Skolan som barnarbete och utvecklingsprojekt : En studie av hur grundskoleelevers arbetsmiljö skapas-förändras-förblir som den är

Sammanfattning: This study is about the working environment of school children in the lower secondaryschool. The aim is to study the course of events in which it develops. The empiricalfieldwork was inspired by ethnographic methods. Data was gathered by means of interviews,participating observation and document studies (especially records of meetings). The datawas treated using a narrative analysis that aimed at finding a `story' by which the databecame comprehensible. A model for data selection was developed for the study. It is called`narrative selection' which means that the researcher chooses those observations that seemmeaningful from within the participating situation. In this way the collected data is interwoven into the analysis. Different elements of the students' working conditions were studied.Of these, homework was given a great deal of attention as the most important aspect of theworkload.The analysis showed that the courses of action could be related in the form of twonarratives that could be classified according to the classical poetry categories of tragedy andromance. The material conditions of the students' work are developed according to thetragedy. Homework can be seen as a result of the confrontation between the two narratives.Those narratives can be understood as the context to which the actors at school try to adapt.The central aspect of those narratives is that they have a rationality of their own and thecourses of action develop according to the logic of each narrative. The findings were testedin attempts to make some features of the Swedish school comprehensible, for instance theweakness of students' influence on their work environment.