REFORMERS PÅVERKAN PÅ LÄRARES UNDERVISNING I GRUNDSKOLAN OCH FÖRSKOLAN : En läroplansteoretisk studie om undervisningsuppdraget och lärarrollen i förändring

Sammanfattning: The overall aim of this thesis is to use a curriculum theoretical perspective to contrib­ute knowledge about the impact of recent reforms on teachers’/preschool teachers’ teaching, with a special focus on mathematics. The thesis takes its starting point in a licentiate thesis that was completed in 2014. The further doctoral studies are based on two articles. These articles answer specific research questions. Substudy 1 was a systematic literature review that focused on the role of the preschool teacher in teaching mathematics in preschool. Substudy 2 explored how preschool teachers in­terpret their teaching mission based on the curriculum’s directives and how they describe the meaning of the concept of preschool teaching. The data from Substudy 1 consisted of 68 research articles, and Substudy 2 was based on 50 preschool teachers’ reflection texts. The theoretical underpinnings of the thesis are two theoretical perspec­tives: curriculum theory and Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic practice. The results from the two substudies show the importance of preschool teachers having both sub­ject knowledge and didactic competence to carry out teaching in spontaneous situa­tions and planned activities. The results from Substudy 1 show two different roles that pre­school teachers adopt when teaching mathematics in preschool education guided by social pedagogical or pre-primary curriculum traditions; these are the role of instructor and the role of an interactor. In the research studies, preschool teachers provide instruction with planned subject content or interact with the children’s play and other everyday situations to promote children’s mathematics learning. The results from Substudy 2 show an education that is guided by invisible pedagogy within the social pedagogical curriculum tradition. The preschool teachers describe teaching taking place spontaneously in play and other everyday situations based on children’s own interests and needs. The preschool teachers also have a purpose with the teaching, and they plan activities together with the children. These reveal teaching governed by visible pedagogy, which is characteristic of the pre-primary curriculum tradition. Further­more, there are indications that a new curriculum tradition is emerging bearing some sim­ilarities to previous traditions, an approach that is both play-based and goal-oriented. Children’s participation and influence are central in the teaching, which means that the teaching conforms to the children’s interests, and that goals from the curriculum are woven into the everyday work. The preschool teacher consciously shapes the envi­ronment in the preschool and uses materials to promote children’s learning, and the teaching has more distinct subject content. Together with the licentiate study, the two substudies show that teachers and preschool teachers have difficulty transforming a new curriculum text into practically applicable form. The curricula leave room for interpretation, and the uncertainty that arises in the transformation arena shows that they need support to realize the curriculum’s new guidelines.