Stefan Lund

Choice paths in the Swedish upper secondary education – a critical discourse analysis of recent reforms

Decentralisation policy in Sweden emphasises school capitation allowance, the local upper secondary schools’ decision‐making and pupils’ choices in contrast to previous bureaucratic governing. The aim of this article is to discuss how pupils’ educational choice paths are a part of the different kinds of integration and differentiation processes within upper secondary education. By doing so, the intention is to make a theoretical contribution to the ongoing discussion in this research field. In the light of Habermas’s theory of communicative action combined with Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, educational choice paths have been studied as a process within three educational practices in a local quasi‐market in Sweden: (1) choice of upper secondary school, (2) choice of upper secondary programme, and (3) choice of courses and subjects within a programme. Some of the results demonstrate that pupils’ choice paths can be vocation‐oriented, career‐oriented and consumption‐oriented. It is argued that these different types of choice paths are related to a market discourse. Other results demonstrate that pupils’ group‐oriented, interest‐oriented and tradition‐oriented choice paths are built upon an active citizenship discourse, which is about creating meaning in terms of seeking knowledge and establishing social relations in upper secondary education. The analysis of these two paramount discourses indicates that pupils’ integration and differentiation processes are ambiguous.

Socio-symbolic homologies : Exploring Paul Willis’ theory of cultural forms

Thirty years have passed since Paul Willis formulated a theory of cultural forms in the appendix to his seminal work Profane Culture. In this article we are driven by the conviction that Willis’ theory is a forgotten treasure trove that needs to be recovered, challenged and developed. The argument is guided by three aims. First, we provide a construction of the theory’s main content. Second, we search for possibilities of enlarging the content and scope of his theory. Third, we reconstruct one of the basic underlying arguments of Willis’ theory, that cultural items in themselves carry a given meaning in relation to social groups. In so doing we partly reconstruct Willis’ understanding of ‘objective’ possibilities as something essentially given in time and space. We utilize the example of the car make Cadillac to demonstrate that cultural items also attract because they are already occupied by socioculturally constructed systems of meaning.

School choice, Ethnic Divisions and Symbolic Boundaries

This book begins with a critique of traditional educational research on how class and ethnicity interact with school choice. It takes a new starting point of analysis in concepts of structural and symbolic boundaries, social belonging and emotions. These concepts are introduced to develop an enriched theoretical understanding of school choices and how they are guided and restricted. It sets out to offer a complementary explanation for the segregation found between immigrants and native students in the education systems of many of todays economically rich and migration-intensive societies. The empirical focus is on teachers and students who participate in the most prestigious academic upper secondary school program in Sweden, the Natural Science program. This provides an interesting contrast to analyses that tend to focus downward on programs that normally recruit from economically underprivileged classes and social segments. Sweden is taken as an example, but the analyses go beyond single state boundaries.

Pupils in upper secondary school sports: choices based on what?

ABSTRACT In the fields of both education and sport, the possession of capital and habitus influences an individual’s lifestyles and choices, which in turn affects the social selection within these fields. In this article, we will study the Swedish system of school sports as an overlap between the fields of education and sport, and thus viewed as a double dominated field. From a cultural sociological perspective, the purpose of this article is to analyse and explain how the organisational conditions and pupils’ social characteristics interact with upper secondary pupils’ choices of different school sports programmes in Sweden. Based on registry data on secondary school sports pupils, the results show that the supply of school sports requires specific forms of social dispositions that have an impact on which categories of pupils choose to participate. Among the students participating in school sports, there is a higher proportion of pupils who: are of Swedish origin (p < 0.05), are boys (p < 0.05), attend academic study programmes (p < 0.05), and have parents with high educational capital (p < 0.05). Furthermore, based on 677 pupils’ questionnaire responses, collected through two studies on school sports in Sweden, the results show that the choice between different types of school sports programmes is related to the intersection between pupils’ sex and possession of educational and sporting capital. One important conclusion is that the overlap between the fields of education and sports exacerbates gender and class biases, and that the supply of school sports in Sweden appeals to a narrow or rather specific taste for sport and education, particularly favouring boys with highly educated parents and an interest in team sports.

School choice and the Natural Science Program

In Chapter 3, written together with Mimmi Barmark, we try to estimate the extent to which students’ choices are guided and restricted by structural and symbolic boundaries, in order to point out the possible reasons for school segregation between the different Natural Science schools. The analysis is divided into seven steps and based primarily not only on survey data, but also on interviews with students with high enough grades to be accepted to what we call “high-threshold” schools. Our results show that it is not primarily previous school achievement that guides and restricts students’ school choices; students’ feelings of belonging are at least as important. Feelings of belonging are particularly important for native-born Swedish students who choose a high-threshold school, which leads us to the interpretation that it is these members of this student group who are the significant agents of self-segregation.

Negotiating Academic Behavior and Social Manners

In the fourth chapter I turn my attention to students of immigrant background who have chosen a high-threshold school, City Academy. My interpretations are based upon ethnographic field notes and interviews with teachers and students. This chapter aims to describe not only the reasons behind the school choices of this group of students, but also how students of immigrant background negotiate the school culture of City Academy and maneuver themselves socially and academically within an elite school setting defined by whiteness, social prestige, and high grades. This chapter therefore extends previous analyses of how symbolic boundaries guide and restrict students’ school choices through the internal logic of City Academy’s we-ness, and how this educational community determines what kind of work is valued and what qualities students are expected to have.