The aim of this thesis is to explore how different competing discourses inthe historical context of the Swedish education development have qualifiedand disqualified different constructions of national curriculum. How andafter what kind of principles is the curriculum constructed? What qualifywho are going to be recognized as the author and addressee of the curriculum?These key questions of the study are discussed in the first part of thethesis. My point of departure is that the curriculum can be understood as arelation between freedom and control. In an educational system this relationshipreflects the problematic tension between the external demandsfrom an authoritative center and the local need to independently reflectover educational issues. How these concepts are defined by the prevailingsocial discourses affect specific relations and constructions of curricula as asteering tool and a producer of specific teacher identities. In this sense, Iclaim that curriculum is constructed in different ways depending on whichof the didactic questions are emphasized and answered and who is judgedas the legitimate author. Based on this, three models of curriculum constructionare formulated; the content based, the result based and the processbased. These models are subsequently used as an analytical tool to examinethe historical development of Swedish national curricula.The second part of the thesis investigates the Swedish education systemand the production of the national curriculum as a product of rival discourses.The historical investigation begins 1842 when the first state curriculumwas issued and the inquiry concludes in 2008. The findings indicatethat no one single construction has been totally dominant and thatthere has been an on-going discursive struggle between different alternativeand opinions about what teachers must do and be.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:oru-10947 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Morawski, Jan |
| Publisher | Örebro universitet, Akademin för humaniora, utbildning och samhällsvetenskap, Örebro : Örebro universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Örebro Studies in Education, 1404-9570 ; 28 |
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