagonist lying in the gutter outside a bar early in the morning, cursing
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his mother and father for conceiving him (the remote cause) and his troubled life (the
effect). He curses the one who sent the mother to the bed, and even the wood that
the bed was made of. When the bar opens and he gets a couple of drams, the cursing
turns into an encomium over his mother, the father’s capability, and the gifted log
man and carpenter behind the making of the bed.
In the same chapter, Quintilian mentions antonomasia, where one substitutes
a descriptive phrase for a proper name, or substitutes a proper name for a quality
associated with it. “He is a Judas to our cause”, “There is much Cicero in this letter”
(eloquence), ”The prince of Peripatetics” (Aristotle). Antonomasia is, in other words,
a metonymy of the first type, a symbol for a thing being symbolised, with a proper
name as the symbol/what is being symbolised. Quintilian also mentions onomatopoeia
in relation to metonymy, and claims that it is really a form of catachresis, a misused
form of metonymy (Book 8 Ch 6 31-34). This understanding of onomatopoeia is well
at odds with the abovementioned arbitrariness of language (that even onomatopoeia
has some arbitrary traits is shown by the fact that Swedish pigs say ‘nine-nine’ in
French, “nöff-nöff”, while American pigs say ‘oink’). These tropes will not be mentioned
further, but a paragraph on synecdoche is appropriate for several reasons.
Synecdoche, meaning ‘act of taking together’ or ‘simultaneously understanding’, is
one of the master tropes. Like metonymy, it is a figure of substitution. It comes in two
variants, substituting the part for the whole, or the whole for the parts, in Latin pars
pro toto and totum pro parte. Typical examples could be “Sweden played brilliantly
in the second half against the Netherlands” (the part, the national soccer team, is
substituted for by the whole, Sweden). An editorial letter could be signed with “A girl
of 14 springs” (the whole, a year, is substituted for by a part). Most scholars, ancient
as well as more contemporary, see synecdoche as a subgroup of metonymy. Lakoff
& Johnsson, for example, in their widely read Metaphors we live by, follow Roman
Jakobson and classify synecdoche as “a special case of metonymy” (1980: 36). The
other way around is also possible. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke considered synecdoche
a basic figure of speech and metonymy “a special application of synecdoche”
(1962: 509) (even though one should mention that it is far from easy to understand
exactly what Burke means here; two pages earlier he wrote that metonymy overlaps
metaphor so likewise it overlaps upon synecdoche…).
The view that synecdoche is one of the master tropes goes back to Giambattista
Vico, the 18 th century rhetorician who has gained so much interest lately (see, for
example, the Rhetorica Scandinavica theme issue on rhetoric and didactics, no 38
2006). In his work on rhetorical figures, he found that all tropes could be reduced to
four master tropes, which subsumed all lesser tropes (1991: 409). The other three are
metaphor, metonymy and irony. It could be problematic to tell the difference between
synecdoche and metonymy, as several of the metonymical subgroups mentioned
above could be seen as a part-whole relationship. In 1830, the classical rhetorician
Dumarsais drew a clear distinction between them. With synecdoche the tenor, the
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substituted part, forms a whole with the vehicle, the subject it represents; making it
impossible to realise one of them without the possible realisation of the other (Davis
2010: 712). 5 With a metonymy, on the other hand, the tenor and vehicle both exist
on their own. Suitable examples could be “How about a glass?” The whisky and the
glass do exist as separate entities without any forcing connection between each other.
The same goes for “The pen (literature) is mightier than the sword (warfare)”. But in
the mentioned signing of an editorial letter, “A girl of 14 springs”, we cannot imagine
the vehicle ‘spring’ without the tenor ‘a year’. A ‘spring’ requires the concept ‘a year’
(but ‘autumn’ as a poetic symbol for ageing will be an unambiguous metonymy/
metaphor). This explanation is seemingly functional. There are evident examples
and the distinction will do its job in a classroom, even though it could be somewhat
questionable to highlight the part-whole relation as being so specific as to render it
the status of a trope in its own right.
The neuro-linguist Sheila Davies presents further arguments for seeing synecdoche
as a special trope (1993: 7-38). Empirical evidence from split-brain language studies
with aphasic patients suggests that synecdoche and metaphor are processed in
different brain halves. Synecdoche is processed in the more literal left hemisphere,
where internal details and the breaking up of wholes into parts is necessary for the
synecdochic thought. The more holistic and figurative right hemisphere deals with
metaphor. This interesting result could provide a starting point for an argument that
by combining two disparate realms metaphor adds meaning, while by reducing the
whole to a part synecdoche contracts meaning. The point worth mentioning here is
that from this the argument could be raised that metonymy works in two steps: first
it adds something, like the metaphor, and then it contracts something, like the synecdoche.
I will return to this below.
If you start thinking about how to tell the difference between different tropes
you will evidently end up in some kind of confusion. Take the proverb “His bark is
worse than his bite”. Are ‘bark’ and ‘bite’ metaphors or metonymies? They are not
synecdoches such as “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”, and not clear
metonymies like “Man cannot live on bread alone” or “Not a single soul was visible”.
As we have seen, there can be many different kinds of metonymies, some not
mentioned earlier are cause-instrument, agent-activity, activity-affected object, and
activity-product. For the purpose of this paper, it is less important to try to enumerate
the possible types of contiguity than to acknowledge that contiguity is an experience
of a relation, of some kind of ‘togetherness’, where experience is to be understood
in the broadest sense. Given this assumption, contiguity can take virtually any form
provided speakers construe a relation between the entities involved and take that
relationship as communicatively relevant as possible. Accordingly, in spite of the
writings of several great scholars, synecdoche and the part-whole relation will be seen
as one type of metonymy throughout the rest of this paper. A quotation in support
of this stance could be:
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In classical rhetoric, metonymy became a figure of speech distinct from metaphor. It normally
excluded shifts of meaning based on PART-WHOLE relations, which were attributed
to synecdoche. Nowadays, shifts of meaning based on PART-WHOLE relations are included
in metonymy and are actually regarded as the most basic metonymical relations (Nerlich,
Clarke & Todd (1999 p. 362)).
Discussion
Quintilian takes, as we have seen, his starting point in what linguistic material is being
used to form different tropes to separate metaphor from metonymy. The same goes
for ancient as well as more contemporary scholars in the field. Cicero in De Oratore
book III 167 and Ad Herenium book IV also take this stand. Contemporary Scandinavian
scholars like Øivind Andersen (1995), Kurt Johannesson (1998), Jens Kjeldsen
(2004), Lennart Hellspong (2011) and Ralph Waldenström (2012) do the same.
As mother-tongue teachers and researchers in this field, language is the focal point
of our study, and the same applies to argumentation analysis. Argumentation analysis
is a language subject, but its focus is outside language, on the result of language
use. Traditionally, one could study linguistic meaning on three levels, the semantic,
syntactic and pragmatic level (Lyons 1991). Argumentation studies will typically be
placed on the third level. If we shift the focus from a more semantic view of the differences
between metaphors and metonymies to a more pragmatic view, another striking
difference will appear. In the typical use of a metaphor the sender’s communicative
intention is to highlight the similarities between the tenor and vehicle: “My darling,
you are a rose”, “You are a pig”. With the typical use of metonymy the contiguity, the
‘togetherness’, that provides the ground for the change is pushed to the background.
“The White House has decided to decrease the military presence in Afghanistan” is
about US military activity and not about where the decision-makers are located. The
same goes for the vast majority of examples mentioned in this paper. The name-shift is
seen as something so obvious that it would be a communicative waste of energy to pay
any special attention to it. In using the metaphor you want the receiver to pay attention
to similarities. “Cicero in not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself”, as Quintilian
puts it (Institutio Oratoria Book 10, Ch 1, 112). The information focus in using the
typical metaphor is on the similarity between the tenor and vehicle, while when using
the typical metonymy the information focus is somewhere else. This indicates that it
follows a communicative pattern to question a metaphor, which is not the case with the
use of metonymy. The contiguity behind the metonymy is not the information focus,
where to question it would not follow a communicative pattern. Such a pragmatic view
would end up with several metaphors being redefined as metonymies. “The market
loves Volvo” (headline after the Geely-Volvo business operation, a metonymy of the
agent-place category). Information focus is on investor’s predilection for a certain company.
The possibly righteous questioning of this anonymous personification of these
investors as ‘the market’ would not follow a communicative pattern. The metaphor
“Money investors are the market” is implicit and taken for granted.
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None of the abovementioned researchers have, as far as I can understand, taken this
more pragmatic view on metonymies, but instead have a more semantically-oriented
view. There are researchers who see the possible persuasive effects from metonymy
contrasted with metaphor. The Norwegian scholar Einar Eggen is one of them. In
his article “Metafor og metonymi” (1976) he writes: “It seems to be central to the
metaphor that it establishes a new semantic union, often by surprising unifications,
while metonymy and synecdoche only represent movements within the same context,
where the associations are on the whole run-in and well known” (p. 10, my translation
from Norwegian). “The metaphor is punctate, illogical, lifted above time and space,
while metonymy always moves within a logical, temporal or spatial setting” (p. 16,
my translation). But his conclusion from this is not a pragmatic one. The conclusion
is for scholars of literature: “Poetry is punctate and therefore metaphorical. Prose on
the other hand is advancing, linear, and therefore metonymical” (p. 16).
Metonymies are not just studied by rhetoricians or linguists. Thanks to the so-called
linguistic turn in most fields of research, metonymies are studied in organisational
research for instance. One example is Gill Musson and Susanne Tietze’s “Places
and spaces: The role of metonymy in organizational talk” (2004). They believe that
metonymies are under explored thanks to the “fundamentally conventional nature
of the trope in use, which express ideas, values and relationships that seem natural,
normal and routine but which are culturally bound” (p. 1301). Their aim could be
seen as a task in a similar vein as the present paper: “[A]nalysing metonymies (and
related metaphors) enables exploration of taken-for granted cultural relationships
and meanings” (p. 1308). Even if their analyses of office-conversations are no doubt
interesting, they too have a more semantic view on metonymies. They ground their
view on the difference between metaphor and metonymy on the material from which
to form the tropes: “Perhaps metonymies are more powerful in their effects precisely
because they shift meaning between signs in the same meaning domain” (p. 1307).
Such a more semantic view also seems to be the prevailing one in the cognitive approaches
to metonymy that we meet in anthologies such as Metaphor and Metonymy
at the Crossroads (2000, ed. Barcelona) and Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison
(2003, eds. Dirven & Pörings).
In her article “Manoeuvring strategically with metonymy in the confrontation and
argumentation stages of a discussion” (2008), Francisca Snoeck Henkemans has a
different understanding from the present paper of the role metonymies play in an
argumentative setting. With references to well-known scholars like Lakoff & Johnson,
Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca and Radden & Kövecses, she sees metonymies as a way
to highlight the name-change, not putting it in the background as is proposed in the
more pragmatic view taken here: “metonymies allows us to focus more specifically on
certain aspects of what is being referred to” (p. 70), “[metonymies] is a way of drawing
attention to a particular characteristic… This function seems to coincide with the
function of high-lighting or focussing” (p. 71). There are examples that could support
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such a view on metonymies, e.g. “Nixon bombs Hanoi” (controller-controlled). Even
if the information focus is somewhere else than on the name-change, it is easy to see
that this metonymy focuses on highlighting Nixon as someone personally responsible
for the actions undertaken; the reinforced negative pathos that follows could be understood
to be in line with the communicative intention behind such an expression.
In contrast, in all the examples mentioned above, and below, the metonymy is put in
the background – not focused, highlighted or drawn attention to – in line with the
abovementioned Eggen and Musson & Tietze understanding of metonymies. That
Snoeck Henkemans has a different view is also shown by her examples. According to a
more pragmatic view, some of them would be seen as metaphors, e.g. “Sugar is energy
by nature” (end-means). “This-is-this” is the typical basis formula for the metaphor.
To make it a metonymy one would have to put the name-change in the background,
for example by re-phrasing the advertorial: “Energy by nature is good for you. The
Sugar Company”, a reformulation that puts the name-change in the background.
One could, of course, find a number of sound ways to look at the tropes in general
and metonymy in particular. Like many rhetorical terms the tropes could instead
be seen more constructively as perspectives from which to look at a communicative
act. What would we see if we look at an expression as a metonymy, a metaphor
or an irony? Here it is argued that a more pragmatic view, contrasted with a more
semantic ditto, on the metonymy could help us detect possibly insidious uses of the
trope. Even if Snoeck Henkemans and the present paper perhaps see metonymies
differently, our purposes are in the same vein. For example, she finds part-whole
metonymies as possibly evading the burden of proof fallacy. And her conclusion is:
“By using metonymies, arguers can present their standpoint in such a way that they
become easier to defend and they can make their argumentation seem stronger and
less open to criticism” (p. 76).
A more pragmatic view, it is argued, could provide better help when it comes to
teaching argumentation analysis by means of our tropes. But why should it be more
constructive to see e.g. the mentioned “The Market loves Volvo” as a metonymy compared
to seeing it as a metaphor? The tropes in our argumentation analysis toolbox
are not etiquettes used to label different aspects of the arguments; they are here to
help us recognise aspects that would have risked passing us by unnoticed. Recently
during the economic turbulence an economic journalist on television was heard saying
“The Swedish crown is floating” (cause-effect). The information focus is on the
decreasing value of the Swedish crown compared to other currencies. The metaphor
that tells us that the persons and organisations behind the decisions leading up to this
situation can be seen as the personified subject ‘the Swedish crown’ is pushed to the
background. This makes the metonymy particularly suitable for conveying implicit
messages. The origin of this article was a train ride back to Sweden from Denmark.
On the train the public train company had fixed commercial posters advertising its
service. Across one of the posters there was a banner saying: “Now also tax-free!”.
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The banner bothered me; there is something strange about a public company running
commercials claiming to have a tax-free service, but I could not quite understand
why it bothered me. Suddenly it struck me that the banner could be understood as a
metonymy of the part-whole type. The word ‘tax-free’ is a part of a whole. The whole is
about the process by which we acquire and use common belongings. The word tax-free
denotes that in this process there is a negative force, the State, that takes our money,
and that it is good if that could be avoided – to be free from taxes. Other wordings
could have given other connotations, for example “We all subsidise the ticket-fares
to make them as low as possible”.
Here is the answer why it could be constructive to sharpen metonymy as a tool
in our argumentation analysis toolbox. Metonymies signal a relation between tenor
and vehicle that is supposedly obvious and not to be questioned, which could be
used for insidious attempts to persuade. The headline “Prices go up”, or preferably
“Pensions go down” could be used to hide the responsibility for those responsible
for the decision to lower pensions. In its Swedish election 2010 posters, a right-wing
populist party (the Swedish Democrats) used the slogan: “Give us Sweden back”. This
whole-part metonymy forces the reader who wants to understand the message to fill
several gaps, what is Sweden, what has been taken, who took it? This kind of implicit
message conveying has the possibility to be effective, among other reasons for the
fact that if a receiver fills the several gaps they could come to the conclusion that this
is something I have found out myself, not something someone else has told me to
think/believe (further, see Sigrell 2011b). In xenophobic argumentation this type of
part-whole metonymies seems to be frequent (see e.g. Reisigl and Wodak 2001). The
two types of part-whole metonymies can be both particularising (pars pro toto) and
generalising (totum pro parte). Examples of the former from the same party could be
“Non-Western immigrants are behind virtually all assault rapes”, “Immigrants cost
money that ought to go to our pensioners”. An example of the latter is what the party
Secretary of the Swedish Democrats posted on Facebook shortly after the Swedish
victory in the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2012 by the second-generation immigrant
Loreen: “Sweden?”. The question mark clearly indicates that there is a whole,
and that the party Secretary is sceptical as to whether Loreen is supposed to be seen
as a part of that whole, thanks to her immigrant background.
A more pragmatic view on metonymy can, as mentioned, sharpen the device in
our argumentation toolbox. A significant example is the Swedish local politician and
academic rhetorician, José Ramirez, who participated in a debate with a Union leader.
Ramirez was very critical of him, and after a while the Union leader exclaimed, “Are
you attacking the union?”. Ramirez saw the metonymy (part-whole) and answered,
“No, I am attacking you” (personal communication with José Ramirez March 2012).
Argumentation can be seen as an attempt to establish connections between different
entities. That is what the everyday use of syllogisms, deduction and induction is about.
With a starting point in something held to be plausible, a connection is established
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with a claim made. We have different models for argumentation analysis to study
these connections, like the pro et contra model, the Toulmin model, Black’s persona,
neo-Aristotelian models, Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, the Pragmadialectic, informal
logic… [(see for example, Foss (2009) or Kuypers (2009)]. But it is not only different
matters of fact in syllogistic propositions that establish connections. Metaphors and
metonymies do that too, like all tropes and figures of style (including the rhyme 6 ).
One important point about the metaphor-metonymy connection that follows from
what has been said so far is that, from a rhetorical argumentation-analysis didactic
perspective, the metaphor will always be an integral part of metonymy. Every scholar
would agree that “The Kremlin denies any intervention in Georgia” is a metonymy.
And most scholars would agree that “Putin is the Kremlin” is an effective metaphor
(or Medvedev, or the Russian government, or all three are the Kremlin). Viewed this
way, the metaphor is a prerequisite for these types of metonymies, but the one who
uses the metonymy has other communicative intentions compared to the metaphor
user. This could be an important aspect in our teaching of how to use the tropes for
argumentation analysis.
With this particular viewpoint taken, we can return to the abovementioned cognitive
processing of the metonymy. To process metonymy we must first understand
the metaphor behind it, an expansion of the denotations of the actual wording, and
then reduce that meaning (the Kremlin is not just the buildings in Moscow, it is the
place where Russian foreign policy decisions are made, therefore you can see the
Kremlin as Russian decision-makers when it comes to foreign policy). After that, the
name-change operation is put in the background. This places the metonymy in the
background as something so obvious and uncomplicated that it is not worth highlighting.
As demonstrated, this move might for example be used to evade responsibility.
How could this way of looking at the metaphor-metonymy be helpful when it comes
to fulfilling the goals of our mother-tongue teaching? From one point of view rhetoric
is, as mentioned, nothing but a meta-reflective language that can help us reflect on the
terms and outcome of a communicative situation. Tropes in a pedagogical setting are
there to help us recognise language-reality relations that could otherwise have risked
passing us by unnoticed. The more and the sharper the tools we can equip our future
teachers with, and thereby their pupils/students, the better off we are when it comes
to reflecting on what we do with language, and what language does to us. A more
pragmatic understanding of metonymy in line with what has been stated above could
be such a sharpening of the tool metonymy as a device for argumentation analysis.
Conclusion
Definitions of metonymy often see it being contrasted with metaphor, the latter being
about some kind of resemblance or similarity, while the former is about some kind
of contextual ‘togetherness’ or contiguity. All our lexica and encyclopaedia, as well
as ancient and contemporary scholars in the field referred to in this paper, entertain
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this quasi-semantic view on the difference. This is no doubt a coherent and functional
way of looking at these master tropes. If we are to analyse persuasive communication,
it could help us label some expressions as metaphors and some as metonymies. But
there could also be other ways of looking at them. In this article, a more pragmatic
view has been advocated. The typical metaphor has its information focus on the
resemblance between the tenor and vehicle, “You are a rose”. The communicative
intention is to make the receiver aware of this resemblance. On the other hand, the
typical metonymy has its information focus somewhere else, “The White House has
decided to decrease the military presence in Afghanistan” is about military presence
and not the name-shift. This makes the metonymy a potential carrier of possibly
insidious assumptions and attempts to persuade, since it does not follow a communicative
pattern to question the name-shift behind the metonymy, but receivers are
assumed to accept it as something granted. The abovementioned examples “Pensions
go down” and “Are you attacking the Union?” “No, I am attacking you” could be such
possible instances. Accordingly, it has been argued that – when coming across a message
containing a transferred meaning with an information focus on something else
than on making the receiver aware of this – the metonymy concept understood from
a more pragmatic point of view can help us detect more or less conscious attempts
to implicitly convey conceptions about our reality. A quest that is anything but unimportant
for our mother-tongue teaching.
Professor Anders Sigrell has a Masters degree in education and several years of experience of
teaching at teachers’ Colleges. He now holds the Chair of Rhetoric at Lund University. Main research
interest involves the combination of rhetoric and learning, ancient and contemporary.
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Notes
1 The downfall of Rhetoric in Sweden, beginning in the late 18th century and thriving into the end of the 20th century, has
been the topic of a successful research project led by Otto Fischer and Ann Öhrberg, Department of Literature, Uppsala
University; see, for example, Fischer 2011. For the claims that stylistics is a survivor of the elocutio step in the partes model,
that unites scholars from Literature and Scandinavian studies in a Scandinavian context, for Scandinavian speakers see for
example Peter Cassirer’s Stil, stilistik och stilanalys 2003 or Birger Liljestrand Språk i text 1983.
2 The Roman development of Rhetoric, with Cicero and Quintilian arguably being the brightest names, hardly contributed
anything substantial to rhetorical theory. Put somewhat simply, one could say that they systematised the terminology,
and made distinctions in a rhetorical vocabulary that for the Greeks was used on a more personal level. The reason for the
changed view on rhetoric as also being a device for argumentation analysis in Rome is a subject for another paper. Here I
settle for a quote from M. D. Hazen: “When the Roman republic evolved into the despotism of the Roman Empire, a concern
for argument disappeared and the study of rhetoric was largely confined to style” (1995: 211). One fitting example of the
mentioned systematisation of the rhetorical terminology is exactly the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. When
Aristotle used the term metaphor, he understood both these concepts (for more, see Ramirez 2000).
3 The Melanchthon quotation is translated from Volkhard Wels’ edited and commented translation into German. Since
neither my Latin nor my German are particularly brilliant, I wrote to Dr Wels. He replied: “Your quotation is more a
paraphrase than an exact quotation. Melanchthon is making this point all over his preface to the Elementa. Anyway, your
quotation is definitely from the core of Melanchthon’s intentions” (personal correspondence, Feb. 2012), hence the wording
“paraphrased quotation”.
4 That we assume a causal relationship if two statements are placed after each other can be explained with the help of the
Gricean maxims, preferably the relevance maxim (see Grice 1975). But the foundation for these maxims rests on the cooperation
principle that has to be subordinated to another principle that could be called ‘the principle of the sense of the
action’. That we assume, until we have reason to the contrary, that there are some meaningful reasons for a person to act one
way or another, otherwise everyday life would be very tricky. And why would someone, like in this case Expressen, mention
Schein’s new position in connection with tennis playing with the PM, if there were no causal relation? It is also possible to
see the Gricean notion of ‘conversational implicature’ as being metonymically motivated; for the sake of understanding you
have to substitute one expression with another.
5 Davis’ reference to Dumarsais is from Theresa Enos (ed.) Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition (2010). It would
have been preferable to quote the original source but, to my knowledge, Dumarsais’ Les Tropes (1830) is not translated
into a language that I am able to quote from. What makes this reference even more questionable is that Davis spells his
name Du Marsais, which I have not seen anywhere else, and moreover that an article like “Distinguishing Metonymy from
Synecdoche” by Ken-ichi Seto (1999) does not mention this distinction (the claim of Seto’s linguistic article is that in our
folk view on the question we tend to equate taxonomies (‘kind of’ relations) with partonomies (‘part of’ relations), and
if synecdoche is to be a consistent category it should only take taxonomy and leave partonomy to metonymy). Seto does
not provide any references to Dumarsais, but Andreas Blank does in his article “Co-presence and Succession. A Cognitive
Typology of Metonymy” in the same volume as Seto, alas without mentioning the distinction made in Davis’ article. The
reason that I, in spite of the insecurity of this reference, still use it, is that Enos’ Encyclopedia is regarded as a trustworthy
source, and above all that the distinction made is the most clear and comprehensible I have come upon.
6 Jeffrey Walker has an interesting line of argument in his “The Enthymeme in Perspective” (1984), where he claims rhyming
arguments are more valid than non-rhyming ones: All argumentation is about establishing connections, and no claim is
valid without its premises. We remember rhyming premises better than non-rhyming ones; therefore they are more valid.
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 553–568
EDU.
INQ.
Neoliberal teacher preparation:
Conceptualising a response in the US
borderlands
Michael D. Guerrero* & Peter Farruggio**
Abstract
The current era of neoliberal capitalism has witnessed the domination of public education by
business interests which openly promote the spirit of competition among schools, educators and
students through a policy of high stakes accountability for immediately measurable educational
outcomes. In the USA, this policy proposes to make teacher educator programmes accountable
for the impact of their programme completers on student achievement, namely standardised test
scores. Consequently, some programmes have begun to rethink their practices in an effort to avoid
negative sanctions. Unfortunately, little empirical evidence of improvement is available to teacher
educators, particularly those committed to the preparation of working class Mexican-origin bilingual
education teachers who are victims of a weak K-12 public school system. Drawing on various sources
from the research literature, this paper describes the creation of a context-specific signature border
pedagogy aimed at preparing effective bilingual teachers in a majority Latino public university in
the South Texas Borderlands.
Keywords: bilingual education, border pedagogy, teacher preparation, curriculum, teaching
effectiveness, bilingual learner achievement
The current era of neoliberal capitalism has witnessed the domination of public education
by business interests which openly promote the spirit of competition among
schools, educators and students through a policy of high stakes accountability for
immediately measurable educational outcomes. Legislation has swept across Europe
demanding core curriculum, common standards, and assessment targets (Glenn,
2007). This market-driven version of educational ‘reform’ has penetrated public school
systems in most English-speaking countries and parts of Asia by publicly ranking
schools by student test scores and altering education funding formulas according to
achievement outcomes (Leithwood & Earl, 2000). High stakes accountability poses
a challenge to the autonomy of higher education as well. For example, the Japanese
national university system faces the threat of bureaucratic evaluation by a businessinfluenced
external review institution (Yonezawa, 2002). In the developing world,
*University of Texas Pan American Curriculum & Instruction 1201 W. University Drive, Edinburg, guerreromd@utpa.edu.
**Second author: University of Texas Pan American Curriculum & Instruction 1201 W. University Drive, Edinburg, pfarruggio@
utpa.edu.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 553–568
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Michael D. Guerrero & Peter Farruggio
and particularly in Latin America, the value placed in higher education as a social
investment and in university autonomy as a means to distribute that investment is
being seriously challenged by a market-driven neoliberal agenda (Torres & Schugurensky,
2002). The imposition of this neoliberal agenda on public education in the
United States was formalised as a national policy in 2002 with the No Child Left
Behind legislation.
There is little doubt that neoliberal accountability has entered the arena of US
teacher preparation (Wineburg, 2006), and the preparation of teachers to meet the
needs of the growing population of Bilingual Learners (BLs) 1 is no exception. Preservice
programmes must now prove their effectiveness (Cibulka, 2009). US Secretary
of Education Arne Duncan, in his address at Columbia University (USDE, 2009), recently
exhorted, “We should be studying and copying the practices of effective teacher
preparation programmes – and encouraging the lowest-performers to shape up or
shut down”. Acting in concert with this discourse, under new state legislation in Texas
pre-service education programmes’ effectiveness will be measured, in part, by their
graduates’ impact on BLs’ academic achievement over a three-year period. Educator
preparation programmes that do not meet set criteria will inevitably face sanctions.
Most language minority education researchers understand the inadequacy of
inferring direct causal relationships between teacher preparation quality and subsequent
BL student outcomes. The linguistic, academic and cognitive aspects of the
sociocultural context of schools and their local communities significantly influence
BLs’ academic performances (Thomas & Collier, 2007). However, it appears that the
quality of teacher preparation does contribute to long-term student achievement patterns
(Darling-Hammond, 2000; Greenberg & Walsh, 2009; Levine, 2006).
Unfortunately, there is scant empirical evidence about specific programme features
associated with effective teacher preparation, especially with regard to those
who will teach the growing population of BLs (August and Hakuta, 1997). So while
Secretary Duncan and state education agencies create sanctions for teacher preparation
programmes, Teacher Education faculty lack substantive empirical evidence to
guide their quest for effective teaching practices. Moreover, we are required to teach
a state-mandated teacher preparation curriculum whose content is not linked to successful
student outcomes, especially in the case of BLs’ (bi)literacy development (Gee,
2008; Strauss, 2005; Perez & Huerta, 2011). More challenging is the fact that some
of our pre-service bilingual education candidates are themselves working class BLs,
with a history of low academic achievement. How should a concerned faculty proceed
without a guideline of proven teaching practices for this non-mainstream population?
We describe here how our team of concerned bilingual teacher education faculty
conceptualised its approach to improving the preparation of pre-service teacher
candidates at a Latino-majority public university in the South Texas borderlands.
Funded by a multi-year programme improvement research grant, we have studied
together and collaborated in the teaching of a specific cohort of bilingual teacher
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Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualising a respons in the US borderlands
candidates during its entire progression through the programme. As these candidates
obtain teaching positions in local schools, we will measure their classroom performance
and their BL students’ learning to gauge the effectiveness of the preparation
we provided them. Our findings from this ultimate phase of the research project will
be forthcoming once the data are collected and analysed. In this paper, we describe
the pre-service programme features that we have examined and modified, focusing on
that which we faculty most directly control: the students’ opportunities to learn and
how we teach the mandated curriculum. Further, we describe how we synthesised a
unique, context-specific pedagogy from a variety of sources that we feel is suited to
the particular needs of our students.
Conceptual framework
Our approach to understanding the impact of our programme completers upon local
BLs’ academic achievement and language development is congruent with the conceptual
model for assessing teacher education used by Cochran-Smith and the Boston
College Evidence Team (2009). Presently in the final year of a federally funded fiveyear
professional development grant that began in 2007, our interdisciplinary evidence
team aims to follow our programme completers into their first year of teaching to
begin to gauge our impact upon local BL students’ learning and to use this empirical
data to inform improvements to our teacher preparation programme. The Boston
team’s conceptual framework includes components related to school practices and
pupil learning outcomes. Our investigation and analysis of these factors will begin
when our programme completers become teachers. This paper discusses the first
component of the framework, the teacher education programme itself (e.g., teacher
candidates’ characteristics, opportunities to learn), with some reference made to
the second component (e.g., teacher candidates’ learning). Both these components
ultimately influence teaching practice and pupil learning, thus completing the basic
chain of evidence (Cochran-Smith & Boston College Evidence Team, 2009).
The Borderland Context
The region’s low education rate highlights the need for educational improvement: an
extremely low SES rate, an 85.5% Educationally Disadvantaged Youth (EDY) rate 2 , a
68% “At Risk of Failure” student population, and a proportion of almost 40% BLs in the
pre-kindergarten to 12 th grade (PK-12) system. Latino children in the region’s schools
had below-average passing rates in 2006 for the 3 rd and 4 th grade state-standardised
achievement tests, the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) (Texas
Education Agency, 2009). An increased BL failure rate from 3rd to 4th grade continues
the pattern since 2003. Dramatically low educational attainment as measured
by rates of 9 th grade completion, high school diplomas, high school graduates’ college
readiness assessments, college enrolment, and college completion characterises the
region (Texas Education Agency, 2009). A recent study by the Brookings Institution
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Michael D. Guerrero & Peter Farruggio
(2010) indicates that residents in this region ranked 98 th among the country’s 100
largest metro areas based on the 15% of residents aged 25 and above with a bachelor’s
degree. The national average is estimated at 35%.
This university has one of the largest enrolments of Latino students (85%) in the
USA, graduating Texas’ second largest number of teacher candidates and, by some
accounts, the most bilingual education candidates in the USA (Office of Institutional
Research and Effectiveness, 2004). Unfortunately, first-time test-takers in the Early
Childhood – 4 th grade (EC-4) Bilingual Education programme had an unacceptably
low passing rate at the Texas Examinations of Educator Standards (TExES), the state
certification exams 3 . For example, during autumn 2004 through autumn 2006, 31.28%
of 418 students did not pass the Bilingual Generalist (103) exam at the first attempt.
Spring 2006 showed an even lower pass rate for first-time test-takers, and recent test
data from autumn 2009 reflect the continued less than acceptable first-time pass rates
for the new EC-6 exam. These tests are required for the state teaching licensure and
purport to measure pedagogical content knowledge of elementary school subjects.
Much of the content tested involves knowledge that should have been acquired prior
to admission to the teacher education programme. The implementation of a new
state-mandated Spanish language proficiency test for bilingual education teachers
adds more challenge. Of the university’s 60 students who took this examination in its
first year, only half passed. Not surprisingly, the exam’s reading and writing portions
posed the greatest challenge to our students.
This low first-time pass rate gives cause for concern since there is some empirical
evidence to show that teachers who pass their licensing tests at the first attempt
(Greenberg & Walsh, 2010) or score higher at teacher licensure examinations (Wayne
& Youngs, 2003) produce higher levels of student achievement. Moreover, the failure
to score adequate yearly progress based on state-regulated teacher certification
standards opens the door to negative sanctions such as site visits, corrective action
plans or even the shutting down of an educator preparation programme.
Our Teacher Education faculty offers a variety of explanations for students’ weak
test performances. Most complain about the larger class sizes that result from the
administration’s insistence on ‘faculty productivity’. Yet few voice concern over the
lower pre-service programme admission standards associated with this policy. Many
criticise the university’s failure to offer pre-programme opportunities to students to
appropriate English and Spanish language and literacy skills, as well as basic knowledge
of mathematics, science and social studies. The content of the generalist test
poses the greatest challenge to our students and allows programme faculty to place
the blame across campus. Since our students score fairly well on the bilingual education
content and pedagogy components, most faculty seem to feel they are fulfilling
their teaching obligations.
To address the low pass rates of first-time test-takers, the programme faculty and
administration have adopted a “test early and test often” policy. The faculty generally
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oppose a teach-to-the-test remedy and condone voluntary test-taking ‘workshops’. To
provide such optional, non-salaried workshops would require an additional service,
and very few faculty members have offered this service. Current policy requires that
students pass the EC-6 Bilingual Generalist exam before being allowed to register for
student teaching. Consequently, some students take this exam about half way through
their preparation so that they can retake the exam as often as needed to qualify for
student teaching. The state charges a USD 120 fee for each exam attempt that represents
a heavy financial burden for our working class students. A testing support office
attempts to identify their weaknesses and provide guidance and support for passing
the exam on subsequent attempts.
The paucity and content of our pre-service faculty’s discussions about programmatic
opportunities to learn signals a belief in external causes of the teacher candidates’
academic shortcomings. Perhaps as with similar programmes, the collective reflection,
discussion and investigation of the impact of our own teaching practices have
not been part of the faculty’s culture or teacher preparation discourse (Gee, 2008).
Ironically, there is general agreement that our pre-service teachers should learn and
practice effective pedagogical approaches for BLs, such as dual language models, native
language instruction, constructivist teaching, funds of knowledge, scaffolding,
thematic units, and sheltered instruction. However, the evidence seems to indicate
that few faculty members believe that the teacher candidates entering our programme
would more favourably respond to similar pedagogy and learning experiences tailored
to their needs or that we should collectively offer these in an effort to improve test
performance and perhaps the impact programme completers have on the BLs they
go on to teach. The impact of our programme is at the heart of the matter, given our
symbiotic relationship with the local schools where our students will teach. If we
cannot prepare better teachers, we are unlikely to contribute to offsetting the overall
academic underachievement in this borderland region.
Guidelines for Improved Teacher Preparation
While factors such as explicit programme purpose, curricular coherence, curricular
balance, faculty composition, admissions criteria, degree standards, site-based research,
budget and assessment practices all play a role in shaping the quality of teacher
candidates’ preparation (Levine, 2006), our evidence team first reviewed the existing
literature on college teaching, the one factor we can directly control. Our journey was
centred not so much on what to teach our prospective bilingual education teachers
but how to teach them. Consistent with Menges and Austin (2001), we recognised
that how we planned our courses, delivered instruction and assessed student learning
could significantly shape our candidates’ preparation, including their performance
at the certification exams.
We recognise that, unlike most US pre-service teacher preparation programmes,
we do not prepare a student population of primarily White middle class females. We
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Michael D. Guerrero & Peter Farruggio
need to gain a profound understanding of teaching approaches that would deepen
the learning of our largely low-income, variably bilingual-biliterate, Mexican-origin
female teacher candidates, most of whom were products of the region’s weak K-12
schools. Menges and Austin (2001) conclude that many research questions remain
unanswered about “relationships between such variables as students’ cultural background
and race and preferred learning strategies and learning styles” (p. 1136). Even
scarcer are empirical studies that might shed light on the effectiveness of language
minority or bilingual education teacher preparation programmes and BLs’ achievement
outcomes (Sheets, Flores & Clark, 2011).
Even if we had a better sense of the knowledge and skills that teachers ought to
have, we would still be left with the need to understand how to create opportunities
for prospective bilingual education teachers to appropriate them within the confines
of the state-mandated degree plan. 4 Menges and Austin (2001) maintain that in college
teaching instructional methods usually reflect individual faculty preferences or
trial and error rather than systematic attention to the nature of the expected learning.
Along these lines, Reybold, Flores and Cortez (2006, p. 2) contend that faculty are often
grossly unprepared for the rigours of teaching, and that what they do learn is more
the product of accidental occurrences. Ironically, we assume this to hold true even in
departments of Curriculum and Instruction where faculty may be adept at teaching
children and adolescents but have not had much opportunity to appropriate the expertise
to teach university-level bilingual learners with weak prior academic preparation.
Towards the Conceptualisation of a Border Pedagogy
Drawing from Giroux (1992), Calderon and Carreon (2000, p. 168) call for an approach
to enacting the curriculum that is essentially tailored to the children whose
experiences are embedded in a US-Mexico border reality and landscape. The two
authors view this new border pedagogy as a kind of progressive education with a
social justice orientation. It may, however, be better construed as a liberating pedagogy
since it addresses “how inequalities, power, and human suffering are rooted in
basic institutional structures” (p. 168). Unfortunately, they do not elaborate on what
this border pedagogy might look like instructionally within the context of pre-service
teacher preparation.
More recently, Romo and Chavez (2006, p. 143) describe border pedagogy as a
means to decolonise and revitalise learning and teaching to promote liberty and justice
for all. However, they too do not elaborate on what kind of instructional approaches
might be used in the operationalisation of border pedagogy with pre-service teachers
who grew up and were educated along the US-Mexico border. Their study involved
students who were predominantly European-American and female. They do however
make some passing reference to the pedagogy used. They briefly describe it as eclectic,
favouring experiential learning aimed at eliciting visceral responses. In spite of the
lack of specification of border pedagogy from an instructional standpoint, what we
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Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualising a respons in the US borderlands
draw from this notion is the need for our instructional approaches to be consistent
with how our teacher candidates best learn, and to gain this insight requires a study
of our students and their contexts. This constitutes new ground with few specifics
about instructional approaches.
For instance, how would a border pedagogy guide us in compensating for the
general content knowledge some of our students have not had the opportunity to appropriate
prior to entering our programme? We do not believe that offering random
test preparation workshops, placing the blame across campus, or adopting a “test
early test often” mantra is consonant with border pedagogy. We certainly expect our
students to meet the needs of BLs within the subtractive school settings where they
will likely begin teaching and, to the extent possible, to correct and even subvert the
miseducation and mislabelling of BLs. Our border pedagogy beliefs are intact (e.g.,
decolonise ourselves, our pre-service teachers, and the BLs they will teach), but within
the constraints of our present teaching/learning situation, the major challenge is to
refine our practice, i.e. Porter’s (2006) enacted curriculum, to better meet our students’
academic needs. In sum, we must find ways to teach at least some of our students
what the degree plan indicates they should know (e.g., mathematics, science, social
studies content knowledge) before entering the teacher education programme (e.g.,
read large amounts of academic text quickly and with comprehension) as we attempt
to develop their political clarity (Bartolome, 2008).
Key Aspects of Signature Pedagogies
Shulman’s (2005a, p. 54) notion of signature pedagogies provides us with a key
concept that we can use to advance our general understanding of how our students
might best learn. As he explains, signature pedagogies have three dimensions: a surface
structure (concrete, operational acts of teaching and learning); a deep structure
(a set of assumptions about how best to impart a certain body of knowledge); and
an implicit structure (beliefs about professional attitudes, values, and dispositions).
For instance, and given the act of assigning articles and chapters in textbooks as a
pervasive pedagogical strategy within our profession, we need to reflect on its three
dimensions. The surface structure is the act itself of assigning readings for students
to study in preparation for class and includes how we engage them in gaining knowledge
from the text. Then the deep structure represents our pedagogical assumptions
underlying this act (e.g., the need to read, discuss, write, and then apply). The implicit
structure entails the attitudes, values and dispositions we associate with being able
to extract meaning from a teacher education text.
Clearly, the surface structure may have other components such as critiquing a
related video clip, followed by a discussion, and culminating in a written reflection
that entails concepts included in the assigned reading. Nonetheless, reading and negotiating
the meaning of professional texts lies at the core of the deep structure of this
pedagogical tool. While we might not regularly use video clips in our efforts to assist
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our students in appropriating target knowledge, we cannot imagine imparting valued
knowledge about teaching in the absence of some kind of interaction around written
text. Its use is habitual and routine, but this is not sufficient for signature pedagogy
status since there is likely to be wide variation among teacher-educators with regard
to the best way to impart knowledge using written texts. As Shulman (2005b) stresses,
it is difficult to identify the signature pedagogies of teacher education.
A certain irony reveals itself when students struggle to comprehend a text because
of the limited opportunities they have been afforded to appropriate the knowledge
to make sense of an academic text associated with social studies concepts (e.g.,
capitalism), for example. The matter becomes even more complex with pre-service
students who struggle to comprehend academic English text and make academic
concepts accessible to elementary grade native Spanish-speaking children. We need
to understand what the signature pedagogy involving the use of written text looks
like for the population in question. For example, does it entail a form of scaffolding
like previewing the reading, developing concept maps, using guide-o-ramas, writing
reflections, and/or the strategic use of both languages? The need to create a border
signature pedagogy thus emerges. Shulman (2005b) emphasises that signature
pedagogies emerge contextually, historically, in settings. The demands of our unique
context challenge us to synthesise an innovative approach to border pedagogy.
Fink’s work (2003) with significant learning provides a detailed approach to what
he calls integrated course design, which appears compatible with Shulman’s notion
of the deep structure of signature pedagogies and aspects of Calderon and Carreon’s
generalised notion of a border pedagogy. This step-by-step procedure also breathes
science into the organisation (e.g., coherence and cohesion) of the intended curriculum.
The primary goal of Fink’s approach is to lead to deep significant learning, or
what students should be able to do two or three years after course (or programme)
completion. This is achieved through active learning or involving students in doing
things and thinking about the things they are doing. Fink states:
One of the more powerful ideas to emerge in the literature on college teaching in the last
decade or so is the concept of active learning. In essence, the concept of active learning
supports research that shows: students learn more and retain their learning longer if they
acquire it in an active rather than a passive manner (p. 16).
It seems obvious that active learning is an easy candidate for signature pedagogy
status, but what is its nature in the context of bilingual education teacher preparation?
Perhaps active learning is what Ball and Forzani (2009) have in mind as they
argue for making practice, or the work of teaching, the core of the teachers’ professional
preparation. Their notion of a practice-focused curriculum shifts preparation
from knowledge acquisition to practice through the specification of what they call
high leverage tasks of teaching. Ball and Forzani (p. 504) describe these tasks in the
following manner:
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High leverage practices include tasks and activities that are essential for skillful beginning
teachers to understand, take responsibility for, and be prepared to carry out in order to enact
their core instructional responsibilities.
Of course, the identification of a set of agreed-on core tasks of bilingual teaching
may be a long-term goal, but this should not preclude the use of active learning or
practice as Ball and Forzani so thoroughly and convincingly argue. Opportunities to
actively practise the core tasks of bilingual teaching are thus central to the synthesis
of a signature border pedagogy.
In our context, a balance must be struck between practice and the development of the
pre-service teachers’ beliefs and commitments, which runs somewhat contrary to the
position taken by Ball and Forzani (2009). Reorienting our teacher candidates’ beliefs
about their own bilingualism and about bilingual education is essential in a society that
has long imbued both concepts with deficit thinking, and such a reorientation must
go hand in hand with learning effective teaching practices. Curricular time and space
must also be made to address our students’ extensive academic needs, including the
development of their academic Spanish language abilities (Guerrero & Valadez, 2011).
These context-specific needs legitimate the notion of border pedagogy (i.e., meeting
border learners’ academic needs) proposed by Calderon and Carreon (2000).
Fink’s (2003) course design for significant learning also makes clear that situational
factors must be considered. Of particular relevance to this paper, he recommends
the inclusion of learners’ characteristics in course development. This entails asking
oneself:
What is the life situation of the learners (e.g., working, family, professional goals)? What
prior knowledge, experiences and initial feelings do students usually have about this subject?
What are their learning goals, expectations and preferred learning styles?
Here again we are instructed to ask ourselves who our students are and how we
can build on these characteristics to create the kind of active learning opportunities
that will best prepare them for the tasks that lie ahead of them. This is clearly one
of the fairest and most complex questions all teacher educators respond to in one
way or another. At one extreme, pre-service candidates might be treated as a generic
population with little or no effort made to design a course or programme with student
characteristics in mind. At the other extreme, the faculty would at least study
a question like: How might border signature pedagogies account for the reality of a
student population that works 30 hours a week, includes single mothers, and wants
to graduate as soon as possible to offset their life of poverty?
At least two inter-related effective programme features come to mind: programmatic
coherence and grouping. Darling-Hammond (2006, p. 306) believes that radically
different or more positive outcomes in teacher preparation are linked, in part, to
intensely coherent programmes. The idea that faculty plan together and share syllabi
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Michael D. Guerrero & Peter Farruggio
within departments in order to achieve a kind of seamless experience of learning to
teach is another aspect to include in a signature border pedagogy. She recommends
that coursework be carefully sequenced based on a strong theory of learning to teach,
explaining that (p. 306), “In such intensely coherent programs, core ideas are reiterated
across courses and the theoretical frameworks animating courses and assignments
are consistent across the program”.
Such cohesion could be achieved if faculty collectively designed their syllabi around
Fink’s significant learning (2003), which entails a careful consideration of who the
students are. A community of working class pre-service Latina teachers would benefit
from a more coherent programme, and the more efficient use of time, one of their
most valuable and limited resources, would be maximised. As we see it, programmes
that are largely a collection of unrelated courses due to departmental divides and
individualistic faculty norms (Darling-Hammond, 2006) unnecessarily tax students’
valuable time and negatively impact BLs’ learning and academic achievement.
A major issue for Teacher Education professors is the organisation of students
into cohorts, groups and teams to improve their learning opportunities. Our teacher
preparation programme uses a cohort model in which the same students take the
same classes in each given semester. In each of the four semesters, students are free to
change cohorts at registration so that there is limited consistency in the composition
of cohorts. The review of the literature on the use of cohorts in teacher education is
somewhat mixed (Seifert & Mandzuk, 2006; Sapon-Shevin & Chandler-Olcott, 2001),
and studies examine participants’ positive or negative experiences, but not their outcomes
at high-stakes teacher certification tests, nor their impact on children’s learning.
However, research related to the use of groups and teams suggests they may be a
worthwhile programme feature when standardised test scores are in the balance. A
pioneer in team-based learning (TBL), Michaelsen (2004, p. 27) argues for the careful
and orchestrated use of student teams to facilitate learning. He maintains:
…the effectiveness of team based learning as an instructional strategy, is based on the fact
that it nurtures the development of high levels of group cohesiveness that, in turn, results
in a wide variety of other positive outcomes.
According to Michaelsen (p. 48), the benefits of this approach include but are not
limited to:
developing students’ higher level cognitive skills in large classes; (2) providing social support
for at-risk students; (3) promoting the development of interpersonal and team skills; and
(4) building and maintaining faculty members’ enthusiasm for their teaching role.
Menges and Austin (2001) support Michaelsen’s position on the value and effectiveness
of small group learning, noting that this approach has increased in popularity
more than any other college teaching innovation. More importantly, Menges and
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Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualising a respons in the US borderlands
Austin report that research associates the use of small groups with improved performance
on course examinations, grades and even standardised tests.
It is important to highlight that, unlike cohorts and groups, team-based learning
as proposed by Michaelsen (2004) entails a specific process for constructing teams.
Briefly, the course relevant knowledge and skills of the members of the entire group
are gauged and then students with the desired learning capital are distributed as
equally as possible among the teams. For example, in a pre-service bilingual education
programme and in a course on the development of biliteracy, students who can
read aloud fluently with comprehension and expression possess a key resource that
should be distributed as equally as possible across the teams. This modelling will also
promote the Spanish language development of the less Spanish-proficient students in
the team. Similarly, parents of young children moving through early biliteracy might
be an asset when it comes to understanding this process in the coursework.
Further, the work of teaching described by Ball and Forzani (2009) to which our
students must be socialised very likely entails working in professional groups or
horizontal and vertical grade level teams. Recent work on school-based inquiry teams
(Gallimore, et al., 2009) suggests that the work of teaching should also entail learning
to function in teams. It appears then that having students work in groups and teams
may not only enhance the learning of at-risk students, it may also prepare candidates
for the work of teaching. We should also emphasise that Michaelsen (2004), like
Fink (2003), advocates the goal of significant learning. The conjunction of TBL with
significant learning contributes to our synthesis of a unique border pedagogy specific
to our borderlands context.
How faculty relate to their students is paramount to learning (Noddings, 1992).
Studies on Latinos in PK-12 education also seem to point to an affective dimension,
in this case caring, that influences their learning and academic success overall (Bartolome,
2008). At the post-secondary level, O’Brien (2010) notes that, when working
with students who find schooling a challenge, teachers who care about their students
as people and learners may make an important difference. Jacobsen, Eggen and
Kauchak (2006), cited in O’Brien (p. 111), contend that, “… it is virtually impossible
to succeed in any part of teaching without genuinely caring about students and their
learning”. Goldstein (2002) maintains, that if we want our teacher candidates to care
about their students, we too must model the desired attitudes and behaviours. This
seems to be the case for Latino students as well.
In fact, in a recent study of Latino bilingual education pre-service teachers Fitts
and Weisman (2009, p. 384) report on the importance of professors’ strong personal
and caring relationships with their students and how these relationships are fostered.
The authors state:
This was developed by the professors through consistently expressed expectations that all of
the students in the programme would excel and by providing students with concrete assistance
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Michael D. Guerrero & Peter Farruggio
and support when they needed it… The modeling of authentic caring by university professors
led participants to realise that this was something that they were committed to providing for
their students in the future.
What authentic caring might look like in this borderland setting serving primarily
first-generation Latina students invites a number of possibilities. If time is an issue for
these working class students, faculty might be able to show that they care by carefully
planning together so that any opportunities to build on each other’s core assignments
are fully but meaningfully exploited. This would likely positively influence the degree
of programmatic cohesion and deep significant learning of high leverage practices.
As the pre-service teachers in the Fitts and Weisman study reveal, authentic caring
transcends simple verbal encouragement. It also entails providing students with the
tools to succeed. In our context, this would likely involve extra-curricular and explicit
coaching and guidance on how to transact with academic texts and the creation of
course-integrated opportunities for students to acquire the academic content they
might be lacking. Clearly, this would be in stark contrast to a “test often test early”
policy.
Reflecting upon the core programme features that best prepare teachers within our
borderlands context, we have embraced those concepts that maximise our students’
learning opportunities. In our estimation, our students’ ways of being, of thinking
and learning, merit special attention and we thus embrace the notion and challenge
of more fully defining a signature border pedagogy for the preparation of bilingual
education pre-service teachers. No part of the PK-16 infrastructure in the USA has
ever meaningfully taken into account anything other than an English-speaking White
middle class perspective for teaching and learning. Our signature border pedagogy
has consequently diverged significantly from the mainstream approach to teacher
preparation.
The use of groups and teams and the demonstration of caring for our students, as
models of how to teach children, are additional examples of our innovative pedagogy.
Knowing how to pool scarce resources and cooperate with colleagues are valuable
skills within an educational context that marginalises our linguistic minority students.
Likewise, it is essential that we help our students develop ideological clarity. They must
learn to deconstruct the myth that their own underachievement was caused by their
bilingualism and culture. Otherwise, they are destined to replicate the subtractivist
teaching that contributed to their own oppression. In effect, we must prepare a force
of bilingual education teachers who can skilfully infiltrate local schools and transform
their hegemonic practices. It is our responsibility as faculty to build a foundation for
the ultimate disruption of the cycle of educational dysfunction by preparing effective
bilingual teachers.
The signature border pedagogy perspective, as described above, that we have begun
to implement has made our students more conscious of the root causes of their
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Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualising a respons in the US borderlands
academic shortcomings, and this increased awareness has reduced their feelings of
personal inadequacy. Undoing these causes takes time, effort and study and may not
fit neatly into a homogenised state-mandated curriculum, degree plan or pedagogy.
While there is little to explicitly guide us in addressing the needs of our marginalised
local academic milieu, shutting our programme down is not an option.
Closing Remarks
Our intention with this paper was to share with the educational community how
we have begun to reconceptualise a course of action for understanding our teacher
education programme, and how we have attempted to begin to improve the preparation
of our teacher candidates through the implementation of a few key programme
features that appear promising. We have in effect taken the first steps in the process
of re-culturing our approach to the preparation of our teacher candidates. As such, we
have started shifting our cultural practice for making programmatic decisions away
from intuitions, anecdotes or departmental and college politics toward a practice
based on our own students, programme, and research questions. We acknowledge
that the task is difficult, but it is certainly worthwhile and rich in professional growth
opportunity. Our ultimate goal is nothing short of giving others something to copy, but
to do so first requires a careful study. The inception of a signature border pedagogy
of the kind envisioned here is clearly long, long overdue.
Acknowledgement
This article was made possible in part by the US Department of Education (Office of
English Language Acquisition) Grant No. T195N070232. However, the viewpoints
expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agency.
Endnotes
1 BLs: mother-tongue speakers in the process of acquiring the society’s dominant language
2 EDY = students with low achievement test scores
3 EC4/EC6 = elementary grades Teacher Education programmes
4 the required Teacher Education courses
Peter Farruggio, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Bilingual Education in the College of Education
of the University of Texas Pan American. His research interests are the attitudes of Latino immigrant
families toward US schools, the sociopolitical aspects of bilingual education in the US, and effective
pedagogy for linguistic minorities.
Dr. Michael Guerrero is an Associate Professor in the field of bilingual education. As an educational
linguist his research interests center on issues related to the academic Spanish proficiency of bilingual
education teachers in the US. He also takes an active interest in the acquisition of academic
English among the growing population of emergent bilinguals in the US.
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Michael D. Guerrero & Peter Farruggio
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 569–590
EDU.
INQ.
Mediating school inspection –
Key dimensions and keywords in agency
text production 2003–2010
Joakim Lindgren*, Agneta Hult**, Christina Segerholm*** & Linda Rönnberg****
Abstract
This paper reports on an analysis of how school inspection in Sweden – its aims, directions and
procedures – is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible national authorities. The study
involves a textual analysis of official annual accounts and plans (texts directed to the government,
municipalities, schools and the public) produced by the National Agency for Education and the
Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The analysis concentrates on key concepts conveying the dominant
ideas of inspection and education. The analysis is structured around four dimensions that are
based on an understanding of inspection as education governance and on the characteristics of
the Swedish education system. The results suggest that the rhetoric and dominant ideas of schools
inspection changed when the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School
Inspectorate in the autumn of 2008. Key concepts before that time are more supportive of schools
and municipalities, recognising local conditions. Later, a language with the intention of detecting
shortcomings and supporting an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent.
Keywords: school inspection, education governance, the inspectable school, equivalence, juridification
Introduction
The current policy drive to improve the performance of education systems in Europe
is accompanied by a general increase in inspection activities (van Bruggen, 2010).
Inspection is, by its very nature, also part of the contemporary governing of education
in that it sets criteria for what is to be regarded as good education or a good school
(Ball, 1998), and often incorporates some means to make schools and municipalities
act in accordance with these requirements (De Wolf & Janssens, 2007; Ehren &
Wisscher, 2006; Gaertner & Pant, 2011).
Like in other European countries, in Sweden policy-makers put great trust in inspections
as a means of steering. One crucial aspect of inspection as a governing tool is the
production of data and text. Inspectorates produce immense quantities of documents.
*Corresponding author, Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden, E-mail: Joakim.lindgren@pedag.umu.se.
**Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden. ***Department of Education, Mid-Sweden University, Härnösand,
Sweden. ****Department of Political Science , Umeå University, Sweden.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 569–590
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Joakim Lindgren, Agneta Hult, Christina Segerholm & Linda Rönnberg
Following Scott (1998, also see Lawn, 2011: 68), we argue that such texts are expressions
of how state agencies see education, “and in the process of ‘seeing’ it, simplifies,
alters, re-imagines and reshapes it”. As pointed out by Börjesson (2011: 23), the Schools
Inspectorate carries out “rhetorical work” in which the agency “linguistically constructs
both itself and political goals that are to be achieved”. Accordingly, an intimate connection
exists between school inspection, governing and text production. Education
policy and practice change in and through inspectorate documentation, meaning that
documentation has a constitutive effect on inspection, governing and education.
This article aims to advance our understanding of the Swedish inspection regime.
We study the official discourse of state agencies responsible for the supervision of
preschool activities, the welfare of schoolchildren, school management and adult education
in Sweden. Attention is drawn to official texts (i.e. brochures, annual reports
and plans, web pages etc.) in which Skolverket (the National Agency for Education)
and Skolinspektionen (the Swedish Schools Inspectorate) describe their own activities
and account for and report on their commission to the government, local policymakers,
practitioners and the general public.
These texts are often based on topoi, seemingly accepted liberal and humanistic
truths about education and individual rights and the consequent need to improve
and review. However, our starting point is that they are also part of an argumentative
scheme. We seek to trace ideas in text production and understand how systems of
ideas change. Further, we hope to learn more about the constitution of the self-image
of state agencies and their activities (Van Dijk, 2006). The analysis is centred on a
number of ideological dimensions related to the values, aims and methods of the
agencies, but also on their style and overall rationality as organisations.
The study is part of the bilateral research project “Governing by Inspection” which
examines the ways in which inspection regimes may be understood as governing
education in three national education systems: Sweden, England and Scotland.
Historical and organisational context
Before we move on to describe the design and basis for the study we need to briefly
outline the recent historical and organisational context of Swedish school inspection.
School inspection is not new in Sweden and dates back to the 1860s. However, its
function, intensity and scope have varied over time. Moving on to more recent policy
changes, inspection was marginalised in reforms of the 1990s. At this time, ideas on
decentralisation and less central state involvement were seen as solutions to school
problems, and the focus on supervision and control was downplayed. The national
agency Skolverket was founded in 1991 and the dissemination of knowledge and
information became central tasks along with evaluation and follow-up. The agency
was to halt at the municipal border and not enter individual schools. Thus, there
were, for instance, no systematic audits of an individual school’s compliance with the
national regulations during this period. Yet this soft and dialogue-oriented approach
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Mediating school inspection
employed by Skolverket attracted criticism (Rönnberg 2008; cf. Ekholm & Lindvall,
2008; Granström & Lander, 2000; Nytell, 2006).
Our focus here is on the most recent period of school inspection: 2003–2010. In
2003 it was decided by the then social democratic government to revive school inspection
and make Skolverket responsible for its introduction, design and implementation.
The inspection model involved three main areas:
• Results: Norms and values, Knowledge
• Activities: Work on norms and values, Teaching, Steering, Management and
Quality Work
• Conditions: Access to information and education, Resources
After a shift in government, in 2007 a new structure for inspection with three main
areas was introduced: Knowledge, norms and values, and leadership and quality
work. Put another way, knowledge was emphasised over resources. In addition, a
separate inspection agency, Skolinspektionen, was opened in October 2008. Several
inspectors were transferred from Skolverket to the new agency. Skolinspektionen
also hired additional staff with a background in education or, for instance, social
scientists and people trained in law. Skolinspektionen has thus strategically recruited
staff with occupational training other than in education. The inspection model drew
explicit attention to attainment/goal fulfilment and leadership, and also introduced
the individual rights of pupils as a separate area to be inspected. In all, it included
four areas to be assessed:
• Attainment/goal fulfilment and results
• Educational leadership and development
• Learning environment
• Individual pupils’ rights
After the shift in government in 2006, the non-socialistic coalition now in government
pursued an extensive education reform agenda. One of the four parties in the coalition,
the Liberal Party, explicitly focused on education policy in its election campaign
and its leader was also appointed Minister of Education. All in all, the reforms were to
encompass, for instance, a new teacher and head teacher training programme, a new
school act, curricula and grading system and a reformed upper secondary school system.
These changes were also accompanied by increasing efforts towards evaluation and
control. For example, the use of national tests was intensified. As previously mentioned,
and as an important part of this extensive reform agenda, additional resources were
also directed to school inspection. However, it should be noted that the Liberal Party’s
education reform agenda was neither opposed nor questioned by the Social Democratic
party (Rönnberg, 2010). Indeed, this party was in office at the time of the resurrection
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Joakim Lindgren, Agneta Hult, Christina Segerholm & Linda Rönnberg
of school inspection in 2003. Instead, the Social Democrats formed an education policy
agenda after the electoral defeat in 2007 that bore a strong resemblance to what the
Liberal Party and the Minister of Education was proposing (Socialdemokraterna, 2007).
After also winning the election in 2010, the non-socialist coalition was given four more
years to implement and consolidate the far-reaching reforms.
As this study focuses on state agencies and their texts, it should be mentioned
that Swedish agencies are often portrayed as largely autonomous from a comparative
perspective (Pierre, 2004). This “provides the government agencies with pretty
much free scope to complete the Governments general aims within the limits of some
overarching instructions, a negotiated budget from the Cabinet, and with politically
appointed General Directors. However, that does not mean that the agencies are left
completely without steering and control from ‘above’” (Hall, Nilsson & Löfgren, 2011:
2f). Bo Rothstein (2005) and others have argued that, despite their autonomous status,
state agencies have increasingly been used as tools to disseminate political propaganda
since the 1990s (cf. Kjellgren, 2002). Recent governments have pursued an overall
policy to reduce the number of agencies, especially those alleged to have an ideological
or normative function (cf. SOU, 2007:79: 122). Yet the politically difficult issues
concerning the governing role and function of agencies are by no means resolved.
Notes on data selection and methods
In our data selection, we sought to identify a particular genre of texts, i.e., published
texts in the form of official annual accounts and plans, and texts and brochures directed
to municipalities, schools, the public and the government. As far as we know,
the selected texts were the total corpus in this genre (see the table below). The material
was chronologically separated into two periods: the first period from 2003 to 2007
(Skolverket) and the second period from 2008 to 2010 (Skolinspektionen).
The selection of texts was based on our idea that the texts should display how the
inspection agencies described their inspection activities in general terms; their tasks
being to determine whether and how well schools are functioning in relation to the
regulations set out in the Education Act: school curricula, programme objectives,
course syllabi, grading criteria and other national steering documents that govern
education activities. Inspection activities consist of four types of examination processes
irrespective of the agency involved: supervision, quality assessments, certification
of independent schools and certification of complaints, all described in the texts
we examined. We were not interested in reports on decisions concerning particular
municipalities or schools, or internal agency texts describing detailed processes, but
texts that could tell us something about the directions, views and ideas on education
and governing that underpinned the inspection activities as presented to outsiders.
The selected texts (approximately 20) were divided among us for reading and
analysis. We were selectively inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in that we
focused on the historical and social contexts of the texts rather than their linguistic
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Mediating school inspection
Table
Table
1.
1.
Overview
Overview of
of
selected
selected
texts
texts
Period Agency Primary audience Documents/sources
1 st period
2003-
2007
1) Government
National Agency for
Education (Skolverket),
Established in 1991.
Regular school
inspections in
individual schools on a
six-year cycle from
2003 to 2008.
2) Practitioners and
general public
1) Skolverket (2003c) Annual report
1) Skolverket (2004c) Annual report
1) Skolverket (2005b) Annual report
1) Skolverket (2006) Annual report
1) Skolverket (2007) Annual report
2) Skolverket (2003a) Study guide. To examine and
develop quality.
2) Skolverket (2003b) To examine and develop
quality
2) Skolverket (2004a) This is the National Agency
for Education
2) Skolverket (2004b) The Swedish National Agency
for Education’s Educational Inspectorate. Inspecting
for improvement.
2) Skolverket (2005a) Inspecting for improvement –
a brochure about the National Agency for
Education’s Educational Inspectorate.
2 nd period
2008-
2010
Swedish Schools
Inspectorate
(Skolinspektionen)
Established in 2008,
Regular school
inspections in
individual schools on a
four-year cycle
(approx.) differentiating
depth and length of
inspection and wellfunctioning
schools
receive less attention.
1) Government
2) Practitioners and
general public
1) Skolinspektionen (2009) Plan for 2010
1) Skolinspektionen (2010c) Annual report 2010
2) Skolinspektionen (2010a) Supervision and quality
assessment 2009
2) Skolinspektionen (2010b) We sharpen the pen
2) Skolinspektionen (2010d) several web pages at
www.skolinspektionen.se: About us/themes/;
Supervision; Complaints; Quality assessment;
Regular Supervision; Our activities.
features (Fairclough, 2003; Taylor, 2004). The site of text production, or what Taylor
(2004: 437) calls “the networks of social practices” (described above), was continually
considered as the context of analysis for the study. We concentrated “on the ideological
work of the policy texts in representing, relating, and identifying” particular
educational problems and solutions as well as what constitutes good education and
good education governance (Taylor, 2004: 437). Throughout our reading, we identified
and sorted terms, concepts and expressions that were both frequently used and
carriers of central meaning or values in relation to the ideological dimensions and the
research questions. In order to maintain some coherence in our collective analytical
process, one central text from each period was analysed collectively. Our choice in
this respect was the annual reports to the government from 2003 and 2010, i.e. texts
that emerged in a similar format throughout the studied period. This joint inquiry
was not an attempt to locate any objective truth about the content, but deepened our
understanding of the texts and the ideological dimensions.
To illustrate some of our findings, we have translated some quotations from the
texts from Swedish into English, fully aware of the problems such operations pose to
the processes of interpretation and understanding.
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Ideological dimensions
We sought to analyse processes of social change in the selected texts, and specifically
attempted to identify and discuss a number of “ideological dimensions” (Bergström
& Boréus, 2005). These dimensions, all related to the values, aims and methods of
inspection, are regarded as continuums where change is understood as “overlapping
and simultaneous” and not of a certain quality within a dualistic framework
(Segerholm & Lindgren, 2011: 54). Our starting point was a broad notion of ideology,
i.e. that these ideas are part of some kind of organised belief system and not “merely
long, unordered sets or mere lists of beliefs” about education and governance (Van
Dijk, 2006: 118). In part, the reason for this is the nature of our objects of study;
writers of these kinds of official documents normally strive to enhance coherence.
However, this assumption about organisation does not imply that the ideas are in
any way consistent. On the contrary, our approach to them implies that they might
be heterogeneous and inconsistent.
We see the relationship between, on the one hand, language and knowledge and,
on the other, the social reality of education and inspection practice as non-linear,
unpredictable and fragile. Our perspective resembles Dahler-Larsen’s “third view”
(Dahler-Larsen, 2011: 152) in that we ultimately see the problem of the constitutive
and governing power of language or text as an empirical question. Since our starting
point is based on CDA, and to use the words of Rose and Miller (1992: 176-177), we
see the highlighted state agencies as “discursive devices” for “conceptualising and
articulating ways of ruling” and we seek to explore relationships between the texts and
wider social contexts. In the final discussion, we thus move beyond the studied texts,
suggesting a few tentative interpretations about how they construct representations
of education, social relationships and identities which are on one hand inter-textually
related to other policy texts and on the other hand connected to overall changes in
the education system (cf. Taylor 2004). In the following we motivate our choice of
ideological dimensions and relate them to our research questions.
The first ideological dimension is about the balance between equality and diversity.
The tensions in this dimension are made visible by the concept of equivalence.
Equivalence is definitely the keyword in the history of Swedish education, and it has
played an important role in shaping educational policy (Englund, 2005). It is a concept
with shifting and contested meanings that holds a performative function in the
sense that it simultaneously describes, constructs and legitimises different ways of
representing education and its goals (Englund & Quennerstedt, 2008). As a keyword,
it is a semantic magnet with positive connotations that are almost impossible to question
(Rönnberg, forthcoming). Basically, equivalence is about geographical, gender,
social and ethnic equality in education (geography and gender are mentioned in the
curriculum, geography in the Education Act (the former SFS 1985:1100 and the new
one valid from 1 July 2011 SFS 2010:800). 1
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In the post-war period, the state used a common curriculum and equally allocated
resources to ensure that all students would have a shared and equal educational
experience (Englund, 2005). In the waves of decentralisation during the late 1980s
and 1990s, the question of equivalence was solved increasingly by local and individual
choices, solutions and adaptations (Englund, 2005). Interestingly, the current
coalition government has returned to a more centralist approach. In the new School
Ordinance (SFS 2011:185), there is a particular emphasis on structured and teacherled
teaching. The Minister of Education presented this shift in policy by promoting
particular instruction methods (Björklund, 2011).
Diversity also relates to issues of stratification or elitism. The education minister
has introduced elite classes in compulsory education, and the growing opportunities
for school choice in the de-regulated school market have opened up new possibilities
for ‘the elite’ to choose their educational paths (Lidegran, 2009). Overall, the state
regards school inspection as one of the most important policy tools to address the
problem of increasing school segregation and the adherent decrease in equivalence.
The questions we pose here are: What is the meaning of equivalence in the official
inspection rhetoric, and how is the goal of inspection formulated in relation to the
dimensions of equality and diversity?
Another theme in research on state school inspection is the balance between development
and control, and support and pressure (Barber, 2007). Research on soft
and hard forms of governance and soft and hard policy tools becomes relevant at this
point (Lawn, 2006; Jordan et al., 2005). Should inspection primarily support the
development of schools through dialogue, or is absolute control the most productive
strategy? The ambiguity between control and development has long been recognised
in the field of evaluation, predominantly as an issue of different evaluation purposes
and appropriate designs and methodologies (e.g. Dahler-Larsen, 2009). This dimension
also highlights the question of whether inspection is to be carried out by an
external agency or if is better left to the local actors themselves. Yet another aspect
of this problem concerns the methods and techniques used to build the basis for
development or control. Soft techniques usually involve internal or self-evaluation
or sample-based thematic evaluations with qualitative methods, like interviews and
observations. These approaches are often – but not always – based on nearness,
mutuality and dialogue. Hard techniques consist of performance monitoring and the
use of indicators, target setting, national testing, ranking lists and external evaluation
based on distanced, neutral and objective approaches. Overall, this discussion
relates to normative divisions in terms of external/friendly inspection and technocratic-reductionist/professional-contextualist
views of education (Thrupp, 1998). The
research questions are: How can the official descriptions of the agencies’ work be
understood in terms of development and control, external and internal inspection
and soft and hard techniques?
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Related to these issues is the matter of technical independence (Clarke, 2008) or
judgment in inspection activities. Here, we acknowledge that inspectorates stand in
a particular relation to governing knowledge (Ozga, 2008). Two basic models can
be identified in the literature. One is the evidence-based policy model which derives
from supposedly objective and neutral judgments. The other model builds on the idea
that embodied and encoded expert knowledge (a kind of inspector-connoisseurship
or artistry) forms the most appropriate basis for judging schooling (Eisner, 2007).
In the first model, reliability and stability are secured by the quality of instruments
and techniques themselves. Ideally, the personal values and ideals of inspectors are
filtered away. Judgments are based on comparisons based on standards and ideas
on a normal distribution. Data are seen as both evidence and the absolute basis for
judgments. The validity of professional judgment, in contrast, is tied to the background,
training and, most importantly, the experience of the inspector, and builds on
standards that are internalised versions of corporate or collective judgments (Smith,
2000). Our questions here are: Which forms of knowledge does the Swedish inspection
regime prioritise, and what is the relationship between professional judgment
and expertise, and evidence?
In the following section, we turn to our analysis of the texts using the ideological dimensions
of equality and diversity, development and control, soft and hard techniques,
and expertise and evidence. The analysis is presented chronologically, starting with
the first period (Skolverket) and finishing with the second period (Skolinspektionen).
The first period: 2003–2007
Equivalence and elite
In the texts from the first period there is a strong emphasis on equivalence and the
idea that every student has the right to an equal education. The provision of monetary
steering instruments for municipalities and schools to better achieve goals,
and guarantee quality and equivalence is seen as a policy tool to achieve the ultimate
aim of review: “the right of each individual to knowledge and personal development”
(Skolverket, 2005a: 7). As a question of an individual right, equivalence comes down
to ensuring “fairness and consistency in grading students” (Skolverket, 2005a: 7).
The explicit references to equivalence are scarce in the annual report of 2003.
Referring to the government approval document, (regleringsbrevet in Swedish) it is
stressed that Skolverket ought to “maintain the students’ right to a nationally equivalent
education” (Skolverket, 2003c: 31). In the 2007 report, there are more explicit
examples of different aspects of equivalence in education for students. One example is
the inspections’ focus on possible differences in equal opportunities for students in big
cities versus back-country schools, and another is the lack of equivalence concerning
the organisation of education for children with special needs and refugees in different
municipalities. Topics of concern also include the schools’ work with norms and values
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and with quality assurance. At the end of this period of inspection, more emphasis
is put on student knowledge and the need for schools to evaluate student progress.
Development and control
During this period, there is a mixture between the tasks of developing and monitoring
schooling, but on the whole there is a stronger emphasis on development. In
2003, Skolverket implemented a new conceptual framework by replacing the words
“evaluate” and “develop” with the words “review” and “improve”. Evaluation is seen
as a narrow research concept that has caused an abstraction barrier and also an everyday
hindrance for practitioners and the natural processes of seeing and valuating
(Skolverket, 2003a). In contrast, improvement is seen as a more distinct concept
than development. It is argued that the former concept always refers to something
positive, whereas development can be positive or negative.
The keyword in this respect is “improvement” or, as the slogans reads: “We’re
inspecting for improvement” (Skolverket, 2005a: 7). Reviewing to bring about improvement
involves:
• “establishing through educational inspections whether – and how well – an
educational activity is functioning in relation to the regulations set out in the
Swedish Education Act and school curricula, and drawing attention to areas
where a municipality or board of an independent school needs to invest more
effort in their own development work
• using national evaluations to focus on areas where development is needed
at the national level, as well as providing the underlying basis for this development;
for example, by helping head teachers in their efforts to lead and
rejuvenate activities at the local level
• participating in international evaluations in order to gain more in-depth
knowledge of comparable education systems and how other countries have
dealt with areas similar to those needing improvement in the Swedish education
system” (Skolverket, 2005a: 7).
Although the focus is on improvement, control is simultaneously seen as the means
by which development can be achieved, and this mode of reason is the underlying
assumption behind the reintroduction of inspection. Control is mentioned in soft
terms like “draw attention to” and “to focus on”.
In addition, the annual reports to the government indicate a rather soft inspection.
The 2005 report states that a substantial part of the inspection concerns reviewing
the schools’ and municipalities’ quality work and their ability to develop their own
practice: “The goal is that the school inspection shall give a professional contribu-
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tion to the local quality improvement activity – without taking on the responsibility
for realising it” (Skolverket, 2005b: 34). Skolverket also introduces trials with selfevaluation
where the inspectors evaluate the schools’ and municipalities’ practices
at four levels: “[W]hat should be adjusted, what ought to be improved, what works
well and what works very well” (Skolverket, 2005b: 37). Schools and municipalities
receive an account that reports both strengths and weaknesses. In the 2006 report,
a fifth level appears, including a more severe critique for when the schools’ and municipalities’
practices are really inferior.
There are signs of both an intimate, dialogical approach and an increasingly distanced,
external inspection style:
“The Educational Inspectorate shall contribute to improvements at the local level but may
not give direct advice, or take any action of its own in the local operations” (Skolverket,
2005a: 10, emphasis added). 2
This quote illustrates a tension that has continued to be a struggle within the work
and role of the inspectorate.
Soft and hard techniques
The first period is characterised by a blend of soft and hard inspection techniques. The
inspection methods are described in relation to the overall endeavour to ensure that
the national objectives of the educational system are achieved in a progressive way:
“This philosophy shapes the Educational Inspectorate’s working methods, which strive
as much as possible to achieve dialogue and learning” (Skolverket, 2005a: 18). Instruments
for data collection included: questionnaire responses, structured interviews,
informal conversations, document analyses (e.g. of self-evaluations), statistics and
observations of activities and work. Formal and informal interviews are conducted
with a range of participants at the municipal level, including local politicians, centrally
placed civil servants, the municipality’s joint development group at the school/activity
level, head teacher and others in the school administration/management team,
pupils, teachers and other staff, parent representatives etc. (Skolverket, 2005a: 13). It
is argued that interviews are preferably designed like dialogues (Skolverket, 2005a).
However, this relatively informal approach must never be too intimate: “The audit
shall be carried out professionally, with objectivity” (Skolverket, 2005a: 10).
In the Skolverket reports to the government, one recurring issue is the concern
with equivalence concerning the inspectors’ own assessment. Significant importance
is attached to developing unanimous grounds for judgment “so that assessments and
standpoints will be equivalent” (Skolverket, 2003c: 29) all over the country. Common
instruments and assessment criteria are created, and a continuing dialogue
within each inspection unit on how different steps of the process are performed. The
analyses of documents from schools and municipalities, the interview situation and
the feedback to schools after inspection were topics highlighted in the 2006 report.
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Expertise and evidence
The approach to knowledge and judgment in the studied texts blends expertise and
evidence during the first period. Evidence-based comparisons, based on statistical
data, are used on different levels, including the international, national and local levels,
and provide knowledge about variations and how students perform locally and
internationally. Statistics are published in reports and on the web (e.g. Skolverket’s
online information system on results and quality, the SIRIS database which encourages
school actors, students and parents to use local and value-added statistics).
The work of inspectors is also described as evidence-based. Inspectors produce
statistics and facts, and they map out differences using interviews and questionnaires.
However, in descriptions of the inspection process it becomes obvious that the inspectors
themselves are the instruments. They conduct interviews; they examine; they
observe, analyse, assess, judge and even sense aspects of the school reality. Thus,
professional judgment precedes, or is the prerequisite for, evidence. The judgment
sometimes concerns vague aspects of schooling, like the school culture, that most likely
demands encoded knowledge. For example, one text states that “[e]very pre-school
or school has an atmosphere, which the inspectors quite quickly sense” (Skolverket,
2003b: 111, emphasis added).
The concept of equivalence is used in the texts when describing the judgements
that inspectors are to make. In this case, it refers to the impartiality of judgements
and that all schools are to be judged in the same way, ensuring equal treatment and
fairness to all inspected schools. It is argued that “[t]he audit shall be carried out
professionally, with objectivity and with respect for local conditions…” (Skolverket,
2005a: 10, emphasis added). On one side, there is a focus on “equal assessments” that
are made possible by the usage of “notes on set points in an assessment document”
(Skolverket, 2005a: 15). On the other side, the employment of a basic model and fixed
manuals is blended with a concern for local conditions and adaptions to each specific
school and the relevant situation (Skolverket, 2005a).
In the annual reports to the government, there is a recurring headline concerning
methodological developments of the inspection. The development of trustworthy
evaluation methods is a frequent theme. In the first report from 2003, the inspection
team is described as a team consisting, as much as possible, of inspectors with different
competencies and experiences, “e.g. persons with experience of steering and
leadership, experience from school juridical investigations and from pedagogical work
in different school forms” (Skolverket, 2003c: 28). This reference to the importance
of the experience of the inspector does not occur again in the reports.
The annual reports often declare the use of experts in different fields, e.g., different
school subjects and children with special needs. In 2004 and 2005, Skolverket also
reports on developmental work concerning “a structured way of making observations
during visits in schools and during lessons, to evaluate the quality of the pedagogical
work” (Skolverket, 2004c: 36). There are also reports of try outs with questionnaires
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given to parents, students and staff. The 2007 report declares that scientific and proven
experience should be the starting point, and it also includes an explicit reference to
scientific knowledge and research.
The second period: 2008–2010
Equivalence and elite
A general observation concerning the texts from the second period is the strengthened
emphasis on each child’s individual right to a good education as a new interpretation of
the equivalence concept. The demands on schools and municipalities are also increased
in these texts, meaning that a good education at a minimum incorporates providing
pupils with the conditions needed to obtain a passing grade in a safe environment:
“One baseline for today’s schooling is that it has to be possible for all pupils to attain
all objectives to 100 per cent; however, in practice, not all schools seem concerned
about this” (Skolinspektionen, 2010a: 15). This quote also demonstrates a shift in how
schools are viewed by the Inspectorate, i.e., as lacking ambition to deal properly with
all pupils. Such a view was not apparent in the texts from the earlier period.
These texts thus have a results-focused conceptualisation of equivalence (cf. Englund
& Quennerstedt, 2008). Another particular problem identified that impedes
equivalence is the lack of robust activities to prevent bullying and harassment. Other
examples of problems given in the texts are: teachers not qualified to teach the school
subjects they have been assigned; assessment and grading not fully aligned with
the national objectives; quality assurance not systematic enough and inadequate
individual formative assessments for pupils; and the guaranteed number of hours of
instruction or the prescribed variety of school subjects not being provided.
There is also a parallel concern that schools do not sufficiently adjust instruction
to the different abilities and needs of individual pupils. This concern addresses pupils
with special needs or those who feel that they are bullied or harassed, explicitly
encouraging them (or their parents) to file complaints through links on the agency’s
homepage (Skolinspektionen, 2010d). However, this concern also extends to gifted
pupils and their “right to develop to their full potential” (Skolinspektionen, 2010a:
24). This opens up possibilities for a restricted kind of elitism which shows the tension
that is constantly present in this dimension.
Development and control
There is a clear shift indicating a more control-oriented direction which is indicated
by a new and harder language, including the following terms: lack of, rules, education
act, prescriptions/prescribed, make judgments, rule of law, supervision, take sufficient
measures etc. (Skolinspektionen, 2009, 2010c). This semantic shift signals a need for
assurance that rules and regulations are followed and that municipalities and schools
are doing well enough. It is not enough to solely rely on reviews of documents and
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to interview school actors. A greater amount of close inspection is promised. In the
plan for 2010, it is stated that:
[t]he teachers’ didactic competence is also a success factor of importance. This means that
we will enter the classrooms to observe and make judgments of how teaching is performed.
The aim is not to examine individual teachers. Rather, it is a base for assessing whether or
not the work is undertaken in line with what is proven successful in research and proven
practice (Skolinspektionen, 2009: 5).
As this passage shows, the general direction of control is based on a specific perception
of good education. The terms “successful” and “factors of success” are used more
frequently in the texts from Skolinspektionen (Skolinspektionen, 2010b; 2010d) than
in the texts from the first period.
Soft and hard techniques
Hardly anything is said about the inspection techniques and instruments in the texts
from the second period. Efficiency and quality in the work of the agency is stressed
in addition to a process orientation, the preferred strategy to achieve those goals:
“process orientation means mapping each step of the work processes, responsibilities
and roles in the inspections” (Skolinspektionen, 2009: 8-9). Data on attainment,
test results, grades, and reports on a number of areas are requested from the schools
and municipalities. Schools’ follow-up data on pupils’ progress are important. The
comprehensiveness of the inspections is also based on previous inspection results,
i.e., a proportionate inspection. In schools with favourable assessments, there may
be a single interview with the head teacher. Otherwise, studies of more documents as
well as interviews with teachers, parents, pupils and other school staff can be carried
out (Skolinspektionen, 2010c: 22).
The texts contain expressions about the inspection now entering the classrooms
to make judgments on teaching, emphasising an external and less friendly approach
compared to the earlier period. For example, nothing is said about dialogues or learning.
Another difference, particularly visible in the report to the government describing
Skolinspektionen’s activities during 2010 (Skolinspektionen, 2010c), is the new style
of accounting. Quantities are presented and comments given concerning production
as well as costs per individual activity. Taken together, this leads us to understand
the current Inspectorate and its activities as being more inclined to use harder techniques.
The Swedish education landscape is changing fast, however, and there are
already signs of a slightly different approach stated in the new Education Act (SFS,
2010:800), which says that Skolinspektionen also has to give advice and counselling
to municipalities and schools, perhaps indicating a more lenient direction.
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Expertise and evidence
Repeated expressions in these texts are systematic, impartial and independent,
based on an analysis of risk and essentials, all referring to the examinations and assessments
carried out by the agency (Skolinspektionen, 2009, 2010a, b and c). The
terminology implies an ambition to substantiate the assessments and decisions with
more scientific-like procedures and a reference group consisting of researchers was
also engaged. In the most recent text, this stance is underlined by terms like “indicators”,
“handbook of assessment processes”, “assessment/supervision model”, and
“examination technique” (Skolinspektionen, 2010c). Another phrase used in the
texts is “…based on research and proven experience” (e.g. Skolinspektionen, 2009:
5; Skolinspektionen, 2010c: 19). This is precisely the same expression used in the
Higher Education Act, declaring the basis for all higher education in Sweden (SFS,
1992:1434, 1 kap. 2§ 1 pt). This well-established, scientific discourse is coupled with
the idea of equivalent inspections, which do not take into account the local contexts
of municipalities or schools.
Discussion
In this final section of the article, we reflect on the tensions in governing that are
uncovered through our use of dimensions in the analysis of texts produced by the
inspection agencies. We contemplate how to understand the tensions and changes we
have observed, and suggest interpretations of this process as linked to an increased
stress on success/good results in the knowledge economy and to the construction of
the auditable or inspectable school (and municipality).
First of all, it is important to note that Swedish school inspection was in the midst of a
profound movement during the two aforementioned periods. The first period starts with
the re-introduction of inspection as part of Skolverket and leads to the second period
with its new and refined objective of inspection under the new agency, Skolinspektionen.
Around 2003, control is introduced within an organisational tradition that previously
targeted school development. Review (or control) is now seen as a vehicle for improvement.
The second period marks the turn to an ideology of school improvement relying
on the belief that improvement may be accomplished through more control-directed
inspections. “Improvement” is the key word here, and in a sense change within this
dimension resolves the dualism of development and control into improvement. The
notion of improvement might also imply a relatively narrow notion of what constitutes a
‘good’ education. As argued by Perryman (2009: 616) in an analysis of schools performing
for the British Ofsted: “[t]here is no room for schools to ‘do their own thing’ in terms
of improvement”. Following the work of Thrupp (1998), we interpret the inspection
regime during the first period as both external and friendly, with a mix of technocraticreductionist
and professional-contextualist characteristics. The second period, on the
other hand, exhibits a predominantly technocratic-reductionist view of inspection,
including tougher assessments and inspections: “turning up the heat” (ibid. 195-196).
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Further, we find that the keyword “equivalence” has been charged with different
meanings. There seems to be a movement from a view of equivalence concerned with
increased segregation and poor results for disadvantaged pupils to a view emphasising
raised standards in subject knowledge in general, including the right for gifted
children to obtain the support they need in order to reach their full potential. Put
another way, we understand the tension in this dimension to be about an on-going
ideological conflict between social justice/public good and individual rights/private
good (Englund, 1993). The usage of equivalence in relation to the inspector’s judgments
emphasises the performative function of the concept. In a deregulated school
market inspections need to be impartial. The results are used as information for school
choice, and today the new Education Act (SFS, 2010:800) gives Skolinspektionen the
authority to shut schools down or impose economic penalties on poor schools. Thus,
inspections can determine the future of schools.
The tensions within the ideological dimensions are related to an overall pattern
of change concerning state attempts to use inspection as a mode of governing a deregulated
education market. One predicament here relates to globalisation and the
international competition stressed by the OECD and the EU (Ozga et al., 2011). The
increased stress on success in the knowledge economy forces national education
systems to put pressure on providers using statistical comparisons as tools. In a
Swedish context, the shift in focus from the inspection of soft areas, like norms and
values, to hard areas, like knowledge and attainment, is interrelated with both the
inspection techniques and a growing increasing reliance on evidence, objective data
and knowledge collected using standardised processes independent of the local context.
In Sweden and elsewhere, the general political education rhetoric emphasises
innovative and entrepreneur-based knowledge production and the consequent need
for well-educated and knowledgeable learners in order to be successful in the global
market. This means that there is not only a need for comparative data of the results
of schooling; there is also a need to ensure that education practice (and inspection)
leads to good results, i.e., success.
The need for success thereby extends to the inspection agencies, meaning that they
seek to establish measures ensuring knowledge (data and text) production that feeds
into the policy of the knowledge economy. In a Swedish context, this means that the
Inspectorate has to develop procedures and techniques that balance fairness, based
on the rule of law and on the principle of equivalence, and distinguish between good
schools and bad schools according to criteria arising from the international school
discourse (research on school effectiveness and development) and international indicators
(e.g. PISA test results).
Taken together, the texts can be seen as part of the construction of the inspectable
school that is an imperative for the new agency Skolinspektionen. Power’s (Power,
1996) notion of “making things auditable” becomes relevant here. Following Power,
we argue that the mediation of school inspection and the making of the inspectable
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school serve to negotiate a legitimate and institutionally acceptable knowledge base,
i.e., certain inspection areas, criteria and statistics. This process also creates environments
that are receptive to this knowledge base. However, the inspectable school
is not only receptive; it is an actively documenting, self-reviewing, quality assuring
knowledge-producer that co-constructs data on output and process in keeping with
inspectorate guidelines. During this period, the demands on schools to evaluate and account
for quality actually did increase incrementally in this respect (Segerholm, 2009).
Further, the inspectable school is a school with a somewhat new and different relation
to the inspecting agency. This relationship might be described as distanced and even
hierarchical, placing the agency more explicitly above the school. In this relationship,
actors in the inspectable school have had to come to terms with a form of assessment
that they, as educators, seldom use: one that focuses and reports only on deviation,
deficiency and failure. Finally, the inspectable school is noticeably regulated by law
and held responsible by parents and their children who are claiming their rights, and
also Skolinspektionen which is defending the same rights. As we move closer to the
present time, there is a growing tendency to approach issues of quality in schooling
as a formal legal issue. We understand this process as an example of “juridification”
(Teubner 1987; Blichner & Molander, 2008; cf. Berg 2010), a concept that refers to
a general increase in legal and regulative processes in society.
However, despite these increased demands and the changes of the orientation of
inspection, there were no dramatic changes regarding the national curriculum or the
education act during these two periods up until 2010. This means that the negotiation
of a particular knowledge base, the increasing focus on knowledge and on individual
rights, is not correlated to changes in the formal regulative documents. But the messages
conveyed may have shed new light on the curriculum and the school act. This
is an example of potential inter-textuality (Fairclough, 1992) in the sense that the
selected texts are related to other texts and have the potential to change the ways
these other texts are understood by municipalities, schools and parents.
In the light of our discussion above, it is possible to argue that Skolverket and Skolinspektionen
are political forces. Even though the studied texts are not examples of
explicit political educational agendas or ideas, they are ideological in the sense that
they regulate the relationship between the visible and invisible, the imaginable and
non-imaginable, particularly when it comes to questions about good education, good
schools and, perhaps most importantly, about how to ‘improve’ education. Overall,
we understand the increased stress on success/good results, comparisons and the
construction of the inspectable school to be part of an overall shift in the way citizens
conceive education and their relationship to education, i.e., as consumers and as legal
subjects with distinct rights to education.
Another underpinning idea in this respect is the notion of schools as independent or
self-acting entities decoupled from local contextual factors. This model resembles what
is often labelled evidence-based knowledge: knowledge that is supposedly detached
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from the individual experience expertise or connoisseurship (Eisner, 1976) and the
professional judgments developed from actions in shared collective practice (Wenger,
1998). Schools are held responsible for their own success and failure according to the
prevalent essentialist perspective. An ideological analysis of the contemporary usage
of the term “equivalence” is that it is used not only in order to combat inequality in
the school system, but also in order to preserve the notion of equivalence as feasible
within a de-regulated school market. In doing so, potential criticism about the segregating
consequences of market reform is avoided by placing the responsibility on
municipalities and individual schools and holding them accountable for educational
results and outcomes. In this light, scrutiny and control by a state inspection agency
can be framed as a convenient and legitimate solution for steering, one that also
signals the political ability to take action. All in all, these mechanisms nourish the
prospects for governing by inspection.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support from the Swedish Research Council (VR) for
financing the projects “Governing by Inspection. School Inspection and Education
Governance in Sweden, England and Scotland” (no 2009-5770) and “Swedish national
school inspections: Introducing centralised instruments for governing in a decentralised
context” (no 2007-3579). We also wish to thank the anonymous referees for
their valuable comments.
Joakim Lindgren, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the Department of Education, Umeå University. He
is currently involved in research projects focusing on school inspection as a mode of governing
education.
Agneta Hult is an Associate Professor in Education at the Department of Education, Umeå University.
Her research interest mainly focuses on assessment in higher education and on evaluation and its
consequences in the educational area.
Christina Segerholm is a Professor in Education at the Department of Education, MidSweden
University. She has performed studies of the impact of evaluation in higher education and has a
research interest in education policy and evaluative activities in education.
Linda Rönnberg, PhD, is a research fellow at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University.
Her main research interest concerns governance and policy and public sector marketisation, with
a specific focus on education.
585

Joakim Lindgren, Agneta Hult, Christina Segerholm & Linda Rönnberg
Notes
1 There is an extensive discussion on the concept of educational equivalence in the Swedish context, focusing on both its
meaning and translation. There may be good reasons to translate the concept to equity rather than equivalence in some
instances (Englund & Francia, 2008; Francia, 2011). However, the official Swedish translation is equivalence and, since we
draw on official publications from state agencies, that concept is being used.
2 During the 2003–2008 period when the inspections were part of Skolverket, another national agency was responsible for
supporting school development, i.e. the National Agency for School Development.
586

Mediating school inspection
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Education Inquiry
Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 591–613
EDU.
INQ.
The Relevance of Class in
Education Policy and Research
The case of Sweden’s Vocational Education
Mattias Nylund*
Abstract
Over the last few decades, less importance has been attached to the concept of class in educational
policy and educational research. Due to the continued relevance of class in many educational contexts,
this article argues that this trend is unfortunate, untimely and unwarranted, and that important
questions are overlooked as a result. As a case in point, the article examines contemporary policy
trends in upper-secondary vocational education in Sweden. The article comprises two interrelated
sections. The first discusses the more general matter of the relevance of class (and its critique) and
how class can be understood in contemporary society. Following the conclusions from part one,
the second section demonstrates how problems arise when vocational education is removed from
its class context, illustrated by contemporary policy trends in Sweden where not only issues of class
are ignored, but policies are also adopted that are likely to augment class inequalities.
Keywords: social class, education policy, vocational education, upper-secondary education,
curriculum
Introduction
During the 20 th century, the Swedish education system was transformed from explicitly
differentiating education along social class lines to a system intent on breaking,
or at least reducing, its class-bound character. Understanding education as related
to a class society was thus a central perspective and policy concern in Sweden during
the 20 th century. This perspective has been on the retreat, however, in the last few
decades within both the policy and research fields. The purpose of this article is to
offer a critical review of this shift and argue for the continuing relevance of a class
concept in educational inquiry. The article thus has two separate but interrelated
purposes. The first is to contribute to the academic discussion of the relevance of
class by putting forward the argument that class remains a fundamental structure in
contemporary capitalist societies. The second purpose derives from the first in trying
to illustrate the importance of relating to class when analysing and implementing
education reforms, exemplified by an analysis of contemporary Swedish policy
*HumUs-Institution, Örebro University, Sweden. E-mail: mattias.nylund@oru.se.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 591–613
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Mattias Nylund
regarding educational content in vocational programmes. Although several reforms
are discussed, the focus is on the extensive upper-secondary reform implemented in
2011, since it is of special interest in a class context. 1
The Diminishing Usage of a Class Concept
Educational research in Sweden relating to class as a problem was fairly common
during the 1970s and 1980s (cf. Ball & Larsson 1989; Bernstein & Lundgren 1983;
Callewaert & Nilsson 1979; Englund 1986; Arnman & Jönsson 1983; Kallós 1979).
However, it is more common in contemporary educational research to view society
as a pluralistic, information-technological, knowledge-driven, post-industrial,
multicultural or risk society, to mention but a few popular concepts, rather than as
a class society. What can be observed is a notable shift in how the basic divisions of
society are understood, from a focus on circumstances based on economic and political
factors to those based on culture (Bernstein 2000; Callinicos 2000:13-24). As a
consequence, education is often related to questions relating to pluralism, religion,
gender, ethnicity etc. and not to class, despite research showing that it can be difficult
to understand the effects of ethnicity and gender for instance, if they are not related
to class (cf. Ambjörnsson 2004; Andersson & Lindblad 2008; Callinicos 1998; Hill
2009). An OECD report looking at equity in education concluded that:
[I]t is surprising to see that the Swedish debate on educational equity is so overwhelmingly
focused on gender issues, to the extent that it almost completely overshadows questions of
social inheritance… (Nicaise et al. 2005:14).
However, this is not only a Swedish phenomenon, as Collini notes:
In the frequently incanted quartet of race, class, gender and sexual orientation, there is no
doubt that class has been the least fashionable … despite the fact that all the evidence suggests
that class remains the single most powerful determinant of life-chances (Collini 1994:3).
Many of the central objections to the relevance of class are founded on challenges
raised by theorists such as Ulrich Beck, Daniel Bell, Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens
and Alain Touraine, who have in different ways described how the foundation
of industrial class society has changed (individualisation, service society, risk society
etc.). Furåker (2005) argues that, while often illustrating important changes in society,
these theories tend to draw very broad and overstated conclusions from these
changes, often founded on weak empirical evidence. This is, according to Sadovnik
(2008:26), also characteristic of a great deal of postmodern critical theory which
has become increasingly popular in educational research over the last decades, often
criticising more holistic theories (e.g. Biesta 2002; 2005), especially those that place
a class concept at the centre (Berglez 2006; Dworkin 2007; Hickey 2000:162; Savage
1996:58). In contrast, there is a range of theoretically and empirically well-founded
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The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
investigations, in turn built on different class concepts, illustrating the continuing
relevance of class (cf. Mayer 2005; Svallfors 2004; Wright, 1997). 2
A critique often raised is that a concept such as class marginalises questions of
pluralism, identity and recognition. However, different theories vary in relevance
depending on the issue pursued, and the relevance of ‘identity/recognition’ by no
means automatically replaces or diminishes the importance of ‘class/distribution’
(Fraser 2003).
The most prominent kinds of recognition claims in contemporary politics have been ones
relating to cultural difference, including differences in sexuality, religion and lifestyle. In
such cases the groups in question claim recognition for their legitimacy and value. However,
the micro- and macro-politics of class are different. The poor are not clamouring for poverty
to be legitimised and valued. They want to escape or abolish their class position rather than
affirm it (Sayer 2005:52).
In short, over the last few decades theories adopting a class approach have been criticised
for being dualistic, reductionist or deterministic, and have often been deemed
irrelevant (Dworkin 2007; Kirk 2000; Savage 1996). It is reasonable to expect from
a criticism of the relevance of class that it will question a particular class concept and
demonstrate its weakness through solid empirical investigation. Undertakings of
this kind are, unfortunately, unusual (Furåker 2005). Discussion of the relevance of
class has instead been characterised by confusion over the meaning of the concept,
jumbling notions of class with very different theoretical foundations and implications
together (Crompton 1998:12; Sayer 2005:72; Svallfors 2004:164).
The tendencies outlined above are also characteristic of contemporary Swedish
policy research, where a class concept is rarely used or discussed in any theoretical
depth. This, together with the fact that there is little research on vocational education
when studying policy (for exceptions, cf. Lundahl 1994; 1997; 2011; 2011b; Nilsson
1981; Olofsson 2005; 2010) and the diminished importance attached to class in research
focusing on vocational education in Sweden more generally 3 , has led to a policy
debate and a set of policy proposals that not only overlook important questions but
that also risk increasing class inequalities.
If class is not irrelevant, but framed in a confusing discussion, a question that begs
an answer is: how, then, can class in contemporary society be understood?
Understanding Society as a Class Society
The concept of class has different meanings in different theories. Bluntly speaking,
one can discern two different basic understandings and analytical usages of class: as
strata or social group, and as social relations (Hatcher 2000:185-186). Analysing class
as strata implies grouping people together hierarchically in groups, defined by their
access to one or many important resources (e.g. income, profession and education)
(Crompton 1998). Commonly used concepts within this school of thought are “upper
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Mattias Nylund
class”, “middle class” and “under class” (Crompton 1998; Gilbert 2008; Kirk 2000),
also referred to as social groups 1, 2 and 3 (cf. Jonsson & Arnman 1989; Svensson
2001; 2007). Such a class concept can be very informative and reveal the distribution
between groups in various contexts. At the same time, this kind of understanding of
class has limitations. First, this concept of class neither can nor attempts to explain
the reasons behind the distribution; it is purely descriptive (Hickey 2000:163). Secondly,
class tends to become something static in this reading, equated with certain
income intervals, professions, educational levels etc. Further, the meaning of class,
and in general how society is categorised, becomes arbitrary. This is exemplified by
the common application of this type of categorisation today in the discourse of “social
exclusion” (Fairclough 2000; Hickey 2000). In this categorisation wage labourers
and owners of capital are recognised as one group (‘inside’), distinguished from the
group of people ‘outside’, e.g. the unemployed and long-term sick (Hickey 2000:170).
A common description of society within such a discourse is a “two-thirds society”,
both theoretically and empirically a misleading description (Hickey 2000:170) that
shifts the political ambition from increasing equality to increasing “inclusion” (Fairclough
2000:65). This ambiguous use of class illustrates additional problems with
the strata perspective in being devoid of concepts of power and conflict (Crompton
1998). Without a concept of power, a theory provides little guidance for action to
challenge inequalities. Another approach which overcomes most of these problems
is to understand class as social relations, e.g. a Marxist concept of class.
A neo-Marxist perspective
In Marxist theory, social systems are differentiated on the basis of the organisation of
production and the extraction of surplus value. In brief, every society has a material
organisation that establishes the basic frames for the way in which social relations
can take form. Capitalist societies are thus characterised by a specific organisation of
production, one in which a small minority owns and controls the means of production
and a large majority has to sell its labour in order to survive. This situation gives
rise to specific relationships, and it is these core relationships – the social relations
of production – that constitute the foundation of class relations. However, if a class
analysis is founded on the relation to the ownership of the means of production alone,
then only three (possibly four 4 ) basic classes can exist:
(i) Capitalists (who own the means of production – purchase labour)
(ii) Workers (who do not own the means of production – sell labour)
(iii) Petty Bourgeoisie (who own the means of production – do not buy labour).
In such a categorisation 85–90% of the population in developed capitalist countries
belongs to the same wage labour class (Wright 1997:19). While saying something
significant about capitalist society, this is too blunt to enable a nuanced understand-
594

The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
ing of many phenomena as it fails to capture the class dynamics of contemporary
society satisfactorily. The basic problem is that all wage labourers are understood as
one category, thereby viewing professors, generals, doctors, chief executives etc. as
belonging to the same class as nurses, telephone salesmen, industry workers, shop
workers etc. To allow a more nuanced analysis of the class structure, Wright (1997)
introduces relations to two additional factors (besides the means of production),
which in combination determine the social relations of production: (i) “Authority”
and (ii) “Skills and expertise”.
Wright finds that access to these factors has a significant impact on the social
relations of production. Wage labour positions involving authority provide greater
remuneration fails to capture the and class power dynamics (over of one’s contemporary own and society other’s satisfactorily. work), and The therefore basic problem tie the interests
generals, of doctors, these positions chief executives closer etc. to the as belonging capitalist to class. the same Possessing class as nurses, skills telephone and expertise
is that all wage labourers are understood as one category, thereby viewing professors,
similarly salesmen, tends industry to workers, impact shop positively workers on etc. salary To allow and a autonomy more nuanced over analysis one’s of work, the class thereby
structure, Wright (1997) introduces relations to two additional factors (besides the means of
affecting interests in a similar way. In short, the more a position involves authority
production), which in combination determine the social relations of production: (i)
and/or “Authority” skills and and (ii) expertise, “Skills and expertise”. the greater the influence of capitalist interest within this
class position. Wright finds While that access still providing to these factors wage has labour a significant and impact consequently the social being relations tied to the
of production. Wage labour positions involving authority provide greater remuneration and
working power (over class, one’s these own positions and other’s are work), simultaneously and therefore tied the to interests the capitalist of these class. positions They are,
in closer other to words, the capitalist “contradictory class. Possessing locations skills within and expertise class relations” similarly (Wright tends to 1997; impact 2009;
positively on salary and autonomy over one’s work, thereby affecting interests in a similar
Hickey 2000). During the later stages of capitalism a growing number of wage labourers
the have influence come of capitalist to occupy interest contradictory within this class position. positions. While However, still providing this wage has labour not meant
way. In short, the more a position involves authority and/or skills and expertise, the greater
that and the consequently relevance being of class tied to has the declined working class, or that these the positions working are class simultaneously has disappeared. tied to On
the capitalist class. They are, in other words, “contradictory locations within class relations”
the (Wright contrary, 1997; 2009; when Hickey analysing 2000). the During class the structure later stages in of countries capitalism as a growing diverse number as Japan, of the
USA wage and labourers Sweden, have Wright come to finds occupy that: contradictory class positions. However, this has not
meant that the relevance of class has declined or that the working class has disappeared. On
the
The
contrary,
working
when
class,
analysing
even if
the
defined
class structure
narrowly,
in
remains
countries
the
as
largest
diverse
class
as Japan,
location
the USA
in the
and
class
Sweden, Wright finds that:
structure of developed capitalist countries, and if it is extended to include those contradictory
locations The working closest class, even to it, if then defined it narrowly, constitutes remains a substantial the largest class majority location of in the the class labor structure force... of [I]
f the working class is defined in relational terms it is hardly the case that the working class
developed capitalist countries, and if it is extended to include those contradictory locations closest to it,
has largely then it disappeared, constitutes a substantial as some majority commentators of the labor have force... suggested [I]f the working (Wright class 1997:73). is defined in
relational terms it is hardly the case that the working class has largely disappeared, as some
commentators have suggested (Wright 1997:73).
By highlighting some of the results of Wright’s analysis on the class structure in
Sweden
By highlighting
(in the
some
early
of
1980s),
the results
the
of Wright’s
table below
analysis
illustrates
on the class
this
structure
point.
in Sweden (in
the early 1980s), the table below illustrates this point.
Table
Table
1.
1.
Overarching
Overarching wage
wage
labour
labour
class
class
positions
positions
in Sweden
in Sweden
(Wright
(Wright
1997:54)
1997:54) v
5
Extended
Expert
Managers
(9.6%) Skilled
supervisors
Experts
(3.0%)
Nonskilled
managers
(2.6%)
(5.6%) Extended
Working
class
(79.2%)
(+) Skills and expertise (-)
(+)
Authority
(-)
By differentiating wage labour positions depending on their relation to authority and skills
and expertise, five different class positions are defined in the table. The extended working
class is thus composed of positions with no, or little, access to both these resources, i.e. class
positions with similar conditions and interests. The table reveals that a large majority (79.2%)
of wage labourers are in the “extended working class” position. If one bundles together all the
disparate positions outside the extended working class and calls them ‘middle class’, this
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Mattias Nylund
By differentiating wage labour positions depending on their relation to authority and
skills and expertise, five different class positions are defined in the table. The extended
working class is thus composed of positions with no, or little, access to both these
resources, i.e. class positions with similar conditions and interests. The table reveals
that a large majority (79.2%) of wage labourers are in the “extended working class”
position. If one bundles together all the disparate positions outside the extended
working class and calls them ‘middle class’, this group counts for just under 21% of
the wage labourers. These findings contradict the common notion of modern society
as a middle-class society, or a two-thirds society, as it is often described in contemporary
politics (cf. Ball 2003; Hickey 2000). Summarising the results from almost
two decades of research, Wright (1997) finds that class understood in this way plays
an extremely important part in people’s lives, strongly influencing everything from
social mobility and life chances to friendships and class consciousness.
The ‘new’ working class
With a relational conception of class it is only with the dissolution of the core relations
that classes dissolve. From a Marxist perspective it thus takes the dissolution of the
capitalist mode of production, with the ownership and power relations it entails. Rather
than dissolving, the capitalist mode of production has expanded during the last century,
and is today more encompassing than ever. Strong everyday notions of class exist, where
working class implies white collared men in dungarees whose relative decline in the
workforce suggests the disappearance of the working class. This conclusion is, however,
based on a static and superficial understanding of class. The working class in Sweden
today looks different from what it was only a few decades ago, but it has certainly not
disappeared. Class should not be understood as a question of fixed characteristics but as
social relations. If related to upper-secondary vocational education in Sweden, as below,
a relational conception of class implies that not only traditionally ‘male’ programmes
(e.g. industry and construction) but also ‘female’ programmes (e.g. care and support)
should be viewed as primarily socialising pupils for extended working class positions,
which brings us to the second section and purpose of this article.
Upper-secondary education in Sweden plays an important part in the creation of
social relations. However, this is almost completely overlooked in contemporary policy
where relating education to class has ceased to be common practice. What kind of
problems this brings about in the context of upper-secondary vocational education
is discussed below.
The Relevance of Class, the Case of Sweden’s Vocational
Education
In relation to class, the purpose of the vocational programmes can, broadly speaking 6 ,
be considered as socialising pupils for extended working class positions, i.e. positions
defined by their non-skilled and subordinate character in the social relations
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The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
of production. Taken together with the fact that about half of all pupils in uppersecondary
education attend vocational programmes (Berlund & Hennig-Loeb 2012;
SOU 2008:27), of which a predominant proportion have working class backgrounds
(Broady & Börjesson 2006; Högberg 2009; Sandell 2007), it can be concluded that it
is individuals from already subordinated class positions that tend to be trained to occupy
subordinate positions. This organisation of education has prompted researchers
(cf. Althusser 1971/2008; Bernstein 1981; Bourdieu & Passeron 1970) to characterise
education as upholding a division between “intellectual” and “manual” labour.
In terms of content, the problem can be formulated as an uneven social distribution
of knowledge. Different programmes are organised around different principles
depending on what future role in the labour market the education is intended to prepare
pupils for. Education for middle class positions is organised around principles of
flexibility, freedom of choice, an inquisitive relation to knowledge etc., while education
for working class positions is organised around principles of punctuality, orderliness,
‘good habits’ etc. (Anyon 1983; Apple 2004; Beach 1999; Marshall 2007). Thus, the
education system is not only central for the selection of individuals for different
class positions, but also in socialising people from different classes in different ways
of relating to the world. A great deal of research on vocational education in Sweden
confirms this pattern, showing how knowledge, especially of a more theoretical and
critical kind, is subordinated to goals of socialisation such as learning punctuality and
attendance (cf. Berner 1989; Frykholm & Nitzler 1989; Härdig 1995; Nordlund 2011;
Rosvall 2011). Härdig, who has studied the relationship between vocational training
and working life, summarises his findings as follows:
The empirical result is to a high degree in accordance with the line of reasoning of Poulantzas
(1977), Gringon (1979) and Popkewitz (1987). Vocational education is by these seen as a
socializing practice into an ideology that reproduces present social and economical situation
(sic!) in society (Härdig 1995:221).
Vocational education is thus intertwined in a context of class, power, conflict and control
and its organisation represents a significant part of what the future working class
will learn and how they will view themselves – a context, as we shall see, completely
overlooked in contemporary policy. But, to be able to understand contemporary policy
trends in Sweden more fully, a brief historical contextualisation is first necessary.
Class and Swedish policies – a historical perspective
During the early post-war decades, Swedish governments launched a series of fundamental
educational reforms to address, inter alia, class inequalities (Gesser, 1985;
Härnqvist 1989; Nicaise et.al. 2005). One central effort was to reduce the differences
between educational pathways open to pupils from different social classes. At uppersecondary
level, the differences between the vocational and academic pathways were
reduced, mainly by broadening the educational content of the vocational routes. The
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Mattias Nylund
first major step in this regard was taken in 1971 (Govt. Bill 1968:140) when vocational
education was integrated into the upper-secondary school, resulting in the first joint
curriculum (Lgy70). Prior to this reform, the organisation of vocational education can
best be described as a weakly institutionalised system, heterogeneous and with limited
central control, its content generally strongly steered towards local and specific labour
market contexts (Berner 1989). In contrast, what has characterised the organisation of
vocational education in Sweden since then is a strongly institutionalised system where
vocational education is primarily located in school settings, priority given to educational
content of a less vocation-specific nature, and therefore comparatively small differences
between vocational and academic routes from an international perspective (Lindberg
2003:16-17). In addition to the shift in vocational skills, the educational content was
reorganised to help enhance pupils’ prospects as active and independent citizens and
workers who would exert influence at the workplace and e.g. “affect the hierarchies
in working life” (SOU 1986:2:105, my translation). Since the upper-secondary reform
of 1994 (Govt. Bill 1990/91:85), 30 percent of the time in all programmes has been
allocated to general subjects 7 , offering pupils in vocational programmes eligibility for
higher education. 8 Issues such as avoiding the creation of educational ‘dead ends’ and
offering all pupils more equal opportunities after finishing upper-secondary education
(Govt. Bill 1968:140:11; SOU:1981:96; SOU:1981:97; SOU:1986:2) were central in this
policy development, as expressed by the 1976 upper-secondary school committee:
We know that different kinds of upper-secondary programmes recruit pupils from different
social groupings. Here we have an inbuilt conflict in the upper-secondary school that reflects
nothing but the socially conditioned distribution of vocational tasks that our society is based
on to a great extent. Not many would dispute that society within reasonable limits must be
based on a division of labour and specialisations. Few on the other hand, if any, are likely to
claim that this distribution should be as strongly linked to social background as it is today.
Regardless of what one thinks about the power of the education system to break this pattern,
it must be argued that it must contribute to such a development more forcefully than
hitherto (SOU:1981:96:381, my translation).
Policy development since 1971 has also implied a change in control over content
where initially the state, and later the local school and pupils, were granted greater
control over the curriculum, with ‘working life’ (e.g. employers) becoming more of
an indirect influence.
In conclusion, the post-war history of upper-secondary education has been one
of integration between vocational and academic education, where issues of equality
and class have played a central role. Policies implemented at other levels, such as
the major expansion of adult education and the establishment of the 25:4-rule (see
below) should also be seen in this light, and policy documents of the time explicitly
stated that adult education was to stimulate and foster economic democracy and a
classless society (Englund 1989). Against such a background, contemporary policies
on education pose a very stark contrast.
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The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
A Policy Blind to Class
The extensive upper-secondary reform implemented in the autumn of 2011 (GY2011)
is of particular interest in a class context. Partly because it represents a historical
break with previous policy trends, but primarily because it is doing so by creating a
new structure for upper-secondary education mainly through the reorganisation of
vocational education.
It should first of all be noted that issues of social class and their relation to vocational
education play no part in the reform, as evidenced by the complete absence of
any mention of the concept of social class in both the inquiry (SOU 2008:27) and the
resulting bill (Govt. Bill 2008/09:199). To the extent that inequalities are recognised
at all, it is understood in the discourse of ‘social exclusion’, where groups of pupils
are differentiated on the basis of their successful transition from school to work (cf.
Govt. Bill 2008/09:199:121; SOU 2008:27:41-42,675). By ignoring class, vocational
education is decoupled from its societal context and, as a result, issues of power,
conflict and inequality are effectively omitted.
Vocational education has historically been related to both goals of efficiency and
equality. In contrast, GY2011 only recognises efficiency (and a specific conception of
the term), making the relation between education and the needs of the labour market
the dominant organising principle for the vocational programmes, expressed as an
ambition to create ready trained and employable workers (Berglund & Henning-Loeb
forthcoming; Nylund 2010).
The most prominent problems identified with the vocational programmes in these
policy texts are the perceived overemphasis on theoretical subjects in the curriculum,
the low throughput and the mismatch between what pupils learn and employers demand
(Nylund 2010). These are also seen as closely related in that pupils in vocational
programmes have poor results in theoretical subjects that take up too much space in
the curriculum and so throughput is low. 9 The remedy to this situation is the introduction
of a new structure for the content, with a reduction of hours devoted to the study
of society, aesthetic experience and language 10 to be replaced with a greater focus on
more specific, specialised labour market contexts (Beach et al. 2011; Nylund & Roswall
2011). The augmented difference between vocational and academic routes through
stronger contextualisation is made explicitly in the new steering documents, e.g. the
new curriculum (Lgy11), syllabuses and overarching goals (Nylund & Rosvall 2011),
and is to be applied in all subjects including the general subjects. This new structure,
it will be argued, is a ‘solution’ to problems understood in a partial and narrow way.
In the absence of class: Structures understood as intrinsic
individual attributes
A dominant perspective in GY2011 is the conceptualisation of most educational
phenomena as individual, demonstrated by the fact that the Swedish word for individual
is used 533 times in the inquiry, while the word for collective is used only 13
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Mattias Nylund
times (Nylund 2010). This has a direct bearing on how problems are identified and
conceptualised, e.g. the low throughput in vocational programmes.
All pupils in national and specially designed programmes are forced to study for a basic
qualification for higher education, irrespective of their individual goals, talents and interests
… Many programmes in which vocationally oriented subjects are the chief concern
have become all too theoretical with too little time for vocational preparation. …Different
interests and inclinations must be utilised in programmes offering preparation for higher
education, vocational education and apprenticeship training... Offering a greater choice of
specialisation can increase pupil motivation... New high quality vocational and apprenticeship
programmes, as well as efforts to improve elementary school and relevant entry requirements
for upper-secondary education, should considerably reduce the drop-out of pupils
from upper-secondary schools (SOU 2008:27:675, my translation).
In short, many individuals in vocational programmes are perceived to lack the talent,
inclination or interest in theoretical content 11 , so to reduce the hours allocated to such
subjects (combined with a few other measures), the thinking goes, would increase the
throughput. The problem is thus conceptualised as contained within or pertaining to
specific individuals (cf. Berglund & Henning-Loeb forthcoming). However, in a class
society children from different classes are raised and socialised in different ways. In the
work of Bourdieu (1990) this is referred to as the socialisation to different habituses,
in the work of Bernstein (1973) as different codes. These orientations to meanings
(habituses, codes) are each useful, and valued differently, in different contexts. In
the school context, there is at a general level a devaluation of working class culture
in favour of a middle class culture (Ball 2010; Bourdieu 1970; Caellewaert & Nilsson
1979; Ingram 2009). The ‘educational failure’ of the working class is thus primarily
a social, not a cognitive problem, depending ultimately on power and privilege – or
their absence – both in terms of class-bound out-of-school factors (Ball 2010) and
the organisation of education (Bernstein 1971). By essentialising these differences
as fixed characteristics and capabilities, and organising education accordingly, they
tend to become self-fulfilling in terms of performance (Ball 2010; Bernstein 1990).
An understanding of educational failure as primarily cognitive, or as a consequence
of ‘talents’ or ‘interests’, thus neutralises and legitimises socially determined class
inequalities. Problems that stem from the class structure are hence misinterpreted as
intrinsic individual attributes. This is what GY2011 does, as illustrated in the above
quote. The same is true for the new main stated goal of vocational education: to create
employable workers.
Framing the question of (un)employment as a matter of ‘employability’ – of whether
the individual is employable or not – shifts attention and responsibility away from the
structure of the labour market to the individual’s ability to acquire the skills necessary
to meet employer demand (Assarson 2012). Further, since unemployment is a structural
phenomenon, employability can be seen as a relational attribute that conceals
the fact that workers in this perspective are set against each other to compete for a
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The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
limited number of job opportunities (cf. Assarson 2012; Lundahl 2011b). By decontextualising
the question of employment, underlying structures such as class and their
impact on opportunities in the labour market are made invisible (Assarson 2012).
This failure to recognise properly the underlying factors implicit in education constitutes
the point of departure for the GY2011 reform and nothing that is unrecognised
in conception is likely to be addressed properly during implementation.
Overlooking the issue of access to education and social mobility
One important change with GY2011 is the reduction of general subjects in vocational
programmes, with the result that many pupils leaving vocational programmes are no
longer automatically eligible for higher education. The endeavour to acquire basic
access to higher education is now the responsibility of each individual pupil, who is
required to select certain subjects (Swedish, English) as elective courses. Such compliance
will not suffice for pupils in all vocational programmes, however, since the
entry conditions for higher education have been changed (Govt. Bill, 2006/07:107).
With the revised entry requirements, many pupils will need to study an extended
programme in addition to the basic subject competencies. Taken together with other
institutional changes described below, these reforms can be expected to seriously limit
the possibilities of those leaving vocational programmes to attend higher education.
One such change is the removal of the 25:4 rule (Govt. Bill, 2006/07:107) which
provided everyone above 25 years of age and with at least 4 years of corroborated work
experience with basic eligibility for higher education, even without a school-leaving
certificate from upper-secondary school. Work experience was also taken into account
by granting a bonus score on the national Scholastic Aptitude Test (Högskoleprovet)
which offers an alternative admission route to higher education. There is a strong
class factor in the failure to attain a secondary school leaving certificate (Alexanderson
2011; Svensson 2007) and to have early work experience. The 25:4 rule thus
addressed the situation of mainly working class pupils, and was designed to reduce
the class imbalances in enrolment in higher education. Its removal contributes still
further to limiting the opportunities of students with working class backgrounds to
attend higher education.
Another change is the introduction of merit points, in which the selection of certain
courses (e.g. mathematics or modern languages) gives pupils a comparative advantage
in access to higher education (Govt. Bill. 2006/07:107). Research tells us that such
selections are more likely to be made by pupils from more privileged social classes,
further accentuating class inequality (Ball 2010; Dahlstedt 2007; Härnqvist 1989;
Lund 2006). Further, the introduction of merit points will result in a differentiation
at an earlier age, which in turn implies a greater impact of social background on
educational choices (Alexanderson 2011).
Yet another change in the same direction is the introduction of new quotas for
admission to higher education (Govt. Bill, 2006/07:107), where secondary school
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Mattias Nylund
leavers without immediate basic access to higher education are placed in a quota with
fewer places (National Agency for Higher Education 2011).
Finally, adult education has also experienced significant cutbacks (Norberg &
Sedigh, 2010). This form of education has worked to reduce class inequalities by
giving pupils from the working class a second chance to attend higher education (cf.
Stenberg 2011).
From a class perspective, these reforms should be viewed as a whole, and as such they
not only directly reduce the opportunities of pupils with working class backgrounds to
attend higher education, but also prompt pupils to make decisions about their future
education earlier. When analysing the class structure across different countries, not
only is the distribution of the population across different positions of interest, but
so too is their permeability, i.e. how strongly people’s lives are bound by their class
position (cf. Wright 1997). The reforms described above are likely to strengthen the
class-bound character of enrolment in higher education, which would have a negative
impact on social mobility and so render the working class positions less permeable.
Overlooking the issue of the social distribution of knowledge
From a Neo-Marxist perspective, these reforms are not primarily problematic in
relation to social mobility but to questions of power more generally, both in terms of
who acquires the power to decide what counts as important knowledge, but also the
power that can be gained from knowledge itself. Let us turn to the second matter first.
In terms of school content, education systems in class societies follow certain
“distributive rules” (Bernstein 2000), making different knowledge available to different
classes. On a societal level, subordinated classes encounter a curriculum where
knowledge is mainly organised to be meaningful in local and specific contexts, making
it difficult to transfer and use its meanings in different contexts. In contrast, privileged
classes encounter a curriculum where knowledge is organised to be meaningful in less
context-bound systems of meanings. As Bernstein (2000) stresses, it is within fields
of less context-bound knowledge, of a more theoretical orientation, that the relations
between objects and events not obviously related to one another are connected. It is
thus a powerful form of knowledge, which makes it possible to think about what is
less apparent and what is possible, essential for educational objectives such as critical
thinking (Beach 2011; Young 2008).
From a class perspective, it may well be argued that the scope for critical discussion
(e.g. about the organisation of society and the workplace) is proportionately
of greatest importance in the vocational programmes, for the individuals who will
occupy the most subordinate and vulnerable positions in the social relations of production
(cf. Englund 1981), a line of reasoning found in policy texts from the 1970s
(Englund 1989). However, in the decontextualised understanding of GY2011, access
to theoretical knowledge in vocational programmes is viewed instead as a problem
and, as a result, knowledge is reorganised in relation to much more specific vocational
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The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
contexts. This is accomplished not only by reducing the time and space for general
subjects, but also by introducing a new model for steering content in which labour
market needs are placed at the centre of the organisation, evaluation and development
of the vocational curriculum.
To facilitate young people’s establishment in the labour market and so that the contribution
of upper-secondary vocational programmes to the supply of competence will increase, closer
collaboration between the National Agency for Education, the employers of upper-secondary
school leavers and other relevant authorities is required... Therefore, the Government considers
that national councils for the various vocational programmes should be established…
[that] should have the task of providing advice and support, both in terms of developing
educational content, but also concerning the objectives and study tasks… These councils
may serve appropriately as a forum for continuous dialogue between the National Agency
for Education and future employers. The purpose of this dialogue is to match educational
supply with the demand in the labour market, in order to facilitate young people’s transition
from vocational education to employment (Govt. Bill 2008/09:199:46-47, my translation).
This new curriculum has implications for knowledge. Not only does historical
experience suggest that employers are unlikely to give priority to knowledge of a
more theoretical kind (Boreham 2002; Lundahl 1997; Olofsson 2005), but an everchanging
demand-driven curriculum implies knowledge that is time- and placespecific,
i.e. with a very context-bound relevance. This organisation of knowledge,
guided by the idea of “translating subjects and courses to descriptions of skills that
are used by and comprehensible in the commercial world” (SOU 2008:27:241, my
translation), offers pupils access to the applications of theoretical knowledge, but
not to the theoretical knowledge that underpins their field of practice. Vocational
education is by definition related to fields of practice, and is thus context-related.
However, the relation between knowledge and context can be organised in different
ways, offering different forms of knowledge and learning (cf. Gamble 2006; Young
2006). Disconnecting practice from theory in vocational programmes means depriving
pupils of access to knowledge that could give them increased control over
their own knowledge and learning and the opportunity to reflect critically on ‘how
it is’ (cf. Weelahan 2007).
Taken together with the reduced access to higher education, these reforms quite
explicitly lock the working class out from access to knowledge that engenders critical
views of society and its organisation. Another reform strengthening this tendency is
that teacher education is being reorganised to differentiate much more clearly between
the vocational/academic paths, for instance by halving the initial teacher training for
vocational teachers, a change that Lundahl et al. (2010:54) argues “can be regarded
as a return to the previous separation of teacher categories — the ‘seminar’ and the
‘academic’” (also see Lagström 2012).
Attempting to solve problems of throughput and unemployment by undermining
critical thinking and theoretical reasoning in vocational programmes is, to say the
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Mattias Nylund
least, problematic as it further contributes to the unequal distribution of power and
knowledge between classes. Further, this decontextualised approach also neutralises
the question of who gains the power to decide on what counts as important knowledge
in vocational programmes.
Overlooking the issue of the power over the curriculum
As described above, one of the main goals in GY2011 is to make vocational students
more employable, a quality evaluated mainly by employers. With such a premise, the
interests of employers are understood as interests common to all, hence the increased
power of employers to decide on what counts as important knowledge in the vocational
curriculum. Simultaneously, and for the same reason, the power of pupils and
teachers over content is criticised and reduced (Nylund 2010). Steering content like
this is disquieting from a class perspective that stresses the conflictive interests of
employers and (future) workers (cf. Wright 1997). What employers regard as important
knowledge is not likely to be learning that lays the ground for a critical discussion
of power relations and the distribution of influence or wealth in the workplace.
Further, employers are hardly educational theorists or particularly knowledgeable on
epistemological questions. It is production and profit, rather than learning, which are
the guiding principles behind the organisation of tasks in a workplace (cf. Lindberg
2003; Barnett 2006; Berner 1989). This new balance of power also implies a great
class misrepresentation as it is primarily pupils with working class backgrounds who
attend vocational programmes.
So, what can be concluded from these changes in policy and research?
Concluding Remarks: Reproducing Class – from a Problem to
an Endeavour?
Since education systems are interwoven into the structures of the societies they form
part of, and class is a fundamental structure in a capitalist society, ignoring class leads
to important questions and problems being overlooked. This is exemplified by contemporary
educational policy in Sweden regarding vocational education, which fails
to recognise class altogether. This decontextualisation means that questions of power,
conflict and control are invariably left out, and vocational education is framed instead
within a pure ‘efficiency’ discourse. In this discourse, asymmetric power relations and
socially determined class inequalities become invisible, neutralised and naturalised,
and a policy is shaped that not only overlooks important problems relating to class
but which also risks augmenting class inequalities and excluding young people with
working class backgrounds from access to critical knowledge.
If contemporary policy is viewed in its historical context, the consequences of
ignoring class can be seen in a shift in ambition from pursuing equality to a form
of ‘inclusion’. But more importantly, it expresses itself as a shift from viewing class
inequalities as a problem to assuming the appearance of an endeavour. A great deal
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The Relevance of Class in Education Policy and Research
of the contemporary policy resembles the period before the 1970s, prior to the joint
curriculum. A clear division of the upper-secondary school based on the difference
between academic and vocational paths is reinstated. The different exams removed
in 1968 have been restored. More direct control by employers over vocational curricula
is reintroduced and the content is again to be much more context-bound and
subject to the evaluation of local employers. Likewise, the ambition that pupils in
vocational programmes shall be ‘ready trained’ for specific types of wage labour is
reintroduced, while the goal of general eligibility for higher education for pupils on
vocational programmes is removed. There will again be major differences in teacher
education, with teachers in vocational subjects receiving much less training than their
academic counterparts. When associated policies are taken into account such as the
cutbacks in adult education, the removal of the 25:4 rule, the introduction of merit
points and the new quotas for higher education, this tendency is further accentuated.
As the perception of society being comprised of social classes has diminished in
educational research, this policy development is being implemented without being
related to questions of class and power. This is somewhat ironic since modern policy
is, though silent on class in its rhetoric, quite consistent in its class character. This
demonstrates the fact that the relevance of class is not merely an empirical question
but also a political one, as underlined by Bourdieu in the quote below that concludes
this article.
The word ‘class’ will never be a neutral word so long as there are classes: the question of the
existence or non-existence of classes is a stake in the struggle between the classes (Bourdieu
1993:21)
Mattias Nylund is a PhD student in Pedagogy at Örebro University, HumUs Institution. His research
focuses on Education Policy regarding Vocational Education. This article represents one of four
studies that constitute his PhD project.
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Mattias Nylund
Notes
1 In Sweden, almost all students (98%) continue from 9 years of compulsory primary school to upper-secondary school (Alexandersson
2011). Upper-secondary school in Sweden is thus central in a class context since it is where the most significant
official curriculum differentiation between educational pathways takes place. It has two main routes, one preparatory for
higher education, and the other vocationally oriented which mainly recruits students from the working class. In an international
context, upper-secondary school in Sweden has stood out in that these pathways have been integrated to a large
extent (this is elaborated in the second part of the article). The Swedish education system has also stood out as a frontrunner
in addressing issues of class inequality (cf. Alexandersson 2011; Ball & Larsson 1989; Benadusi 2001; Erikson & Jonsson
1996; Nicaise et al. 2005; Shavit & Blossfeld 1993).
2 In a recent study on how class affects people’s lives in Sweden concerning everything from work, education, social mobility
and low-wage jobs to well-being, shopping patterns, alcohol consumption and ideological assumptions, it is concluded that
“[O]ne thing remains clear: class matters in contemporary Sweden” (Oskarsson, et al. 2010:227).
3 Critical perspectives relating to class, power and control in this field of research have become less common in the last few
decades. However, there are (more than in many other research areas) contributions in contemporary research on vocational
education discussing different phenomena in relation to different conceptions of class (cf. Asplund 2010; Gruber
2007; Högberg 2009; Sandell 2007). Nonetheless, it is rarely in focus and is often almost entirely left out (cf. Berglund
2009; Broman 2009; Jernström 2000; Swahn 2006). Further, even when a class concept is used, it is usually not with a
relational and critical understanding focusing on power, conflict and control (see the discussion below).
4 (iv) Lumpen Proletariat (who do not own the means of production – unable to sell their labour power)
5 This table is somewhat modified by the author, based on two tables in Wright (1997:47, 54). The data on which Wright bases
his analysis, presented in the table, was collected in the early 1980s. The balance between different class positions today
may therefore differ somewhat. The purpose here, however, is not to present a precise description of the contemporary class
structure, but to illustrate how class can be conceptualised in contemporary society.
6 It should be noted that there are significant differences between different vocational programmes (cf. SOU 2000:39), both in
terms of the social background of the students attending them, and concerning the outlooks after completing the education. But,
on a general level, there are strong and clear class patterns with deep historical roots (Broady & Börjesson 2005; Nilsson 1981).
7 Swedish, English, civics, religious instruction, mathematics, natural science, physical education and art/music/drama.
8 It should be noted that the 1990s brought many other changes regarding Swedish education policy that in contrast broke
the historical trend of integration between different parts of the education system. This development can be illustrated, for
instance, by the new curriculum based on management by outcomes and goals, the establishment of independent schools
and of school vouchers, a shift in governance with a stronger influence for municipalities and increasing features of individualisation.
These extensive changes have been described as constituting a system shift in the politics of education in
Sweden (cf. Englund 1996; Lindensjö & Lundgren 2000; Sundberg 2005; Wahlström 2002), mostly having a segregating
effect, increasing class inequalities (cf. Lund 2006; Olofsson 2010; Sandell 2007; Swedish National Agency for Education
2009). However, although playing an important part in class reproduction, the processes in which pupils are sorted for different
educational routes will not be dealt with in any length in this article, where the focus is on upper-secondary education
and the social distribution of knowledge.
9 However, this is a somewhat misleading statement. With the reform initiated in 1991, the drop-out rate in upper-secondary
school grew significantly, and became (in 1998) twice as high in vocational programmes compared to preparatory programmes
for further studies. Since then, however, the drop-out rate has decreased in vocational programmes. The numbers
from different sources vary somewhat (Berglund & Henning-Loeb forthcoming), but the trend was, as Alexandersson
(2011:205-206) notes, that: “[L]eaving certificates and grades have improved, especially for those taking the vocational
studies option. The completion rate is slightly below the rate for the academic track … 67% of pupils on vocational tracks
graduated from upper-secondary 2008, compared to 56% of those who graduated ten years earlier”. Two points can be
made here. First, the ‘throughput trend’ was positive in vocational programmes, making the description of this problem in
the policy texts a little misleading. Secondly, the removal of more general content from all vocational programmes appears
quite blunt since a great majority of students in vocational programmes were indeed completing their studies. For instance,
in 2009/2010 the construction programme had the largest proportion of pupils with a leaving certificate within three years,
just over 83 percent (Henning-Loeb 2012).
10 E.g. civics is halved, aesthetic subjects are removed from the compulsory curriculum and Swedish is (for most vocational
programmes) halved.
11 It should be noted that this assumption is far from uncontroversial. Instead, as noted by Beach et al. (2011:149), their empirical
studies indicate that “[T]here is no distinction between students of vocational programs and others in regard to interest in
and desires for a good education and the value of academic/theoretical knowledge”. This assumption, they claim, can instead
be seen as resting “[E]ntirely on foundations that are socially constructed elements of a dominant discourse about social
belonging, social origins, labor and intellectual ability”. This is perhaps also illustrated by the preliminary results of the first
applications for the new vocational programmes, where the number of applicants has fallen considerably (Swedish National
Agency for Education 2011), by approximately 10% compared to previous years (Berglund & Henning-Loeb forthcoming).
606

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Vol. 3, No. 4, December 2012, pp. 615–636
EDU.
INQ.
A cross-national comparison of test
anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade
3 pupils: Measured by the CTAS
Mikaela Nyroos*, Johan Korhonen**, Karin Linnanmäki***
& Camilla Svens-Liavåg****
Abstract
The education systems in Sweden and Finland have different formal and informal testing traditions.
A recognised possible adverse effect of testing is test anxiety among pupils and students which
may have a negative impact on examination performance. Research into which factors of testing
practice affect the levels of test anxiety in younger pupils in real classroom settings is a neglected
area internationally yet holds great importance for school practitioners. A cross-national study was
conducted to determine whether there are any differences in test anxiety between groups of young
pupils in Sweden and Finland, as measured by the Children’s Test Anxiety Scale (the CTAS), and
whether these differences are ‘real’ differences or a result of differential item functioning. The dimensionality
of the CTAS construct is further examined. Exploratory Structural Equation Modelling
was used to analyse the data obtained. Partial measurement invariance with respect to nationality
and gender was achieved, demonstrating that the CTAS accurately measures latent constructs
such as thoughts, autonomic reactions and off-task behaviours in boys and girls, and Swedish and
Finnish pupils. No differences were found in the levels of test anxiety experienced by Swedish and
Finnish pupils. Girls reported higher levels of autonomic reactions related to test anxiety, but no
gender differences in thoughts and off-task behaviours were identified. Methodological limitations
and the future implications of the results obtained are discussed.
Keywords: test anxiety, CTAS, cross-national, exploratory structural equation modelling
The present study is designed to examine the dimensionality of the Children’s Test
Anxiety Scale (“CTAS”), to identify if there are differences in test anxiety between
Swedish and Finnish pupils, and whether these differences are ‘real’ differences or a
result of differential item functioning. The educational testing scenes in Sweden and
Finland differ in many respects which in previous findings have been identified as influencing
pupils’ experience of taking tests (see below). Testing is a central but debated
tool in formal education that is used to determine whether a pupil has successfully
understood the taught material (Leach et al., 2001). Testing might, however, trigger
*Corresponding author, Department of Applied Educational Science, Umeå University, Sweden, E-mail: mikaela.nyroos@
edusci.umu.se. **Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland, E-mail: jokorhon@abo.fi. ***Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland,
E-mail: karin.linnanmaki@abo.fi. ****Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland. E-mail: camilla.svens-liavag@vaasa.fi.
©Authors. ISSN 2000-4508, pp. 615–636
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Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
intense emotions (Pekrun et al., 2004) and one of these with debilitating effects on
academic performance is test anxiety (Eum & Rice, 2010). Examining the impact of
different testing regimes on pupils’ reported levels of test anxiety contributes to the
understanding of the influencing and developmental aspects in pupils’ schooling (cf.
Lowe & Ang, 2012) and is therefore of great importance.
Testing takes up a relatively large proportion of school time (Clarke et al., 2000;
Wren & Benson, 2004), but the exact proportion of time it consumes seems to differ
between nations. Swedish pupils undergo a very small number of examinations
during their compulsory education (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development – OECD, 2005; Skolverket, 2007). The frequency and types of testing
in Sweden further differ from those in Finland; Finnish pupils generally have more
classroom examinations over the course of the school year (Kupiainen et al., 2009).
A new assessment programme recently introduced in Sweden requires all pupils in
grades 3, 6 and 9 to undergo an increased number of mandatory national examinations.
The primary reason for introducing these new tests is to generate data that can
be used to monitor school performance; that is to say, the results are used for external
evaluation. In Finland, there are no national examinations taken by all students at
a given stage in their basic education. Instead, schools are assessed on the basis of
the test results of a random representative sample of their pupils in grades 3, 6 and
9, typically in a single subject. Individual schools’ results are not made available to
the public or the schools, but are used by the government as internal measures of
the performance of the national education system (Garme, 2002; Eurydice, 2009).
This lack of mandatory high-stakes examinations is partly responsible for the great
number of exams that Finnish pupils must take during their education. The control of
learning is decentralised, with schools and individual teachers having the authority to
set their own curricula and tests. Thus, despite the absence of national examinations,
pupils are assessed numerous times in most subjects throughout the nine years of
their compulsory schooling (Kupiainen et al., 2009; Sahlberg, 2011).
In addition to undergoing different numbers of exams during their time in school,
pupils in Finland and Sweden also vary in terms of their levels of academic achievement,
as measured by various international comparative studies in education (e.g. the
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study – TIMSS, the Programme for
International Student Assessment – PISA, and the Progress in International Reading
Literacy Study – PIRLS). For several years, the ranking of Swedish pupils in these
comparative exercises has fallen; there is a stable downwards trend in Sweden’s PISA
rank as measured in 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009. By contrast, Finnish pupils have
maintained consistently high rankings (Kupiainen et al., 2009). Notably, Finland
performed very well in PISA 2009, whereas Sweden’s results were significantly worse
(Skolverket, 2010). This downwards trend caused an educational crisis in Sweden
that prompted the introduction of the aforementioned new assessment programme
and its increased number of national examinations, particularly for younger pupils
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A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
(Pettersson, 2008; Krantz, 2010). As previously discussed, the Finns adopted a very
different system in the 1980s, eliminating standardised testing in favour of national
teaching policies that set aside a portion of teachers’ time for the development of new
tests and assessments (Darling-Hammond, 2010).
Both Finland and Sweden could be said to have ‘low-stakes’ national assessment
systems, although this may be changing in the case of Sweden. While the Swedish
accountability system is not really standards-based, it has certain elements that
incline it in that direction. In particular, the introduction of more national examinations,
particularly for younger pupils, and the increasing popularity of the voucher
system may raise the stakes of the assessments (Eklöf et al., 2009). The publication
of individual schools’ results might place a further emphasis on the importance of
test results (Hall & Øzerk, 2008). In addition, the Swedish national examinations
are all conducted within a short period of time, which could have further unintended
consequences (Mons, 2009). Increasingly, test scores are becoming the only metric
used when describing and evaluating schools (Osborne, 2006).
Pupils are often well aware of the effects of national assessment (Reary & Wiliam,
1999) and that assessment can increase their accountability (Brown & Hirschfeld,
2008). High-stakes tests are generally perceived as being stressful, resulting in
anxiety (O’Neil & Abedi, 1992). However, no matter what the stakes associated with
a given assessment regime, pupils will inevitably bear the consequences (Heubert &
Hauser, 1999). If pupils experience high stress and intense emotions connected to
taking a test, it may adversely affect their performance (Putwain, 2009). One common
feeling associated with assessment among pupils and students is test anxiety, a
condition that can have a highly negative impact on academic achievement (Ergene,
2003). Research has shown that as a group highly test-anxious individuals perform
less well at examinations in both laboratory settings and classrooms (Zeidner, 2007).
On the other hand, it is possible that increased testing may boost educational
performance. Studies have shown that exams and tests influence pupils’ behaviour
and stances, providing motivation and encouragement (e.g. McDaniel et al., 2007).
Together with increases in test-taking skills, familiarity (cf. Connor-Greene, 2000),
and changes in attitudes (Bangert-Drowns et al., 1991), this seems to reduce test
anxiety (Roediger et al., 2006). Pupils accustomed to tests and regularly being tested
may develop a resistance to test anxiety (Snooks, 2004), and a degree of “testwiseness”
(Bodas et al., 2008). Those positive effects of testing are indirectly beneficial
to pupils’ education (Karpicke & Roediger, 2007). Several researchers have termed
it a “hidden curriculum” (cf. Connor-Greene, 2000).
There are over 1,000 publications on test anxiety among elderly pupils and students
(Stöber & Pekrun, 2004), but in general there have been few international studies
on how test anxiety affects younger pupils in a classroom environment (Metcalfe et
al., 2007), and little attention has been paid to its occurrence in Sweden or Finland.
Even though test anxiety levels do not seem to differ greatly between nations (Seipp
617

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
& Schwarzer, 1996), it may be sensitive to cultural and socialisation factors, and so it
may be imprudent to simply generalise previous research findings to other national
populations (Zeidner, 1990; cf. Lowe & Ang, 2012).
The objectives of the study reported herein were thus to determine whether grade
3 pupils in Sweden and Finland differ in their experiences of test anxiety, given that
Sweden and Finland have adopted different testing regimes. The level of test anxiety
experienced is measured by the CTAS which is translated into Swedish and Finnish,
while the dimensionality of the CTAS will first be examined, and then differences
between the Swedish and Finnish samples analysed to examine whether these are
‘real’ or a result of differential item functioning.
Test Anxiety
Test anxiety is a very circumscribed condition (Beidel & Turner, 1988) and typically
involves behaviours, feelings, reactions and thoughts (Wren & Benson, 2004) that
occur at all academic levels (Birenbaum & Guvittz, 1993). Numerous authors have
stressed the connections between anxiety and educational underachievement as well
as academic problems such as early school leaving (e.g. Owens et al., 2008). Test anxiety
is believed to be learnt in educational settings, typically evoked during the earlier
school years (Pekrun, 2000). Several factors can potentially affect the development of
test anxiety. However, these factors are not all active at the same time during a child’s
development; an individual’s reaction to a specific test situation is shaped by the specific
influence of the factors active during and leading up to the test (McDonald, 2001).
The first scales for assessing individual differences in test anxiety were developed in
the 1950s and typically focused on single primary components. These one-dimensional
approaches were replaced by seminal two-component approaches, i.e. worry and
emotionality or state and trait, in the 1960-1970s (Hagtvet et al., 2001). More recent
advances have led to the development of more sophisticated and psychometricallysound
measures of test anxiety. The test anxiety construct today is theorised and
conceptualised as being complex, multi-dimensional, and dynamic, and represents
a key area in contemporary test anxiety research with characteristic factors or subscales
that vary depending on the instrument used. The first distinction is between
two basic dimensions in the experience of anxiety, emotionality and worry, which
are accepted by most contemporary researchers as major components of test anxiety
(Zeidner & Matthews, 2003) and are empirically distinct but interrelated (Zeidner,
2007). Worry is a cognitive distractor that stems from the individual’s valuation of
their performance. It can be experienced over relatively long periods of time, sometimes
beginning several days before an exam, and may persist throughout testing.
Emotionality denotes the individual’s subjective awareness and understanding of their
physiological reactions in different evaluative situations (i.e. the more physiological
part). It is experienced at a specific point in time (Meijer, 2001) and is dependent on
the context, and so can potentially be adjusted or modulated by changing the testing
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A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
environment (Zeidner, 2007). Worry has been consistently shown to have a stronger
negative influence on test performance than emotionality in all age groups and both
sexes, and across diverse cultures (Chung et al., 2005).
Test anxiety may also afflict children, with children as young as 7 years appearing
to experience stress as a result of formal testing (Connor, 2003). Increasing
standardised testing will likely also lead to an increase in test anxiety among school
children in compulsory education (Wren & Benson, 2004). Even though the extent
and influence is less clear compared to elderly individuals, it is neither uncommon
nor necessarily harmless. Except for playing a major role in academic underachievement,
it is also related to a lack of school-motivation, poor academic self-concepts,
constraint career advancement, bad personality development and weaker health
(Stöber & Pekrun, 2004). Several researchers believe the manifestation of test anxiety
in children includes cognitions, somatic symptoms and test-irrelevant behaviours (cf.
Wren & Benson, 2004). Compared to adults, Wigfield and Eccles (1989) suggest that
children’s anxiety during experiences of failure is initially dominated by emotionalaffective
responses but subsequently becomes characterised more by cognitive or
worry concern over performing poorly. Wren and Benson (2004), who have developed
the instrument used in the present study, chose to combine worry cognitions and test
irrelevant thoughts. They further hypothesised that autonomic reactions are more
consistent with children’s responses than emotional ones, and therefore included
them as a component in their model of text anxiety in children. A third behavioural
component, off-task behaviour (e.g. nervous habits, distracting behaviours), was also
included to better mirror the symptoms of text anxiety in children.
Test anxiety is a growing problem, occurring in different geographic and cultural
settings (Bodas et al., 2008). Pupils of all achievement levels suffer and no age
group is immune (Legrand et al., 1999). However, some differences between groups
relating to gender, background and age have been observed (Richmond & Rodrigor,
1988). Numerous studies have found that, regardless of cross-cultural setting and
age, females tend to report higher levels of test anxiety than males (e.g. Chapell et
al., 2005; Eum & Rice, 2010). The worldwide occurrence of this phenomenon may
reflect existing socialisation practices that encourage women to express feelings that
men are expected to suppress or keep in private (McDonald, 2001); alternatively, it
may be a consequence of the view that school work and scholastic performance are
less highly valued by males and that high scholastic performance is somehow not
masculine (Skelton, 2001). Another possible explanation for these gender differences
is that the methods used to assess test anxiety might be less sensitive for males than
for females (Zeidner, 1998).
Even though test anxiety levels in general do not differ greatly between nations,
some studies report that different backgrounds may have an influence. One hypothesis
on parental attitudes has been proposed to explain such cross-cultural differences in
reported test anxiety. In some nations, parents put excessive pressure on their children
619

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
to succeed (Bodas & Ollendick, 2005). But it is also generally likely that high test
anxiety among children and students reflects a state of dependence on the parent’s
opinions and expectations. The child is afraid to disappoint their parents, which may
hamper their concentration and ability to perform during exams (Peleg-Popko et al.,
2003). Parents who belong to a minority group may put additional pressure on their
children to perform well in order to improve their social status. Minority groups must
also study a broader curriculum since they have to learn more languages, which may
intensify their school worries or levels of anxiety (Peleg, 2009).
Finally, elderly students compared to younger pupils are found in the majority of
studies to report higher levels of test anxiety (e.g. Zeidner, 1998; Lowe & Lee, 2008).
Research Design
Participants and Setting
A total of 172 pupils, 103 girls (69 of whom were Finnish and 34 of whom were
Swedish) and 69 boys (40 Finnish and 29 Swedish), participated in this study. The
children came from six different schools, two of which were Swedish (of which one
school conducted teaching in Swedish and one school teaching in Finnish) and four
of which were Finnish (of which two schools conducted teaching in Swedish and two
schools teaching in Finnish); in total, individuals from eleven grade-three classes,
as defined in the Swedish and Finnish education systems were studied; four were
Swedish and seven Finnish. The participants were between nine and ten years of
age. Finland is officially bilingual (Finnish and Swedish), while in Sweden Finnish
is an official minority language; notably, it is the language used in teaching in one of
the Swedish schools studied. Both language groups in the respective countries were
thus included in the study. We decided to treat the Swedish- and Finnish-speaking
pupils as a single group in both countries because there were no differences between
the language groups (t(100) = .70, p = .49 and t(58) = 1.11, p = .27) in the CTAS and
because our study was focused on cross-national differences. Convenience samples
were collected in both countries. Of the original sample of 188 children, 172 consented
to participate, and their parents’ informed consent was obtained. Data collection was
conducted in such a way that it did not violate the ethical guidelines formulated by
the Swedish Research Council (2006) and the Finnish National Advisory Board on
Research Ethics (2002) regarding information, consent for participation, scientific
use and confidentiality. Parents were asked about their highest level of education (i.e.
compulsory school, vocational training, upper-secondary school or higher education).
There were some differences in parental educational background between the schools,
F(5, 138) = 11.72, p < .01, . Pairwise comparisons of means revealed that one of the
schools in Sweden had a significantly lower parental educational background than
two of the Finnish schools (p < .05). However, parental educational background and
the CTAS total score were unrelated, r(135) = -.11, p = .21.
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A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
Procedure
The CTAS was administrated over a period of one month during ordinary school time.
The administration was not immediately after or before the children had a test but
during regular teaching in all classes. The children sat quietly and filled in the assessment
in the classroom and were able to ask the researcher or the class teacher when
uncertain about a question. One hour was set aside for information on how to fill in
the CTAS (i.e. to choose the response alternative that best agreed with their opinion)
and for answering it. Conditions and instructions were the same for all participants.
The researchers were responsible for scoring the CTAS.
Instruments
Test Anxiety. The CTAS (the Children’s Test Anxiety Scale: Wren & Benson, 2004)
is a refined and modernised 30-item version of the most widely used measure of this
construct, the 30-item TASC (the Test Anxiety Scale for Children: Sarason et al., 1969).
The scale was purposefully developed for measuring the construct of test anxiety in
children. Based upon earlier and previous research, Wren and Benson (2004) believe
test anxiety in children to be a situation-specific trait including cognitions, somatic
symptoms, and test-irrelevant behaviours. The CTAS assesses an individual’s level of
apprehension or anxiety about testing on a 1-4 Likert scale, asking for participants’
response about how anxious they would feel in response to various settings and experiences;
it is a self-reported pen-and-paper instrument for measuring test anxiety
in children. Since its target group is very young children, it fills a need that is unmet
by other methods for assessing test anxiety (Cizek & Burg, 2006). The CTAS is one
of several widely used test anxiety inventories that have satisfactory reliability coefficients
and high practicality in naturalistic field settings (Zeidner, 2007). Wren
and Benson (2004) report good internal consistency for the original sample (α=.92)
and their cross-validation sample (α=.92). An individual’s overall score is equal to
the sum of their responses to each item of the instrument; respondents are asked
to respond to a series of questions with four response options: 1 = almost never; 2
= some of the time; 3 = most of the time; and 4 = almost always. The test has three
dimensions: thoughts, with 13 items, (e.g. “While I am taking tests, I worry about
failing”); autonomic reactions, with 9 items, (e.g. “While I am taking tests, my belly
feels funny”); and off-task behaviours, with 8 items, (e.g. “While I am taking tests,
I check the time”).
Item data from the 172 respondents were used to validate the factor structure of
the responses. A series of explorative factor analyses using Maximum Likelihood
with an oblique rotation were conducted to verify the factor structure of the CTAS
in the current sample. We were interested to see if our data would support the proposed
factor structure of Wren and Benson (2004) or the two-factor structure of
test-anxiety commonly found in the literature. Analyses with all 30 items favoured
the three-factor solution over the two-factor solution, Δχ 2 (28) = 164.687, p < .001.
621

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
After this, the data were screened to identify poorly working items. Items that showed
a non-normal distribution and had weak factor loadings in the factor analyses were
excluded from further analyses. This resulted in a revised measure of 19 items. Again,
the three-factor solution provided a better fit, Δχ 2 (17)= 79.889, p < .001. The model
fit of all explorative factor analyses can be found in Table 1 and the factor loadings of
the three factor models can be found in Appendix A. The internal consistency of the
responses was assessed by calculating Cronbach’s alpha value, which was 0.86 for
the revised test (19 items).
Table 1 1.
Goodness-of-fit indexes for the Exploratory Factor Analyses on the CTAS
Goodness-of-fit indexes for the Exploratory Factor Analyses on the CTAS
Model χ² df CFI TLI RMSEA Δχ² Δdf Δp
2-factor model (30 items) 767.654* 376 .77 .73 .078
3-factor model (30 items) 602.967* 348 .85 .81 .065 164.687 28

A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
Results
In accordance with the aim of the study, an ESEM with covariates (MIMIC) modelling
approach was used to study measurement invariance and population heterogeneity.
The MIMIC approach was chosen instead of a multigroup ESEM because MIMIC
models have smaller sample size requirements and therefore suited our data better.
We started the modelling by specifying an ESEM model for the test anxiety construct
with three factors; thoughts, autonomic reactions, and off-task behaviour. The factors
were allowed to correlate. The model fit was acceptable, χ²(117, N=172) = 191.770, p
< .001, CFI = .93, TLI = .90, RMSEA = .06, and clearly better than those obtained by
Wren and Benson (2004) in their validation study of the CTAS, χ²(402, N=261) = 853,
p < .001, TLI = .81, RMSEA = .07. According to our research questions, gender and
nationality were then incorporated into the model as covariates. The direct effects of
the covariates on individual items were initially constrained to zero, and this model
was then used as a baseline model for further analyses (Figure 1).
Figure Figure 1. Exploratory 1. Exploratory structural structural equation equation model model of of the the theoretical three-factor model model of
test anxiety of test anxiety in children in children with gender with gender and nation and nation as covariates. as covariates
623

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
Modification indices for the baseline model were examined to identify possible differential
item functioning in the CTAS. The model fit (χ²(149, N=172) = 272.310, p
< .001, CFI = .90, TLI = .86, RMSEA = .07) and the modification indices suggested
that there were improvements to be made. An examination of the modification indices
revealed large values for item 3 on gender, and for item 24 and item 29 on nationality.
We continued the analyses by adding direct effects from gender to item 3, and
from nation to items 24 and 29 which resulted in an improved model fit, χ²(146,
N=172) = 230.968, p < .001, CFI = .93, TLI = .90, RMSEA = .06, Δχ 2 (3) = 41.342, p
< .001. The regression path from gender to item 3 was significant (Figure 2) and the
interpretation for the direct effect is that for a given off-task behaviours factor value,
girls tend to look more around the room in a test situation. The direct effect from
nationality to item 24 was also significant and should be interpreted that for a given
thoughts factor value, Swedish children are more worried about what will happen if
they fail the test. The direct effect from nationality to item 29 was also significant.
Figure 2. Path 2. Path diagram for for the the final final model. model The . The dashed dashed arrows arrows represent represent the the independent
direct independent effects of direct predictors effects on of individual predictors items. on individual Only significant items. paths Only significant (p

A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
The interpretation of the regression path is that, for a given thoughts factor value,
Finnish children are more worried about what their parents would say if they fail
in the test. The modification indices further indicated that three items with similar
content should have correlated residuals. Adding these correlations improved the
model substantially, χ²(144, N=172) = 209.528, p < .001, CFI = .95, TLI = .92, RM-
SEA = .05, Δχ 2 (2) = 21.440, p < .001. In conclusion, despite the minor bias detected
in three items, the necessary condition for meaningful group comparison – partial
measurement invariance – was clearly achieved.
The direct effect of nationality on the latent factors showed no significant differences
between the Finnish and Swedish children in the three domains of test anxiety.
The direct effects of gender on the latent factors showed a significant mean difference
between boys and girls in the latent variable autonomic reactions (Figure 2). The girls
reported stronger autonomic reactions than the boys. No gender differences were
identified in the thoughts and off-task behaviours factors. The parameter estimates
are summarised in Table 2, and an illustration of the final model is given in Figure 2.
Discussion and Conclusion
This cross-national study was conducted to determine whether the dimensionality
of the CTAS was valid for groups of pupils in Sweden and Finland, if there were any
differences in test anxiety between Swedish and Finnish pupils, and whether these
differences are ‘real’ differences or a result of differential item functioning.
The present study lends support to the three-factor model of test anxiety proposed
by Wren and Benson (2004). However, the original scale had to be heavily modified
to achieve good construct validity. This was expected because the model fit indices
from the original study indicated that improvements should be made to the CTAS. The
questions that were discarded did not differentiate pupils well enough, as reflected
in the skewed distributions in these items. Many indicators had cross-loadings to
secondary factors, which could lead to biased results when using traditional CFA that
relies on the assumption that each indicator loads on only one factor. We therefore
utilised exploratory structural equation modelling that counteracts this problem. The
resulting model had a good model fit, which shows that the theoretical three-factor
model describes the data well. Partial measurement invariance across nationality
and gender was clearly achieved, which means that the CTAS accurately measures
the latent constructs of thoughts, autonomic reactions and off-task behaviours in
both Finnish and Swedish boys and girls. The only item to function differently between
the boys and girls was “I look around the room”; girls reported higher values
on this individual item on the same latent level of off-task behaviours as boys. This
might be due to girls’ tendency to seek support from their peers. Peers’ support may
partly buffer them from emotional distress such as worrying and rumination (Rose &
Rudolph, 2006) and help them to cope with stressful situations (Day & Livingstone,
2003). Girls, more than boys of the same age, seem more concerned for others and
625

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
relate their own feelings more to those of others (cf. Wehrens et al., 2010). In general,
social support may aid our sense of control and dampen arousal (Fuhrer & Stanseld,
2002); but girls seem to have a greater need than boys for the teacher’s acknowledgement
and harbouring of feelings (Nie & Lau, 2009) and support of most types from
classmates (Demary & Malecki, 2002).
The responses to two items relating to worries about the test going badly indicated
the existence of differences between the two nations. Assuming that the “thoughts”
latent construct is the same in both nations, Swedish pupils experienced more worry
Table 2
Table 2.
Parameter estimates for the final model
Parameter estimates for the final model
Standardised loadings
Item T AR OTB Intercept
Residual
variance
R-
Squared
M
SD
2 -.04 .64 .03 1.31 .62 .38 1.79 .99
3 -.01 .04 .63 1.36 .56 .45 2.01 .89
4 .09 .64 .04 1.45 .52 .48 1.90 .98
5 .77 .01 .05 2.02 .39 .61 1.87 1.01
6 .45 .03 .01 2.16 .78 .22 1.88 .89
7 .14 -.02 .50 2.16 .72 .29 1.45 .75
9 .53 .48 -.14 1.52 .20 .80 1.86 1.00
11 .40 .52 .01 1.74 .32 .68 2.01 .97
12 .04 .10 .42 2.28 .80 .20 2.35 1.07
13 .20 .39 .04 1.71 .71 .29 2.19 1.12
15 .23 .24 -.05 2.12 .83 .17 2.33 1.02
18 -.05 .05 .57 2.18 .68 .32 1.65 .82
19 .93 -.22 .02 2.16 .33 .67 1.62 .89
20 -.01 .40 .01 1.65 .84 .16 1.62 .82
21 .41 .36 -.02 1.77 .52 .48 1.93 .97
22 .09 -.07 .42 2.20 .81 .19 2.06 1.04
24 .67 .17 .01 1.30 .39 .61 1.73 .92
27 .78 -.01 -.04 2.04 .41 .59 1.59 .83
29 .57 .08 -.07 2.32 .56 .44 1.70 .94
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A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
about what would happen if they failed a test, whereas Finnish pupils worried more
about what their parents would say if they failed. Swedish pupils in general have few
tests in compulsory education (e.g. OECD, 2005), and this was also the case with the
present sample. National testing has only been recently introduced for grade 3 pupils
in Sweden, and so the Swedish group may have been uncertain as to the meaning and
consequents of their performance at the national tests (cf. Tholin, 2003). In terms
of the influence of the parents, the Finnish parental corps and general culture is very
positive towards education. Parents generally support the teachers’ work and play a
natural role in the school system (Uljens, 2004; Sahlberg, 2007; Kupianen et al., 2009;
Chung, 2010).This high degree of engagement could possibly cause some Finnish
pupils to experience excessive pressure, which might negatively affect test-anxious
pupils (cf. Peleg-Popko et al., 2003). An overview of school linked experiences in
Finland and Sweden suggests that Finnish pupils possible differ from their Swedish
counterparts in a number of ‘like of school’ aspects relating to well-being, interest,
satisfaction, fun etc., with the Swedes having more positive school experiences than
the Finns (Hämäläinen, 2006; Health Behaviour in School-aged Children – HBSC,
2008; Kupiainen et al., 2009; Chung, 2010; Statistiska Central Byrån – SCB, 2010).
However, the picture is not unequivocal (United Nations Children’s Fund – Unicef,
2007), and should be interpreted with care.
In our study, being socialised in different testing systems seems not to affect levels
of test anxiety. One explanation for this is that the sample is relatively young and has
not yet acquired the learning of test anxiety (cf. Lowe & Lee, 2008; Mertler, 2009). On
the other hand, since test anxiety is a learnt symptom and Finland conducts informal
tests on a regular basis in teaching from a young age, the Finnish pupils possibly could
have reported higher levels of test anxiety but the introduction of national tests in
Swedish primary school might have compensated for that. Increased frequency and
importance of testing are argued to result in greater test anxiety in children (Putwain,
2008). Another explanation is that the Finnish pupils might have become accustomed
to tests, developing a resistance to anxiety (Bodas et al., 2008). In the same vein, this
was the first time the Swedish sample had been exposed to testing. Increased and
lasting exposure to standardised testing is argued to increase the levels of test anxiety
(Casbarro, 2005). The National Board of Education in Sweden specifically also emphasised
that the new national examinations for grade 3 should minimise the stress
associated with the testing and that the examinations should be integrated naturally
into teaching, avoiding over-preparation and focusing on effort and attainment to
help pupils become more confident in their own performance (cf. Connor, 2003). In
sum, test anxiety is likely not an extended problem in either classroom.
Girls exhibited higher levels of test anxiety as judged by autonomic reactions but no
gender differences were identified in terms of thoughts and off-task behaviours. This
was surprising because preliminary analyses with manifest variables indicated relatively
large differences in the thoughts subtest, suggesting that girls would experience higher
627

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
levels of test anxiety in this domain. These results show the importance of testing for
measurement invariance and using latent constructs that are free of measurement
error when making group comparisons. It is possible that the results of other studies,
in which females were overrepresented in age groups reporting higher scores on
various test anxiety scales, may have been misinterpreted. In younger age groups,
however, emotions have been claimed to be the dominant experience of test anxiety
rather than worrisome thoughts (Wigfield & Eccles, 1989). Along the same lines, girls
tend to express their emotions in different situations to a higher extent compared
to boys (cf. Leppänen & Hietanen, 2001; Gurian & Stevens, 2010). In summary, this
might explain the differences in gender and autonomic reactions in present study.
Our study has four methodological limitations. Firstly, the samples are not representative
for the respective countries and so these results cannot be uncritically
generalised to the whole populations of Sweden or Finland. Although the present
study needs to be replicated on a larger, representative sample, it does not demonstrate
any differences in reported test anxiety among Finnish and Swedish pupils,
or among girls and boys, except in the subscale autonomic reactions where girls reported
stronger values than boys. Secondly, the structural validity of the CTAS was
not that high in the original validation study (low model fit indices) and this was also
the case in the present investigation when we did preliminary analyses with the data.
Therefore, we undertook a thorough data screening and consequently discarded 11
items to obtain a better measure of test anxiety in children. The revised 19 item test
met the criteria of acceptable fit and was therefore used in our main analyses. Some
items had very strong secondary loadings, which could indicate poor wording of the
items. Therefore, in future studies these items might need to be rewritten in order to
better capture the constructs to be measured. Thirdly, our sample size did not allow
us to conduct a multigroup analysis, which in some respects is superior to MIMIC
modelling; specifically, it can be used test for all aspects of measurement invariance
as opposed to only two in MIMIC models. Fourthly, one of the schools had a lower
parental educational background than two other schools. However, parental educational
background and the CTAS total score were unrelated and, in general, it is also
unclear how socio-economic background contributes to different levels of reported
test anxiety (cf. Putwain, 2007).
Notwithstanding these reservations, our results show that the CTAS instrument
(revised version) seems to be a valid test anxiety scale for groups of Swedish and
Finnish children and that there seem to be no differences between the levels reported
in the two nations. The validity of the revised scale should, however, be examined in
future studies, preferably with a more representative sample. The only subtopics for
which girls scored more highly than boys were those pertaining to autonomic reactions.
Even though the levels of test anxiety in the present study are low, an implication
of this study for primary education in both countries is that educators could benefit
from knowledge of the likely anticipated effects of test anxiety and its different sub-
628

A cross-national comparison of test anxiety in Swedish and Finnish grade 3 pupils
components. This might prepare them and help them to deal more adequately with
pupils’ facets of test anxiety. Test anxiety is believed to reach higher levels among
elderly students (e.g. McDonald, 2001; Lowe & Lee, 2008) and pupils become ‘habitualised’
to tests (Pekrun et al., 2007), and educators need to take this into account.
Our results also hold some implications for future studies. Relatively large mean
differences were observed between the Scandinavian groups examined in this work
and the American children studied by Wren and Bensons (2004). These unexpected
results indicate a need for cross-cultural studies with the CTAS to determine whether
they reflect real differences or are artefactual, perhaps as a result of differential item
functioning. It would also be interesting to extend these studies to countries with a
very different cultural background, and to follow pupils through compulsory education
to see how stable this phenomenon is over time and evaluate the longitudinal
measurement invariance of the CTAS. Considering test anxiety to be a learnt experience
and as likely being influenced by several factors during development, the present
study has shown that, for the age of 9–10 years and for girls and boys situated
in two different educational settings, the reported test anxiety is the same. However,
to understand developmental changes in anxiety more studies, especially follow-up
ones, are recommended.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of Professor Douglas G.
Wren from the Department of Research, Evaluation and Assessment, Virginia, for his
kind assistance in providing access to the CTAS. We also thank the two anonymous
reviewers for their valuable comments on this paper.
Mikaela Nyroos is associate professor in education at Umeå University. Currently, her main research
focus is a project focusing on cognitive implications (including working memory and test anxiety)
for mathematical learning in young pupils. The project also addresses a cross-cultural perspective,
i.e. Sweden, Finland and China.
Johan Korhonen is a doctoral student in special education at Åbo Akademi University. His main
research interest is learning difficulties in adolescent students. He is a university teacher and teaches
mainly courses in mathematics learning difficulties and research methods.
Karin Linnanmäki is associative professor in special education at Åbo Akademi University. Her
research interests are learning difficulties, self-concept, and marginalisation. She has participated
in research projects mainly on learning and learning difficulties in mathematics in relation to various
psychological and social factors.
Camilla Svens-Liavåg is a doctoral student in special education at Åbo Akademi University. Her
research interest lies in the field of gifted children and assessment. She is a special needs teacher
in primary schools.
629

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
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Appendix A. Factor loadings for the exploratory factor
analyses Appendix A. with Factor a 3-factor loadings for structure the exploratory factor analyses with a 3-
factor structure
Items (30 items) Thoughts Autonomic
reactions
Off-task
behaviour
1. I wonder if I will pass. .32 .19 -.16
2. My heart beats fast. .42 .61 -.03
3. I look around the room. .16 -.01 .38
4. I feel nervous. .55 .49 .01
5. I think I am going to get a bad grade. .77 .17 .21
6. It is hard for me to remember the
.49 .17 .15
answers.
7. I play with my pencil. .20 -.09 .51
8. My face feels hot. .25 .52 .21
9. I worry about failing. .83 .52 -.04
10. My belly feels funny. .46 .60 .14
11. I worry about doing something
.76 .47 .02
wrong.
12. I check the time. .18 .01 .39
13. I think about what my grade will be. .49 .39 .04
14. I find it hard to sit still. .22 .30 .42
15. I wonder if my answers are right. .38 .12 -.02
16. I think that I should have studied
.37 .07 .21
more.
17. My head hurts. .27 .30 .24
18. I look at other people. .07 -.04 .47
19. I think most of my answers are
.76 .03 .27
wrong.
20. I feel warm. .27 .59 .13
21. I worry about how hard the test is. .67 .43 .07
22. I try to finish up fast. .09 -.03 .44
23. My hand shakes. .41 .47 .14
24. I think about what will happen if I
.76 .36 .23
fail.
25. I have to go to the bathroom. .09 .04 .24
26. I tap my feet. .20 .21 .30
27. I think about how poorly I am doing. .76 .23 .17
28. I feel scared. .49 .47 .05
29. I worry about what my parents will .63 .23 .13
say.
30. I stare. .40 -.05 .49
635

Mikaela Nyroos, Johan Korhonen, Karin Linnanmäki & Camilla Svens-Liavåg
Appendix A. Factor loadings for the exploratory factor
analyses with a 3-factor structure
Items (19 items) Thoughts Autonomic
Reactions
Off-Task
Behaviours
2. My heart beats fast. .36 .62 .01
3. I look around the room. .15 .14 .54
4. I feel nervous. .47 .69 .05
5. I think I am going to get a bad grade. .78 .47 .13
6. It is hard for me to remember the
.47 .31 .05
answers.
7. I play with my pencil. .21 .07 .51
9. I worry about failing. .79 .79 -.09
11. I worry about doing something
.72 .76 .04
wrong.
12. I check the time. .16 .13 .45
13. I think about what my grade will be. .45 .52 .06
15. I wonder if my answers are right. .35 .34 .05
18. I look at other people. .06 .02 .60
19. I think most of my answers are
.81 .33 .12
wrong.
20. I feel warm. .24 .41 -.02
21. I worry about how hard the test is. .63 .61 .03
22. I try to finish up fast. .11 .01 .39
24. I think about what will happen if I
.74 .57 .10
fail.
27. I think about how poorly I am doing. .76 .47 .04
29. I worry about what my parents will
say.
.62 .43 .02
636

Acknowledgement
The Editors and the Board wish to gratefully acknowledge all those listed below who
have generously given of their time to referee papers submitted to Education Inquiry
during 2011 and 2012.
Agneta Hult, Umeå University, Sweden
Agneta Linné, Örebro University, Sweden
Alison Hudson, University of Dundee, Scotland
Anders Marner, Umeå University, Sweden
Andre´Elias Mazawi, University of British
Columbia, Canada
Anna Larsson, Umeå University, Sweden
Anna Nordenstam, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden
Anna Triandafyllidou, European University
Institute, Italy
Anna Tsatsaroni, University of Patra, Greece
Anna-Lena Östern, Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Norway
Ann-Catrine Eriksson, Umeå University, Sweden
Anne Palmér, Uppsala University, Sweden
Annette Braun, City University London, UK
Annette Sandberg, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Ansgar Richter, EBS Business School, Germany
Antigoni Sarakinioti, University of Patra, Greece
Anton Franks, University of London, UK
Atle Krogstad, Queen Maud University College,
Norway
Barbro Hagberg Persson, Uppsala University,
Sweden
Bengt-Göran Martinsson, Linköping University,
Sweden
Berit Lundgren, Umeå University, Sweden
Berner Lindstrom, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden
Bert Jonsson, Umeå University, Sweden
Bert van Oers, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the
Netherlands
Björn Åstrand, Umeå University, Sweden
Brian Stecher, RAND Corporation, USA
Carin Jonsson, Umeå University, Sweden
Carlo Raffo, Manchester University, UK
Catherine de Wenden, CERI Science-Po, France
Charlotte Palludan, Aarhus University, Denmark
Christian Lundahl, Stockholm University; Sweden
Christina Svens, Umeå University, Sweden
Christina Wikström, Umeå University, Sweden
Daniel Coste, École normale supérieure Lettres
et sciences humaines, France
Daniel Koretz, Harvard Graduate School of
Education, USA
David Gillborn, University of London, UK
David Hamilton, Umeå University, Sweden
David Little, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
David Tandberg, Florida State University, USA
Deborah Harcourt, Australian Catholic University,
Australia
Eddie Denessen, Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands.
Eleni Andreou, University of Thessaly, Greece
Eli Ottesen, University of Oslo, Norway
Elisabeth Frank, Linneaus University, Sweden
Elizabeth Peterson, University of Auckland, New
Zealand
Ellen Beate Sandseter, Queen Maud University
College, Norway
Esko Mäkelä, Umeå University, Sweden
Eva Forsberg, Uppsala University, Sweden
Eva Gannerud, University of Gothenburg,
Sweden
Eva Lindgren, Umeå University, Sweden
Evert Vedung, Uppsala University, Sweden
Gaby Weiner, University of Sussex, UK
Geert Driessen, Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands
Godfrey Baldacchino, University of Prince
Edward Island, Canada
Gordon Joughin, University of Queensland,
Australia
Gordon Stobart, University of London, UK
Gun-Marie Frånberg, Umeå University, Sweden
Göran Sonesson, Lund University, Sweden
Hanna Eklöf, Umeå University, Sweden
637

Hans Örtegren, Umeå University, Sweden
Harry Torrance, Manchester Metropolitan
University, UK
Herbert Altrichter, Johannes Kepler University,
Austria
Hildegunn Otnes, Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Norway
Inge Johansson, Stockholm University, Sweden
Inge Weber Newth, London Metropolitan
University, UK
Isa Jahnke, Umeå University, Sweden
J. Marshall Mangan, University of Western.
Ontario, Canada
Jane Perryman, University of London, UK
Janet Enever, Umeå University, Sweden
Jennifer Greene, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, USA
Johanna Rosenqvist, Linnaeus University,
Sweden
Julie Kate Seirlis, University of Wilfrid Laurier,
Canada
Kajsa Borg, Umeå University, Sweden
Kalervo Gulson, University of South Wales,
Australia
Kenneth Ekström, Umeå University, Sweden
Kerstin Norlander, Umeå University, Sweden
Kim Rasmussen, Roskilde University, Sweden
Kirk Sullivan, Umeå University, Sweden
Koen Lombaerts, Vrije Universiteit, Belgium
Laura Hamilton, RAND Corporation, USA
Liisa Postareff, University of Helsinki, Finland
Lisbeth Lundahl, Umeå University, Sweden
Lyn Yates, University of Melbourne, Australia
Magdalena Szpotowicz, University of Warsaw,
Poland
Manal Hamzeh, New Mexico State University,
USA
Manfred Hintermair, University of Heidelberg,
Germany
Mari Haneda, Florida State University, USA
Maria Nordstrom, Stockholm University, Sweden
Martin Lawn, University of Edinburgh, UK
Mary Jane Kehily, Open University, UK
Maureen Killeavy, University College Dublin,
Ireland
Mérove Gijsberts, Utrecht University, the
Netherlands
Mia Porko-Hudd, Åbo Akademi University,
Finland
Michael Buzzelli, University of Western Ontario,
Canada
Miriam David, University of London, UK
Monica Rosén, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Monika Vinterek, Umeå University, Sweden
Muthanna Samar, Kingston University, UK
Nihad Bunar, Stockholm University, Sweden
Ola Lindberg, Mid-Sweden University, Sweden
Palle Rasmussen, Aalborg University, Denmark
Panayoitis Antoniou, University of Cambridge, UK
Patrik Hansson, Umeå University, Sweden
Patrik Mehrens, Uppsala University, Sweden
Paulette Luff, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Päivi Granö, University of Lapland, Finland
Rita Hvistendahl, University of Oslo, Norway
Robert Linn, University of Colorado at Boulder,
USA
Rose Vukovic, New York University, USA
Rosie Flewitt, Open University, UK
Rusanen Sinikka, University of Helsinki, Finland
Sally Tomlinson, University of Oxford, UK
Spyros Themelis, Middlesex University, UK
Svein Lie, University of Oslo, Norway
Sven Persson, Malmö University, Sweden
Søren Kjørup, Roskilde University, Denmark
Tania N Thomas-Presswood, Gallaudet University,
Washington DC, US
Tehmina N. Basit, Staffordshire University, UK
Terri Kim, University of Brunel, UK
Tomas Englund, Örebro University, Sweden
Tony Gallagher, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK
Ulf Fredriksson, Stockholm University, Sweden
Ulla Lind, University College of Arts, Crafts and
Design, Sweden
Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, Rutgers University,
USA
Øystein Gilje, University of Olso, Norway
638