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Teacher students learning what? The multicultural discourse in curriculum in teacher education in Sweden
University of Borås, Centrum för lärande och undervisning.
University of Borås, Centrum för lärande och undervisning.
2008 (English)Conference paper, Published paper (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

Bernstein (1971) claims that a curriculum defines what valid knowledge is. A question to be asked in accordance with this then is: what is defined as “valid knowledge” in the teacher education curriculum in Sweden? The governmental bill of 1999/2000:135 states that teacher education will educate teachers to encounter a multicultural school and a society characterized by diversity. What traces of multiculturalism are visible in the curriculum? What perspectives on multiculturalism might teachers of tomorrow thereby receive in their education? The purpose of our study has been to uncover multicultural discourses in the course syllabi in “the general area of education”, AUO, in teacher education. In the study, 177 course syllabi from 22 universities in Sweden were scrutinized. Multiculturalism, according to our interpretation, is not only a question of ethnicity and nationality or religion but also of class. One of our main results has shown that the multicultural discourse is formed on the basis of a monocultural perspective, i e Swedish and middleclass. Culture, irrespective of being about class or ethnicity, is “talked about” as a feature belonging to the Other both on an individual and collective level. Previous research into educational contexts reveals similar findings (for example Gundara, 2005; Lahdenperä, 1997; Sjögren, 2001). Our findings also show that the multicultural discourse is characterized by deficits. In syllabi, issues of ethnicity/nationality and multilingualism are expressed as if they were issues of functional disorder. Pupils when being categorized as “not Swedish”, for example, are seen as having certain characteristics that will disenable them from learning. Their culture affects the pupils’ capacity for learning and teacher students have to learn about the Others’ background. In what follows an introduction to teacher education in Sweden, a presentation of how this study was carried out and a closer analysis of its results will be provided. The concluding section will include a short discussion of the possible pedagogical consequences that this may entail.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
The Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development , 2008.
Series
Improving Student Learning
Keywords [en]
learning, multiculturalalism
National Category
Other Social Sciences Pedagogy
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-6180Local ID: 2320/5427ISBN: 978-1-873576-78-6 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hb-6180DiVA, id: diva2:886864
Conference
The 16th Improving Learning Symposium, University of Durham, UK, 1-3 September 2008.
Available from: 2015-12-22 Created: 2015-12-22 Last updated: 2017-10-02Bibliographically approved

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Langelotz, LillJämsvi, Susanne

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • harvard-cite-them-right
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf