Writing for life? : A case study of affordances of writing in four L1 upper secondary classrooms

• During the period of 1994-2011 all programmes in Swedish upper secondary school comprised a set of core subjects with the aim to entail equity on the policy level. However, a division between programmes still prevailed on the school level, particularly in the core subject L1 Swedish. The main purpose of this study has been to explore how the teaching of writing in two academic and two vocational programmes differs, which writing repertoires are developed and how writing is assessed. The study is part of a long-term ethnography of writing in upper secondary school (Andersson Varga, 2014). The data produced during the two-year field study contain field notes from writing lessons, lesson observations and talks with four teachers, as well as recorded and transcribed, semi-structured teacher and student interviews, instructions on writing tasks, student texts and teachers’ responses to student texts. This article focus-ses on the preparation for the National Test, the afforded assignments, the realisations of the student texts and the assessment. The teachers in the four programmes handle the national syllabus in relation to the students, resulting in four different curricula in the classroom. Thus, issues of inequity, disparities in curricula as well as different expectations on students, depending on programme, became obvious. To understand the processes of social reproduction, we use Bernstein’s sociology of education (1996, 2000) and the concept of the pedagogic device and pedagogic identity. However, we also show one example of interruption (Singh, 2013) in one of the four classrooms. Thus, the main results demonstrate how one particular teacher brings about change to a group of working class girls. © 2015 International Association for the Improvement of Mother tongue Education.

Subject headings

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

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

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

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

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

Keyword

horizontal discourse

pedagogic device

pedagogic identity

social reproduction

vertical discourse

Writing social reproduction

Utbildningsvetenskap

Educational science

Pedagogik

Pedagogics

Writing

pedagogic device

pedagogic identity

social reproduction

social interruption

horizontal discourse

vertical discourse

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)