In this study, we target the role and the work of science teachers when encountering teaching resources produced by industry and offered to schools to support science and technology teaching. The project is set in the intersection of curriculum studies, educational policy and didactics and focuses on industry-produced teaching resources offered to schools by companies and business organizations in various areas of science and technology. 

There are many examples of such teaching resources across Europe. In Sweden, examples include textbooks produced by the forest industry on forests and forestry or on plastics by the petrochemical industry, as well as lesson plans with films and student worksheets by the meat industry on antibiotics. Similarly, Parvin and Stephenson (2004) conclude that there is a long tradition of industrial engagement in the UK involving the manufacturing industry and the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. To date, previous research on science and technology education has pointed to that teaching might benefit from industry collaboration e.g., in terms of increased student motivation and challenging stereotypic images of science, technology, and industry (e.g. Henriksen et al., 2015; Loukomies, 2013).

However, when industrial actors engage in education, they also act to influence the transposition of the educational content (cf. Chevellard, 2007). According to Chevellard (2007, p. 32) a core to the theory of didactic transposition is that “it considers knowledge as a changing reality, which adapts to its institutional habitat where it occupies a more or less narrow niche”. In other words, the content of education is not merely defined and set in curricula and syllabuses but set in praxis, in a dialectic of persons and institutions. Rather, what constitutes knowledge or content of a school subject is what has “gained epistemic recognition from some culturally dominant institutions” (op cit, p.133).

In the Swedish context, there is a range of industrial education initiatives including school programmes, competitions, festivals and other event-based initiatives (cf. Teknikdelegationen, 2010). It has been estimated that about 40% of the STEM initiatives in Sweden are in some way financed by industry and the private sector (op cit). In the production of teaching resources industry actors seek to influence what is considered knowledge; what is considered true and valuable. In doing so, the industrial actors become part of the local governing of education (Robertson et al., 2012; Giroux, 2019). In Canada, Eaton & Day (2020) show how the oil industry influences the messages communicated in science teaching on climate and climate change. Thus, when teachers incorporate and make use of such resources this will impact the students’ encounters with the school subjects. In decentralized school systems, such as the ones in the Nordic countries, classroom practices become particularly vulnerable to such external influences (Carlgren, 2009). 

The aim of this presentation is to discuss the interests of industry actors in education and how teachers can navigate such interests in the didactic transposition of knowledge in education. This presentation synthesizes a three-year project on the participation of industry actors in science and technology education where the following research questions have been investigated:

• What are the rationales used by industry actors to account for why they engage in science and technology education?

• To which extent are these rationales mirrored as interests in the teaching resources offered by the industry to schools?

• And, how do teachers approach the evaluation of teaching resources offered by the industry?

In the presentation we will present the main points of three sub-studies and engage in a meta-reflection regarding how the combined results may contribute to the understanding of the processes of didactic transposition  and the role of different actors.

The project is based on three sets of data: (I) Web pages where industrial actors (companies as well as business organizations) describe their engagement in school activities in Sweden. (II) A case study of webinars where industry actors meet with students in webinars. The topic of webinars was career in the petrochemical industry and the target-group was students in secondary school. The webinar series was organized by Scientix - an organization aiming to promote and support a Europe-wide collaboration among STEM teachers - in collaboration with STEM Alliance and the European Petrochemical Association (EPCA). The analyzed data included screen recordings of the webinars (including video, voice and text messages) published on the Scientix webpage, and documentation associated with the webinars on the Scientix web page., (III) Focus groups with 20 science and technology teachers who teach science and technology in Swedish compulsory schools. The analyses of data varied across the three substudies: (I) In the analysis of web pages, we looked for patterns in the descriptions of and rationales for the industrial STEM initiatives using a theoretical framework of interpretative repertoires (Potter, 1998). We focussed on the variations in the ways in which the industrial actors accounted for their engagement in single STEM initiatives as well as across accounts of different initiatives by different actors. (II) In the analysis of the Scientix case-study, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006) concerning companion meanings (Östman, 1998) about the relations between the petrochemical industry, society and the environment that were communicated to students in the webinars. (III) In the analysis of the focus groups we have used an ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015) to scrutinize how the teachers negotiate the usability of the industry resources.

When industry actors describe why they engage in science and technology education, they draw on discursive repertoires which allow them to speak to an audience of both shareholders and teachers, e.g., increasing students’ interest and knowledge, but also economically oriented discourses, e.g., securing competent labor and improving the public image of the industry (Andrée & Hansson, 2020). In the industry-student webinars the main message to students is that the petrochemical industry is pivotal for handling environmental problems and maintaining modern life. Thus, the meetings clearly serve the industry interests. In addition, the results from the focus groups show that there is no consensus among teachers regarding the relevance and legitimacy of taking biases into account in their evaluations of teaching resources (Andrée & Hansson, 2022). Thus, the risks in relation to objectivity are not always evident to the teachers, even though teachers, on a collective level, engage in complex didactic analysis taking steering documents, teaching traditions, correctness, and potential biases into account (Andrée & Hansson, 2021). The results contribute to highlighting the complexity of didactic transposition when it involves different actors, networks and interactions in the transpositive work (cf. Chevellard & Bosch, 2020). The results show the role of industrial actors in these processes with consequences for which perspectives become integrated parts of the school subjects taught. In conclusion, the results point to the necessity of strengthening teacher agency including their ability for didactic analysis. Since the process of didactic transposition involves decisions on inclusion and exclusion of content and values that are to be taught, issues concerned with external actors and their influences on the didactic transposition should be raised in policy discussions as well as in teacher education.

Andrée, M. & Hansson, L. (2020). Industrial actors and their rationales for engaging in STEM education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(4), 551-576. Andrée, M. & Hansson, L. (2021). Industry, science education and teacher agency: a discourse analysis of teachers’ evaluations of industry-produced teaching resources. Science Education, 105(2), 353-383. Andrée, M., & Hansson, L. (2022). Teachers’ negotiations of bias in relation to teaching resources offered to schools by industrial actors. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 8(1), 52-64. Andrée, M., & Hansson, L. (2023). Inviting the petrochemical industry to the STEM classroom: messages about industry–society–environment in webinars, Environmental Education Research, DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2023.2168623. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3 (2), 77–101. Carlgren, I. (2009). The Swedish comprehensive school—Lost in transition? Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 12(4), 633–649. Chevellard (2007). Readjusting Didactics to a Changing Epistemology. European Educational Research Journal, 6(2), 131-134. Chevallard, Y., & Bosch, M. (2020). Didactic transposition in mathematics education. Encyclopedia of mathematics education, 214-218. Eaton, E., & Day, N. (2020). “Petro-Pedagogy: Fossil Fuel Interests and the Obstruction of Climate Justice in Public Education.” Environmental Education Research, 26(4), 457–473. Giroux, H. (2019). Toward a pedagogy of educated hope under Casino capitalism. Pedagogía Y Saberes, 50, 147–151. Potter, J. (1998). Discursive social psychology: From attitudes to evaluative practices. European Review of Social Psychology, 9(1), 233–266. Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency. An ecological approach. Bloomsbury. Robertson, S., Mundy, K., Verger, A., & Menashy, F. (Eds.). (2012). Public private partnerships in education: New actors and modes of governance in a globalizing world. Edward Elgar Publishing. Östman, L. (1998). “How companion Meanings are Expressed by Science Education Discourse.” In D. Roberts and L. Östman (Eds.), Problems of Meaning in Science Curriculum, (pp. 5–12). New York: Teachers College Press.