Teknik och politiskt handlande : Rationalitet och kritik i den samällsorienterande undervisningen

Sammanfattning: This thesis is a content analysis of discursive meanings of technology in the Swedish comprehensive school, with a specific focus on social science. The primary aim is to analyse moral and political aspects of the relation between individual and technology in interpretations of the content of teaching. Different technology-discourses are developed concerning their conditions for criticism and political action, which makes a specific interpretation of the problems of democracy a central framework of the thesis. Social values, interests and endeavours are thereby related to the constitution of students´ social identities in instruction. The study consists of discourse-analyses of social science textbooks and the Swedish national curricula, focusing rationality, values and power related to technology, indicating different consequences in political action terms. Aiming to specify the action-aspects of the technology discourses (as discourse-practices) a historical inquiry of curricula is made, which shows a certain parallel between three gruops of discourse-practices: epistemological, transformative, and colonising. In an instruction context, different conditions for discussions of technology and technological change, as well as for the assignment of authoritative positions, arise from the three groups. Implications for instruction of the parallel discourse-practices are discussed in terms of poly-perspectivity, challenging any selective tradition of teaching regarding the individual-technology-relation. Thereby, the fulcrus of instruction is regarded as a contingent situation, involving continual suspicion and readiness to re-conceptualise standpoints. Full responsibility for mutual recognition follows, making moral implications of instruction crucial. Critical conversations are one way of designating an effort to come up to these demands.