What happened to the glowing activism in the Swedish School Rebellion on Facebook?

• This presentation focus on Swedish teacher’s School rebellion on Facebook, a group whose conversations early in the spring of 2021 were filled with enthusiasm and glowing activism. In about 650 post every month, teachers vividly discussed how to improve the Swedish school and the working conditions for teachers. However, in the following year there was a sharp decrease in the number and type of posts in the group. To understand the changes of the group discussions, the aim of this paper is to study what content is given presence in the posts and to analyse to what extent this is deliberated on between the teachers.Our theoretical perspective is inspired from research on deliberative communication, where analyses of arguments, stances and concretizations are made (Englund, 2006).  We are particularly interested in how different perspectives in the posts and comments are received and if there is space for tolerance and respect for different viewpoints. We have followed the activities (posts, comments and likes) in the rebellion group from March 2021 and intensively for ten weeks, then occasionally until March 2022. As the posts rapidly decreased, we searched among the about 100 posts made by the administrators, from which we selected ten for further analyses. Repeatedly during the year, the administrators tried to initiate and stimulate discussions, by asking for advice on how the group should act, what focus the members wanted the group to have or by challenging the members to react on or think about specific issues. Thereby, we direct a specific focus at the administrators’ roles to create a conversation climate that support the group’s ambitions.We found that the administrators, besides asking the teachers to present topics of interest, to initiate several different issues to discuss in the group. When we analysed the conversations in the light of the concept of deliberation, we found in some posts no deliberative approach at all, in other posts a pre-deliberative approach and in some posts even a counter-deliberative approach to appear. From these findings, we discuss the administrators’ roles in keeping the spirit and glowing activism alive. The specific Facebook forum for these conversations is discussed in terms of online deliberation and specific limitations and possibilities. When it concerns the question of content, it is naturally so that the content is important for the discussion to be liked and commented on by the teachers in the group. However when the conversation does not have a clear agenda, when discussions are not followed up by the administrators, who started the thread - or even when the admin takes over and hijacks the discussion - the interest becomes less among the members and the glowing activism seems to fade out. The topic is of high relevance to the Nordic educational research as similar online forum show up in all Nordic countries, discussing issues of relevance for schools’ and teachers’ work. 

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Education

Pedagogik

Pedagogiskt arbete

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)