Descriptions and analyses of the science classroom with a social class perspective

Earlier research shows that there is a relationship between low achievements in science education and low socioeconomic background. Despite the aim to give all children an equal education, school science contributes to a reproduction of social. The overall aim of the research is to contribute to a more complex and multi-faced description and analysis of the relation between inequalities in education, focusing on social inequalities in the science classroom. With a characterizing of the science subject and asocial class perspective as a backdrop, the aims of this research will be elaborated on through the theoretical frameworks from foremost Bourdieu and Bernstein. Inspired by an ethnographic approach the data was produced through observations, field notes, interviews and questionnaire in a Swedish compulsory school and students aged fourteen and fifteen, were followed during a five weeks unit on physics (mechanics). The results revealed for example that room to manoeuvre, possibilities, options and success in this science classroom were a collective process. It was shown that science learning and teaching were deeply complex and that social class clearly gets manifested and sometimes created and established in the science classroom with its activities and practices however in collective social processes where many actors interplay