Den specialpedagogiska personalens arbete med stödinsatser för nyanlända elever – yrkesroll, arbetsuppgifter och utveckling av skolans lärmiljöer

Sammanfattning: The overall aim of this licentiate thesis is to increase knowledge of the special educators’ professional role and work in relation to special educational support for recently arrived immigrant pupils. The need for the study is motivated by the immigrant pupils’ low achievement of goals and schools responsibility to adapt education to each pupil’s needs in a school for all. The first study examines special educators’ role and work in relation to special educational support for recently arrived immigrant pupils and the professional group's view of the reasons for special educational support for these pupils. The results are based on responses in a questionnaire directed to 483 special educators. The results show that the special educators state that the reasons why recently arrived immigrant pupils are in need of special educational support are that the knowledge requirements are too difficult for the pupils to achieve or that the pupils have individual shortcomings. The occupational group's tasks consist of administrative work and the development of learning environments. According to the special educators, most often class and subject teachers and mother tongue tutors provide special educational support. The special educators collaborate to the greatest extent with class and subject teachers and with the pupils, while they want more collaboration with mother tongue tutors. The results of the study are interpreted and discussed based on Abbott's theory (1988) reasoning about professional groups’ claims of jurisdiction, Persson's (1998) categorical and relational perspectives and Hughes' (1958) concept of dirty work. In the second study, free text answers (n = 451) from the questionnaire are examined, where the special educators describe how they and their schools have developed learning environments for recently arrived immigrant pupils in need of special educational support. The free text answers are analyzed using a qualitative content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). This analysis is then theorized based on Skrtics´ (1991; 2005) concepts of the school system to interpret obstacles and opportunities in the development of the learning environments. The results show that the development have mainly taken place through general adaptations (one size fits all solutions), language-adapted solutions and special solutions. The analysis based on Skrtics’ concepts shows how the machine and professional bureaucracy can act as an obstacle to the development of learning environments for recently arrived immigrant pupils in need of special educational support. The thesis helps to bring together the results from the two studies. A developed contextualization is made, and the results from the two studies are discussed in relation to previous research and theoretical points of departure. Abbott's (1988) reasoning on claims of jurisdiction and Skrtics’ conceptions of the school system (1991; 2005) are combined to get a deeper understanding of the deadlocks that may exist in the bureaucratic system.