Contributing to the discussion of different groups’ attitudes towards protest movements, this essay aims to examine and describe Swedish teachers’ attitudes towards students’ participation in protest movements during the school day. The topic is relevant since teachers can play a significant role in the political socialisation of the citizens, decision makers and legislators of tomorrow. It is nevertheless a neglected topic; little research has been done on teachers’ attitudes towards protest movements, and even less so on teachers’ attitudes towards students leaving the classroom in order to participate in them. Attitudes towards student participation in the protest movement Fridays for Future are examined and the selection of respondents is based on the least-likely logic; the respondents are teachers that are certified to teach the subject civics in the non-compulsory Swedish school form gymnasium (upper secondary school). The method used to collect data is semi-structured interviews and the framework of analysis is built on models developed in the research fields of didactics and political science. The results show a variety of attitudes among teachers, defined as how teachers value student participation in protest movements during the school day and to what extent teachers accept student participation in protest movements during the school day. No firm conclusions can be drawn from this study, but the results show that all of the respondents value and accept student participation in the protests organised by Fridays for Future during the school day to some extent, but that none of the respondents has an attitude towards the phenomenon that is undividedly positive.

If democratic society is to avert the dire straits that may come from decreasing levels of political participation and civic engagement, all potential explanatory factors must be explored. The purpose of this paper is to i) elucidate how the modeling and self-efficacy mechanisms of social learning theory affect individuals’ decisions to participate politically or not, and ii) assess the applicability of the relatively unutilized social learning theory in studies on political socialization and participation, respectively. By conducting a study composed of life history interviews, the paper aims to contribute to the research field by providing new explanations on how and why participatory behavior occurs in individuals, potentially filling a research gap by using and developing the previously unutilized social learning theory. The study finds that the proposed social learning theory mechanisms appear to have some explanatory power in the context of individuals’ political participation and asserts that social learning theory may very well be applicable in similar future studies as a complement to other explanatory factors.