Lärardrömmar: om makt, mångfald och konstruktioner av lärarsubjekt

Teacher Dreams: Power, Diversity and the Making of Teacher Subjects

Swedish teacher education was reformed at a national level in 2001. This thesis takes as its point of departure one of the many sites where new teachers are educated in Sweden, the Teacher Training Programme at Göteborg University. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse how norms for new teachers are sustained within teacher training, and what teacher subjectivities emerge from them. The main theoretical influences are poststructuralist discourse theory and postcolonialism. Important concepts used in the thesis are power, normalisation, and decentered subjects. A discourse analytical approach is used to analyse the ethnographic material, interviews, policy and regulation documents, and media material forming the empirical base of the study. Field work was conducted for three semesters in the Teacher Training Programme between the years 2002-2005. The courses attended were all part of the common field of education (AUO), a novelty of the reformed education where student teachers aiming for different age groups, take courses together. Individual and group interviews were made with eleven student teachers. Some shorter interviews with teacher educators and organisers of courses were also conducted. Four different regulating norms about new teachers are interrogated in the thesis. These are norms about: the personal teacher, the flexible and independent teacher, the teacher as an individual, and finally the norm about the diverse teacher.

The interrogation of these norms show that there exists a constant power struggle within the Teacher Training Programme. The norms are not hegemonic, but they nevertheless set a standard through which teacher subjectivities emerge. The main argument in the thesis is that the norms are formulated through a discourse of use-value, which demands of new teachers that they are personal, flexible, independent and diverse in a manner that coincides with the logic of use-value. As a consequence, important questions of power were rarely addressed, remaining norms of swedishness, heterosexuality, and middle-class values unchallenged. This meant that a privileged subject position was construed, suited for those new teachers who pass as Swedish, heterosexual and middle-class.