This contribution is based on empirical material from the project Future citizens in pedagogical texts and education policies – Examples from Lebanon, Sweden and Turkey[1], where we have examined how the ‘citizen’ is constructed in relation to place, nation, language, religion, ethnicity and gender in policy documents for schools and pedagogical texts and how the relationship between national and global perspectives are treated in these texts. We have analyzed textbooks and policy documents for social sciences for secondary school, but also interviewed various actors involved in policy processes, that form the basis for different syllabuses. In this contribution we focus mainly on the Swedish sub-study, however contrasted also to the analytical results from the Turkish sub-study. Of interest, for example, has been to compare interview data from the two countries, how different stakeholders look at the policy processes and how certain tensions can be discerned in terms of different positions and perspectives. We have also examined how struggles over what counts as valuable knowledge has been played out at different levels – both in text and speech. These questions also draw attention to the tensions between different decision-making levels (international, national, individual schools, local conditions, specific classroom contexts) and different actors (politicians, professionals, citizens in society) and their importance for curriculum issues. We have also been interested in how various perspectives interact with ethnicity, gender, and religion, and how these perspectives generate processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Theoretically/methodologically the project is linked to critical discourse analysis, which provides tools for studying how the ‘citizen’ and different subject positions are constructed in both text and practice (e.g. Fairclough, 1992). We have investigated how various tensions have been expressed in speech and text, with particular focus on how different perspectives are related to global, national and local perspective. Regarding the relationship between the EU and Sweden and Turkey, we have partly used an analytical point of view from Dale (2009), where the EU can be understood as three different arenas that can be more or less integrated with each other, where we have chosen to look primarily at the arena, which consists of the countries 'own' national policies at home. In our analysis of tensions related to various actors’ positions and perspectives we also draw on professional research, distinguishing between occupational professionals and organizational professionals, where the former group in educational contexts, e.g. can focus more on learning and knowledge content (Evetts, 2009; see also Ball, 2003). This last issue has also to do with didactic aspects (e.g. (Hudson & Meyer, 2011).

[1] The project was financed by the Swedish Research Council’s Committee for Educational Sciences (2011-2014). 

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