Drawing on Dewey's concept ‘guided pathways’ the aim with this paper is to investigate how the understanding of the concept of student influence has changed in Swedish education policy over the last two decades and how this, in present time, is interpreted by teachers when enacting the new curriculum Lgr 11. With the approach chosen the paper contributes knowledge on how international policy is shaped in relation to national and local educational contexts (cf. Braun et al 2010; Sivesind et al 2012). The broader context is provided by the goal and result oriented system where there, since its introduction in the early 1990s, has been a visible shift from an emphasis on goals to one on results (Wahlström 2009). While the discussion of the early 1990s emphasised ‘bildung’, democracy and an understanding of knowledge as constructed by people in interaction, this has later been replaced by an emphasis on quality, equivalence and goal attainment (Bergh 2010). Despite this changed rhetoric and an extensive restructuring of the education system the government states that the educational assignment is still formulated in the same way as it was in the early 1990s (Bill 2008/09:87). The analysis is conducted in two steps. The first is based on a close reading of central policy text from the early 1990s and onwards (SOU 1992:94, SFS 2010:800), which are analysed with support of earlier research selected in an abductive process (cf. Peirce 1902/1990, Säfström & Östman 1999). From the broader understanding of how the use of the concept of student influence has changed over time the second analytical step makes use of interviews conducted in 2014 with three teachers working in different schools and municipalities. Even though there are few explicit discussions about student influence in national texts, the conditions for this has changed during the studied period. In the 1990s, complex and qualitative goals were placed at the local level to be interpreted and dealt with by teachers. In recent years there has been a recentralization movement where student influence has become a central part of the goal and result oriented system, also given a strengthened juridical position. This leads to paradoxical situations that have to be resolved by teachers, where there is an obvious risk that the emphases on results reduce teachers’ possibilities to take students’ diverse backgrounds, needs, and possible futures into account.

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