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This thesis examines how changes in school equipment relate to changes in teaching ideals in the Swedish school system between 1865 and 2010. Three cases of changes in school equipment are examined in three sub-studies. The first sub-study explores how national guidelines for school desks covering the period 1865–1981 implicitly expressed specific teaching ideals. The second sub-study examines equipment requirements that arose in connection with changes in teaching ideals during the Swedish comprehensive school reform of 1949–1972. The third sub-study analyses how teaching ideals changed in conjunction with the introduction of new media technology in schools during the 1980s and in 2010. The thesis’s overarching research question addresses the significance of the origin and direction of change initiatives when school equipment and teaching ideals change. The source materials used in these studies consist of archival material from schools and authorities, printed official documents, teacher magazines, the local daily press, and teacher interviews. The thesis’s theoretical framework is based on a socio-material perspective whereby schools are studied as socio-material networks, and teaching ideals and school equipment shape each other. Additionally, concepts such as ‘historical path dependency’, ‘the grammar of schooling’, and ‘horizontal and vertical change initiatives’ also contribute to the analysis. Methodologically, the study follows a source-pluralistic and source-critical approach, which is supplemented by discourse analysis (in one sub-study). The results indicate that school equipment should not be seen merely as passive or neutral proposals for teaching. Historically, equipment has supported specific teaching ideals and has hindered or concealed others. While many teaching ideals have clearly changed during the period of investigation, older ideals have been reproduced over time because of ‘the path-dependent use of equipment’. However, school equipment has also changed based on how it is used or the ideals it is inter-related with. The results also indicate that the significance of the origin and direction of the change initiative shifts in character if such initiatives are vertical or horizontal to the school. Vertical change initiatives tend to function primarily as boundary setters for internal change within the school. Horizontal change initiatives, on the other hand, appear to take on great significance as trendsetters for the direction these changes take.

Artikeln, författad av forskare, förstelärare och skolledande personal, bygger på ett samverkansprojekt med målet att utveckla en gymnasieskolas kollektiva lärande. Artikeln syftar till att bidra till förståelse av vad ett sådant utvecklingsarbete kan innebära. Metoder som användes var enkätundersökning och intervjuer. Dataanalys genomfördes med stöd av tematisk analys i olika steg (jfr Braun & Clarke, 2006) och teoretiska begrepp som kollektivt och kollegialt lärande (Larsson, 2018) samt olika former av begreppet tillit (Jederlund, 2019). Resultaten visar att förstelärare som leder utvecklingsarbete påverkas av tidigare erfarenheter från utvecklingsarbete och att det är viktigt att lärare som medverkar känner tillit till enskilda kollegor, till den större grupp de ingår i samt till processen bakom utvecklingsarbetet. Samverkansprojektet bidrog till skapande av strukturer för fortsatt utveckling samt till insikt om att utvecklingsarbete främst handlar om att utveckla arbetssätt som är lämpliga för den egna verksamheten.

I detta kapitel berätta jag om mitt avhandlingsprojekt där jag fördjupar mig i den undran kring materialitet och undervisning som följt mig under många år. Den stora frågan är om man kan förbättra skolors undervisning genom att köpa nya saker. Det jag presenterar i detta kapitel är ett arbete som är under utveckling. Någon del är färdig och någon del finns i skrivande stund bara på planeringsstadiet. Målet är att lägga fram en sammanläggning för disputation i slutet av 2024.

From 1865 up to 1981 Swedish national authorities issued regulations on design of school desks and furnishing of classrooms. This article investigates what teaching ideals that were expressed in these regulations and how they have changed over time. The article shows that the teaching ideal for the early decades of the study period where teacher centred, resulting in regulations aiming for school desks and classrooms where pupils could sit and listen for long periods of time. From the 1920’s up to the beginning of the 1960’s the regulations held on to teacher centred ideals while the desks used in schools were designed to facilitate variation and cooperation between pupils. Regulations from the last decades of the study show strong changes in teaching ideals. Desks and furnishing now should make interaction and cooperation between pupils easy, and the teacher were to be more of a mentor than a lecturer.

The present study analyzes attitudes made manifest when media technology is used in teaching at Swedish upper secondary schools. It examines discourses related to the subject of history by comparing contemporary circumstances with those of the mid-1980s, making research in both educational history and history education indispensible to its execution. The study considers the impact of technology on human interaction as an essentially social construction. Furthermore, it addresses questions about the role media technology plays in current discourses, about the actors that are manifested in these discourses and about their didactic implications.

Since the investigation focuses on discourse, it is an interpretive work. Analytical tools have been borrowed from the field of discourse theory to facilitate a broad understanding of discourse and communication. The analysis is conducted in order to reconstruct chains of analogy and nodal points of communication in media technology and teaching, with specific attention paid to matters related to the subject of history. Secondary school policy documents, curricula relevant to each period, teacher´s periodicals and interviews with history teachers are combined to reconstruct discourses on technology in education. Interviews were conducted with six history teachers, three of whom taught in the 1980s, while the remainder began teaching in the past fifteen years. The periodicals studied are Lärarnas tiding and Skolvärlden, including every issue published in the years 1983, 1985, 1987, 2008, 2010 and 2012.

Four discourses on media technology in education have been reconstructed from this material. Two of the discourses are relevant to the mid-eighties, and have been called the discourse on the school of the future and the discourse on film, junk culture and education, respectively. The discourses reconstructed from the years around 2010 are named the discourse on the contemporary school and the discourse on good teaching. These discourses generally nurture an optimistic belief in what media technology can mean to school and teaching. The reasons for using technology in the classroom are based on notions of what is required from society or what is relevant to the students. The roles of media technology in education are affected by several groups of actors, including government officials, marketers, school leadership and teachers. The process was however never significantly affected by formal policy. One aspect central to a positive view of media technology in education was that it would improve the quality of teaching, especially in the case of history, characterized by storytelling and lecturing. Certain didactic considerations became visible in the study of these discourses, which risked being shallow and trend sensitive, insofar as it might be difficult for teachers to find suitable forums for peer-to-peer subject specific reflections on media technology.