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Research topic/aim: Transitions are built into most educational systems and within the Swedish cohesive compulsory school the transition equivalent to primary and secondary school is made within the same school form. Although it should be cohesive the organisation bears traces of several reforms, resulting in schools being organised in different ways, and thus transitions can entail different things. This paper are part of an ongoing doctoral project on transitions within compulsory school in Sweden. The research questions in focus for this paper is 1) How is the transition (between year 6 and 7) represented as an object (of thought) by teachers and what assumptions underlie these representations? and 2) What are the possible effects of these representations on teachers’ possibilities to create continuity in the students schooling?

Theoretical framework: Theoretically the project is informed by a poststructural framework, building on Bacchi (2009) and Bacchi and Bonham(2016). The underlying assumption made is that people are not able to comprehend a direct reflection of the world, instead they understand things/concepts, through representations. Each thing/concept can be understood in different ways and the researchers’ job is to analyse how specific representations are made, what makes them possible and how they could be represented differently. Every representation is assumed to have effects that benefit some and not others, effects that also need to be analysed. 

Methodological design: Data is collected through semi-structured interviews with teachers teaching in year 6 and/or 7. The teachers work at schools organised in different ways – at some schools the students change school at the transition and in some schools they do not. Both large and small schools, in cities and rural areas, are represented.

Expected conclusions/findings: Tentative results show that teachers represent the transition in three ways – as changes for the students (e.g. structure, relationships), as transferring information between teachers (about individual students’ shortcomings) and as changes for the teachers (relational). Tentative examples of underlying assumptions are whether the transition should be a “continuation” or a “break”. A strong assumption is also the focus on individuals. These representations do not include teaching groups of students. That, together with the focus on shortcomings, might affect the teachers’ possibility to create continuity for the students negatively.

Relevance to Nordic educational research: Research on transition within compulsory schools in the Nordic context is scarce but growing (see e.g. Strand 2020). This project is a contribution to that field of research, with focus on how transitions are conceptualised in a context where compulsory school organisation differs from the British, continental and American contexts where most research on transitions within compulsory school are made.