This contribution draws on a classroom study[1] conducted in one grade 8 classroom at a school situated on the outskirts of a larger Swedish city. The setting of this school is diverse as to its residents’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds. According to statistics from the National Agency of Education (NAE), this is a low-performing school. The interest of this paper intertwines with concurrent and complex phenomena of the Swedish society, addressing socioeconomic inequalities, segregation, and the increased standardisation and marketisation of the educational system (SOU 2020: 46; Wahlström & Sundberg, 2018).

The aim of this paper is to examine the classroom discourse to illustrate the kinds of knowledge that students can access. The aim will be addressed by answering the following research questions: 

1. What characterizes the classroom communication and interaction? 
2. What views of the students as learners emerge through the teachers’ talk? 
3. What views on their learning, and the accessible forms of teaching, emerge through the student’s talk?

In their professional enactment, teachers interpret core content, aims, and knowledge requirements as being part of national curriculum standards. Commonly, teachers design ongoing themes/tasks that persist over a sequence of lessons linked by their content, in which two or more subjects are often integrated (Doyle (1992). From this follows an understanding of the curriculum as a coherent set of contexts and activities sequenced over days or weeks to build students’ competencies towards desired goals. When interpreting the curriculum in their teaching, teachers select from the repertoires of organisation, in terms of whole class teaching, individual work or pair/group work, and then follows the repertoires teaching talk and learning talk (Alexander, 2008). Drawing on Alexander’s (2008) international discourse data, recitation was identified as the overall dominant category of teaching talk, consisting of closed-end questions and brief recall answers, with a minimum of teacher feedback. Less frequently, and relating to deeper possibilities for meaningful feedback, were discussions and dialogues. Discussions are understood here as exchanges of ideas and shared information between students, while dialogues achieve ‘common understanding through structured, cumulative questioning’, the purpose of which is to ‘guide and prompt, reduce choices, minimize risk and error, and expedite the “handover” of concepts and principles’ (Alexander, 2008, p. 110). The ways in which the repertoires of organisation and teaching talk are carried out create various possibilities for students’ learning talk; for example, opportunities to listen to others, ask questions, and act upon different kinds of answers (Alexander, 2008). 

Twenty-eight percent of Swedish students speak a language other than the majority language (NAE, 2019b). While these students do not constitute a homogenous group, general academic results within these groups are below those achieved by students with monolingual Swedish backgrounds. The importance of providing intellectually challenging education for second-language learners, in combination with high support and the explicit teaching of language, has long been emphasized (e.g. Cummins, 2001). This issue relates to opportunities for students learning talk regarding contextualisation, structure, and high expectations (Schmidt & Skoog, 2017, 2018), including opportunities for students to participate in higher-order thinking and exploration-based activities (Schleppegrell, 2004). However, reproduced deficit discourses risk increasing stigma, in which concepts like diversity or multicultural tend to become equated with school areas that have a larger proportion of migrated inhabitants with a weaker social position (Bunar, 2011). For individual students, this includes the risk of developing a low self-image, a feeling of not belonging, or being discounted as a legitimate citizen (Cummins, 2001; Runfors, 2003). 

[1] The classroom study is part of the research project Exploring the elusive gap – Equity and knowledge segregation in teaching processes. Swedish Research Council. D nr: 2017-03501.

The study involved 14-year-old students and two of their teachers, and was conducted 2018-19 through 16 video observations of classroom teaching, 7 teacher interviews (4 with the teacher in Swedish and 3 with the Natural Sciences teacher) and 8 student interviews (in groups). The video recordings made it possible to capture and document classroom interaction and communication. A semi-structured interview guide focusing on subject content, curriculum connection, and teaching and possible individual considerations was used. My goal was to listen carefully and to ask follow-up questions to understand what the respondents were trying to communicate. Each interview lasted 40-60 minutes. The unit of analysis consists of 10 curriculum tasks, drawing on the teaching in Swedish and the Natural Sciences. First, I analysed the organisation of these tasks (in terms of whole class teaching, pair/group or individual work) and the next elements of the teachers’ teaching talk (in terms of rote, recitation, instruction, and monologue) (Wahlström, 2019). In the analysis, the categories of discussion and dialogue were coded as one category. Also, lesson gaps - those gaps in which the teacher waited for the class to be quiet and/or commented on student behaviour - was added as a category in the analysis. Next, the analysis focused on the transcribed interviews. A content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) was carried out regarding subject content, selection of textual resources, and teaching - including their motives for this - and lastly, the teachers’ views on the students’ participation and interaction as well as the students’ views on their own learning. In this way, the analysis aimed to investigate what classroom discourse emerged through the teachers’ and the students’ talk. The underlying assumptions for this are that discourses are created within social contexts, such as classroom practices, and that they form prevailing notions, or certain fixed ways of talking about and understanding the world (Foucault, 1993). As these discourses influence and determine the borders for what is socially and culturally accepted, they identify what is seen as worth striving for. In this way, classroom discourses creates conditions relating to and depending on power structures within society, linking classroom practices with institutional, national, and global discourses (Luke, 2004). The study was carried out in accordance with the general requirements for research ethics (Swedish Research Council, 2011) with regard to information, consent, confidentiality, and use of data.

The focus of this paper is on the repertoires for classroom organisation and performed teaching, including the teachers’ and the students’ thoughts on these repertoires. To analyse, understand, and reason about this specific school means to approach a range of unprivileged tensions, compared with schools situated in more affluent areas. In this specific school there were no authorized teachers in the subject of Swedish as a second language, delayed access to individual laptops for students, and a higher share of students affected by socioeconomic inequalities. Bearing that in mind, there is at the same time a need to report on classroom practices as they are, and on the ways in which the created classroom discourse is shaped. The results show that the created classroom discourse consist of whole class teaching, followed by individual work, and of mainly recitation or rote. Altogether, the classroom discourse was characterized by low expectations, with the students targeted as a homogenous group that was unfocused and lacked language abilities. At the same time, both teachers struggled to maintain classroom peace, leading to even lower expectations. I have not yet analysed the student interviews; their voices will accordingly complement the previous/existing results. Apart from the students’ perspectives, the results illustrate the increased segregation of Swedish society, combined with a stronger focus on standardized education and knowledge outcomes. These results could renew discussion about classroom pedagogy: what we strive for, what we do not strive for, and why.

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