Växelspel med förhinder: Skärningspunkter i verksamhetsförlagd svensklärarutbildning

Individual higher educational institutions have a mandate to interpret the task of teacher training, expressed in the Higher Education Act and the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education’s regulations, and to use these as the basis for composing programme and course syllabi. Furthermore, higher educational institutions have responsibility for conducting the training programmes, as well as for ensuring that the goals have been attained, through supervision and assessment. This involves, for example, taking responsibility for examinations in all parts of the programmes, despite one part, the work placements, being conducted in the school setting and thus, for the most part, outside of the physical supervisory range of the higher educational institutions. This means that the organisational, legislative, qualitative and practical conditions that apply to work placements are different from those which apply to university-based education.

In the studies and evaluations which have taken place, the connections to subject are limited. There is therefore justification for a study that illuminates, problematises and discusses the professional specialisation segment of the teacher training programme for Swedish teachers. In this thesis, Växelspel med förhinder. Skärningspunkter i verksamhetsförlagd svensklärarutbildning, [An Imperfect Exchange: Points of divergence in teacher training programmes for Swedish teachers] the primary goal is to improve our knowledge of how work placements are construed in the policy and management documents of specialisation programmes for Swedish, as well as in the statements of a number of teacher educators and student teachers of Swedish.

How the higher educational institutions express themselves on the question of work placements and the different ways there are of organising and regulating work placements is investigated and then related to how work placements are considered in relation to university-based education and to schools. The study also shows how the content and assessment of work placements may be connected to professional discourses. By highlighting the connection and dominant relationship between discursive expression for the teaching profession, the importance of various dimensions of knowledge to the development of professional identity may be revealed.