ABSTRACT

The aim of the article is to deepen the knowledge of progressivism and how it was manifested in practice in Swedish secondary schools from a teacher perspective before it was prescribed in policy during the reforms of the 1950s. In the current educational debate, progressivism is blamed by some for being the root of a permissive style of education in decline that no longer provides any knowledge to students, and regarded by others as the starting point for the modern form of democratic schooling. The question we pursue is in what way progressive teaching practice existed before policy. We do that by investigating teacher narratives describing their own teaching practices found in a historical archive from 1946. Hence, rather than looking at the policy level as in most studies, we are unpacking the black box of progressive teaching. Through thematic analysis, we investigate 209 secondary teacher narratives from teachers of History, Biology and Mother tongue. We found that the theme of student participation was very frequently reported in 76% of the accounts, while student interaction (33%) and extended classroom (37%) were somewhat less reported. Hence, our study shows that progressive teaching existed in different ways before it appeared in policy.

摘要

本文的目的是加深对进步主义的了解，以及它在 1950 年代改革期间在政策中规定之前如何从教师的角度在瑞典中学的实践中表现出来。在当前的教育争论中，进步主义被一些人指责是一种不再为学生提供任何知识的宽容教育方式的根源，并被其他人视为现代民主教育形式的起点。我们所追求的问题是，在政策出台之前，渐进式教学实践以何种方式存在。我们通过调查教师在 1946 年的历史档案中描述他们自己的教学实践的叙述来做到这一点。因此，与大多数研究中的政策层面不同，我们正在解开渐进式教学的黑匣子。通过主题分析，我们调查了历史、生物学和母语教师的 209 篇中学教师叙述。我们发现，76% 的帐户中经常提到学生参与的主题，而学生互动 (33%) 和扩展课堂 (37%) 的报道则较少。因此，我们的研究表明，渐进式教学在出现在政策中之前以不同的方式存在。