Litteratur och livskunskap. Modersmålslärarens berättelse om undervisningen i årskurs 7-9

The purpose of the dissertation is to contribute to the development of knowledge regarding how mother tongue teachers’ think about the potential that literature has in students’ development of life management skills. The research questions encircle the three domains that one can assume mother tongue teachers teaching grades 7–9 relate themselves to, that is literature, life management and the core curriculum: 1. How do mother tongue teachers experience working with literature during instruction? 2. What does life management mean to teachers? 3. What relationship do mother tongue teachers have to the core curriculum? The three domains encircled in the dissertation’s chapter on theory return as main themes in the results. The empirical material consists of nineteen interviews with mother tongue teachers in Swedish-language schools in Finland, and the interviews are analyzed using a multimethodical principle. Discourse analysis is used to highlight teacher approaches to relating to the curriculum. Phenomenological meaning concentration is used to analyze the narratives of literature instruction. Thematic narrative analysis is used to categorize teachers’ perceptions of life management. These analysis methods result in varying ways of reporting the results: in constructed narratives, categories and a fictional narrative. The results show that mother tongue teachers are polyparadigmatic and multipolar, which means that they combine strategies and reasons from different paradigms and contextual poles. Teachers utilize the room for decision-making that the core curriculum allows them, and they connect literature to various different knowledge domains. They connect life management to the various subdomains within mother tongue instruction. The teachers’ occasionally problematic perceptions of the core curriculum can be attributed to the fact that the curriculum is so demanding and somewhat contradictory. For mother tongue teachers in Swedish-language schools in Finland, however, the core curriculum still constitutes a support. One question that the study did not answer was what one teaches when one works with literature. Imperfections exist in the didactics of literature used, and the core curriculum does not include progression or the development of students’ reading competence. In the dissertation a literary-didactic model, in the form of a staircase, is presented, which could act as an aid in literature instruction.