The aim and scope of the research project guiding this paper is to map 7-year-olds, first grade students, understandings of societal functions, such as the police, and to develop teaching with the ambition of increasing young students’ knowledge of these functions. The paper however focusses on the first part of the project, conducting interviews to create a cross section of Swedish first grade students’ understandings of societal functions. The paper is based on three key arguments. First, it is socially important to meet the equality issues that exist in the Swedish society and schools (i.e., that knowledge and civic values have different outcomes depending on student’s background and where they grow up) by studying student's different understandings of societal functions. Second, more education research in the area of ‘conceptual change’ is needed for developing the knowledge of concept understanding and concept-progress regarding societal issues among younger students. Third, as the new Swedish curricula, emphasizing student’s understandings of facts, has been launched there is a need for supporting schools and teachers work. In this paper we suggest that children’s understandings on basic societal functions is an important piece for developing social studies teaching. 

The main research question is: how does first grade students understand societal functions such as the police?  

The point of departure in the paper is that research on conceptual change, i.e., mapping students' different understandings of concepts/phenomena and investigating how these can be developed through teaching, is scant regarding societal issues (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Lundholm & Davis, 2013). In a review of the research Lundholm and Davis (2013) state that the societal oriented subjects are clearly underrepresented within this research orientation. The few studies made focus on broader issues like sustainable development and are mainly targeting older students (in secondary or upper secondary school) views. Compared to what is known about student’s understandings of, for example, mathematical concepts, both the empirical and theoretical research in social studies didactics needs to be developed.

The theoretical framework used in this paper is phenomenography. For several decades it’s been used for studying younger children's understandings of mathematical phenomena and concepts (Björklund et al. 2021, Kullberg et al. 2020). Phenomenography takes departure in the idea that there are different ways to understand a certain phenomenon and that these different ways might be hierarchically ordered from less powerful to more powerful ways of understanding (Marton 2015; Marton & Booth 1997; Svensson 1997). As a research approach phenomenography sets out to track these different understandings of a phenomenon and to organize them in a hierarchically ordered outcome space with different categories of description, depicting the different increasingly more powerful ways of understanding the phenomenon.

Methodologically the paper departs from the phenomenographic research tradition seeking to map the different ways individuals understands a phenomenon. The basic research method gathering data for this task is respondent interviews focusing on generating the individuals’ ways of understanding (seeing, experiencing) the phenomenon. Each single interview adding to the so-called pool of meaning, in the end representing the populations different ways of understanding the phenomenon in question (Booth 2008). The first step of the study was to create a strategic selection of first grade student from the population (Cohen et al. 2002). We focused on targeting schools in both rural and urban areas, and for the urban areas we differentiated with regard to socioeconomic standard. The Swedish city of Gothenburg is a segregated city with distinct low income, and high income, areas. 10 student interviews were made with students in a school in a low income area (average income below 250 000 SEK/year, 40 percent foreign born, unemployment rate of over 10 percent) and 10 in a school in a high income area (average income over 350 000 SEK/year, under 10 percent foreign born, unemployment rate of under 4 percent). 10 interviews were made with students in a school on the countryside (an agricultural area), 100 kilometers north of Gothenburg. The schools, as well as the students and student’s legal guardians, gave their informed consent for participating in the study. The interviews were guided to reveal how students understand the police, trying to open as many aspects of their understanding as possible. In seminal research outlining the phenomenographic interview this is argued to be done by “preparing a number of entry points for the discussion of the phenomenon, varying the context for the discussion by varying the aspects of the phenomenon that are fore-grounded” (Booth, 2008). In order to accomplish this, and considering the young age of the interviewees, we turned to the research of photo interviewing (McBrien & Day, 2012; Mannay 2007). In this tradition using photos are considered to help young children, not used to be interviewed, to describe abstract issues and verbalize memories when discussing a phenomenon (Cappello, 2005). A single sheet with 10 different pictures of police-officers, police stations and police vehicles were used as entry points for the interviews opening up the conversation exhausting the student’s ways of experiencing the phenomenon. The 30 interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed.

The results from the analysis show different ways of understanding the chosen indicator of societal function, i.e., the police. In the analysis of the 30 transcribed interviews, we used the principles of phenomenography for extracting the different understandings that appeared among to the students, grouping these understandings together in a hierarchically order outcome space with different categories of descriptions, i.e, different ways of understandings. The analysis followed key principals for the phenomenographic analysis, coding similarities and differences of expressions of meaning in single transcripts to meanings within the context of the group of transcripts (Akerlind 2005). The main focus was on determining whether a possible category of description actually reviled something distinctive about a certain way of understanding the police, compared to other formed categories, and further to determine how the categories were logically related (Marton & Booth 1997). The analysis (although yet in progress) indicates an outcome space of at least three different categories of first grade student’s understandings of the police. The first and least powerful way of understanding, we call the “fairy tail category”, seeing the police (a male police man) as a hero. The second understanding we call, “the authority category”, seeing the police as a (frightening) power. The third and most powerful way of understanding, we call “the institution category”, seeing the police as an institution in our (common) societal surrounding.

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