Paper short abstract:

This paper is based in a small project on Swedish upper secondary school teachers’ experiences of working with students’ societal involvement and the challenges and uncertainties this may entail. The material consists of interviews and the analysis starts from a cultural analytical perspective.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to examine issues around how teachers in Swedish upper secondary school work with and handle societal involvement among students in their teaching and classroom practice and the challenges and uncertainties this may entail. The material stems from a small ethnological research project and consists of qualitative, semi-structured interviews with upper secondary school teachers. The theoretical framework starts from the concept of agency and the analysis is based on cultural analytical tools such as perspectivization. The paper furthermore discusses and exemplifies how ethnological approaches may contribute to research on school and education.

The preliminary results show that the interviewed teachers regarded the students’ involvement in societal issues such as the climate crisis, me-too, Black Lives Matter and various topical or local political and societal issues, as a potential didactic resource in several subjects and in several ways. At the same time, they experienced a number of challenges and uncertainties connected with this, regarding for instance giving space for student initiative and still having enough time to cover the curriculum, and the difficulty with managing classroom discussions that could sometimes become quite heated without discouraging student participation and involvement. With the school strikes for the climate, the challenges could also concern uncertainties around how many students would attend school on a particular day, and the dilemma between wanting to encourage societal participation and democratic competence, while acknowledging the problems with students missing too much of their education.