Teaching with a sponsored teaching material for better or worse : An interview study on how upper secondary school teachers have been working with We should all be feminists in Swedish teaching

This study aims to investigate how secondary school teachers have used We should all be feminists and the accompanying teacher’s guide and if they used the material in a problematizing way, given that it is sponsored. Hilary Janks’ model of critical literacy served as theoretical basis in this study. To collect data, qualitative interviews were conducted, that included five secondary school teachers. The transcribed material was processed and analyzed by the method Qualitative Content Analysis and with a deductive approach. The main results show that teachers primarily used the material as a way to meet the criteria of the curriculum and to train students in certain moments of the Swedish subject, rather than as a material for the discussion of feminism and gender equality. The study’s most conspicuous result was that none of the teachers had reflected on the fact that the material was sponsored by a numerous of organizations. The teachers viewed the sponsors as harmless and the material as a text from a fiction writer, rather than a material from trade unions and foundations who wish to exert influence in the classroom. In the analysis by Janks’ model of critical literacy, the results show that all of the teachers had worked with critical literacy in the classroom to some extent, but that they had not realized all of Janks’ criteria on how to work with critical literacy in classrooms