Rum, frirum och moral : En studie av skolgeografins innehållsval

• Main Author: Molin, Lena
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Kulturgeografiska institutionen 2006
• Subjects: Geography; didactics; curriculum space; morality; choice of content; curriculum theory; selective traditions; national curriculum; syllabus; fundamental values; democracy; citizenship education; upper secondary school; Geografi; Educational Sciences; Utbildningsvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-6884; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:91-506-1876-8

This thesis, Space, Curriculum Space and Morality, focuses on the two roles of the school, i.e. developing identities and transmitting knowledge. The latest curriculum reform commissions the teachers to transform the fundamental values of the curriculum to the separate subjects. The principal object of the school subjects is to contribute to the implementation of the curriculum goals, namely to educate and promote democratic citizens. Since the new course syllabi lack guidelines about subject content and method, the intention of this work it is to analyse in what way the teachers’ fill this curriculum space, which subject content the teachers choose in order to connect the curriculum goals to the course syllabi goals and, to the practical teaching of geography as a school subject. The understanding of the teachers’ choice of subject content is the overall aim of this thesis. The thesis can be placed within a curriculum theory tradition that regards education and its content as situated in a field of tension ultimately determined by social and political forces engaged in struggle. Within this tradition, an approach has been developed which examines the educational content of the school subjects as contingent. A curriculum historical analysis – supplemented by a text analysis of textbooks, a number of observations (81) of geography lessons in upper secondary school and the following qualitative interviews with geography teachers – shows that the teachers’ choice of content can be understood and explained by the strong selective traditions which have formed within the subject during 150 years. These selective traditions together form a school subject discourse which implies that the moral dimension is lost as the subject content is characterized by an essentialistic approach. The consequences of the findings can be discussed in relation to what content is excluded in the school geography education. Some examples are a gender perspective, issues regarding equality, ethnicity, solidarity, social justice and sustainable development. The issues that the school geography excludes contain ethical and moral considerations. If these issues were presented, they would relate to the fundamental values and the promotion of democracy, issues given strong prominence in the curriculum.