BARA FÖR SPELANDETS SKULL? En diskursanalytisk studie över ensemblelärares positionering och funktion på gymnasieskolans estetiska program

Abstract

This paper examines how ensemble teachers, in the Swedish upper secondary school, talk about their didactical positions and functions in the classroom, and how these conversations construct and authorize the teachers’ discursive room for manoeuvre. The study takes a social constructional perspective as its starting point, and assumes that every day interaction in a social context, produce a system of truths which determines what is possible or impossible to say or do.

The empirical foundation of the study is three focus group discussions with ensemble teachers at different upper secondary schools. The produced data has been analysed through a discourse analytical approach, with one perspective focusing how rhetorical strategies are used to legitimize different didactical positions and functions in the ensemble room, and another perspective focusing on identifying local discourses which are being constructed and constituted throughout the focus group discussions, and how these discourses affect the teachers’ didactical abilities in the ensemble room.

The result shows that ensemble teachers didactical positioning in many ways can be legitimized by interpretive repertoires with other interests than to follow the national curriculum or other governing school regulations. Four discourses are identified in the result: the school discourse, the feelgood discourse, the reality discourse and, as a subordinate discourse to the latter, the concert discourse. These discourses are to be regarded as small, or local, discourses which manifest themselves in different degrees and with variations in the three discussion groups.