From Teachers for Education Change

Abstract

This article concerns issues connected to social inclusion and exclusion in Swedish upper secondary education in the late 1990s, after the 1994 curriculum reform. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork that was completed in 2000 and that appropriated participant observation and interview methods in data production. Extensive comments from teachers and headteachers on strategies and ideas about how to work within the context of the reform, with respect particularly to expressed aims of providing an education of good and comparable quality for all students and opening up higher education to groups who were previously excluded from it, figure strongly in the article. The intention was to discover what the people working within schools felt about their working experiences with respect to social inclusion and to understand what stands in the way of the realisation of social inclusion at present. The article indicates that two competing regimes of truth currently operate on what counts as valid teacher work but also that a creative subject position for all education participants is important in projects of inclusion.