During the last two decades, the National Curriculum for Norway has experienced a shift from content-oriented to competence-oriented curriculum that has altered the understanding of how teaching can promote Bildung (Hilt & Riese, 2021). The culmination of this process took place in 2020, with a comprehensive reform of the national curriculum (Læreplanverket). It was said that one of the intents with the reform was to clarify how classroom teaching can reinforce Bildung (danning) among students (Meld. St. 28 (2015-2016)). As a part of this process, policy makers argued that philosophy teaching facilitates Bildung and that it deserved more space in the national curriculum (St.meld. nr. 30 (2003-2004); Meld.St. nr. 25 (2016-2017)).

This poster presentation is about philosophy teachers’ understanding of what the teaching of philosophy consists of and how it relates to the Bildung-promoting task of Norwegian public education. How do philosophy teachers in primary and secondary school in Norway represent the relation between Bildung and philosophy in their classroom teaching?

Curriculum work can be divided into a political, programmatic and practical level (Hopmann, 1999). The political level sets up the framework for the curriculum, the programmatic level is where the actual curriculum is written and formalised as a policy document, and the practical level is where the curriculum is locally interpreted and taught. In the context of curriculum work, effective implementation of Bildung-promoting teaching depends on a use of signifiers of Bildung on the programmatic level that opens for teachers’ interpretive freedom of the concept (Bergheim, 2023). Discourses on Bildung in the Norwegian national curriculum appear to greatly emphasise ‘method-based’ approaches to philosophy teaching at the expense of ‘content-based’ approaches (Bergheim, 2024). Method-based approaches encourage a comprehension of philosophy as a way of reasoning and tend to focus on philosophy as a transdisciplinary fostering of critical thinking and analytical skills (e.g., Vansieleghem, 2013; Kienstra, Karskens & Imants, 2014). Meanwhile, content-based approaches are built on the conception of philosophy as a field of knowledge, with its historical content (e.g., antiquity, renaissance and modernity) and themes (e.g., ontology, epistemology, and ethics) that must be taught to be able to philosophise. Because Bildung-promoting teaching is intimately connected to the autonomy of teaching and learning processes (Hopmann, 2007), for a curriculum to heavily rely on particular teaching methods at the expense of others may be counterproductive. The reason is that it reduces the possibilities for students to experience Bildung-promoting teaching as an integrate part of teachers’ adaptation of the curriculum. However, considered the limited impact of the written curriculum on teaching practices (Hopmann, 1999; Priestley et al., 2021), it is of interest to investigate how philosophy teachers in Norway themselves perceive the relation between their teaching practices and Bildung on a practical level.

The objective of shedding light over philosophy teachers’ representations of the relation between their teaching practices and Bildung is threefold. First, it offers insight into what philosophy teachers themselves perceive as Bildung-promoting in philosophy. Second, it serves as a contribution to studies on the interplay between the programmatic and practical level of curriculum work. Third, it serves as a case-study of how global educational policy ideas, such as competencies-based education, influence the Scandinavian Didaktik-tradition and Bildung-centred teaching.

The study’s theoretical framework is based on discourse theory. Discourses are forms of knowledge that are socially produced and set limits to how social objects and practices can be thought of and expressed (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). The concept of ‘discourse’ denotes that language itself is structured according to social patterns that influence our use of language and which can be identified through discourse analysis (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002).

For this paper, we will conduct and analyse semi-structured qualitative interviews with philosophy teachers in primary and secondary schools in Norway. The criteria for the recruitment of interviewees are that they have formal training in teaching of philosophy (filosofididaktikk) and that they have or are teaching philosophy in either Norwegian primary or secondary school in a minimum of one of the following three school subjects: (1) “Knowledge of Christianity, Religion, Philosophies of life and Ethics” (primary and lower-secondary school); (2) “History and Philosophy” (upper-secondary school), or (3) “Religion and Ethics” (upper-secondary school) (UDIR, 2019a; UDIR, 2019b; UDIR 2020). Common for the three school subjects is that philosophy teaching is explicitly mentioned as component in their respective subject curricula (Bergheim, 2024). The study aims at recruiting 6 to 10 interviewees and consists of semi-structured individual interviews in Norwegian. The duration of the interviews will be of 45 to 60 minutes. The interview guide is divided into three sections: (1) the interviewees’ everyday practices in philosophy teaching, (2) the interviewees’ representations of Bildung-promoting teaching, and (3) the interviewees’ representations of Bildung-promoting teaching in philosophy. For the analysis of the collected data, we will manually transcribe audio recordings of the interviews to written text and insert them into the qualitative data analysis software NVivo 12. To identify discursive articulations of the concepts of Bildung, we will analyse the interview transcripts through the lens of the discursive categories “individual” and “society”. The two categories are justified with reference to Horlacher’s (2017) historical comparative study of the concept of Bildung and her thesis that discourses on Bildung presume a link between the inner cultivation of the individual and the development of a better society.

The interviews will be conducted during the spring semester of 2024 and the poster will therefore present preliminary findings. However, previous studies have shown that the written curriculum has a limited impact on teaching practices on a practical level of curriculum work (Hopmann, 1999; Priestley et al., 2021). Additionally, teaching experience (Priestley et al., 2016) and formal education in philosophy (Bialystok et al., 2019) may offer more leeway for philosophy teachers to adapt themes and approaches in the written curriculum to their own students. What remains to be seen is how the interviewed teachers perceive the relation between Bildung and philosophy, both in theory and in their own teaching practices, and how they justify it.

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