In our presentation we introduce a model for understanding and cultivating school subjects and one’s subjectivity based on the analysis of curricula documents for basic education. The first version of the model was created earlier when we studied the ethos of sport as a silent partner in physical education (PE) curricula. Now we have further developed the model (e.g. one more category of citizenship and the comparison between PE and other school subjects).

In the model we use the concept of citizenship as a tool for analysis. Citizenship is a focal concept in education because schools and all school subjects play a significant role in producing citizens. Our heuristic research question is: How the model developed within PE could be adapted to a wider context?

The various school subjects, indeed, serve as the media of formation for the human subject. By using the model it is possible to study the objectives of citizenship education for each and every school subject. Simultaneously, there will be room for studying the basis of identification or sources of identity of diverse school subjects, including the potential operating of silent partners. By silent partners we refer to the “significant others” operating mainly through discourses and practices among various school subject curricula and simultaneously participating in the identity process of various school subjects. In social psychology, significant other usually refers – in a Meadian sense – to the primary socialization of an individual; it is the significant others such as family members who selectively mediate and filter the social world to a child. Accordingly, as we see it, there are silent partners who selectively mediate and filter the truths of their worlds to various school subjects.

By studying and discussing these themes in areas such as teacher education, participants will end up with a deeper understanding not only of the subject at issue but also of the formation of the human subject in the connection of the school subject. With a deeper understanding participants may also experience personal cultivation. Consequently, the aim of our study is to cultivate understanding of the inevitably complicated phenomena of curriculum.

As teacher educators we find it important that student teachers throughout their studies engage themselves in discussing, and “reconstructing their own understandings of what it means to be educated” (Pinar, 2012, p. 1). Similarly, they have to confront their own subjective experience with school knowledge and how their own convictions, investments, and desires have been structured by it (Britzman, 1991, p. 46). Based on our own results and experiences, we are confident that the model can trigger this kind of significant debate in teacher education and in education more generally. Moreover, it can serve as a starting point for further reflections on the complex relations among education, society, citizenship, and subjectivity. 

In the context of this study we understand school curriculum in the spirit of Curriculum Studies as a highly symbolic concept: “school curriculum is what older generations choose to tell younger generations” (Pinar, 2012, p. 188). So understood, school curriculum is not seen as an objective, neutral document, something to be taught and to be taken for granted as such. In teacher education it should rather be seen as a provocation for to reflect on and think critically about ourselves and the world we will inherit” (cf. Pinar, 2012, 189).

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