Kunskapens fanbärare : den goda läraren som diskursiv konstruktion på en mediearena

The specific aim of this dissertation is to formulate and examine the discursive constructions of “the good teacher” in a specific discursive practice in the media arena. The broader aim is to participate in a discussion about the relationship between the media and education, including education policy. The discursive practice that is studied is the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter. The material underlying the study consists of articles published on the editorial and comment pages of the paper during the 1990s, a decade when the Swedish education system underwent some major changes. In the first part of the empirical study, the articles included are categorised, first according to the debates constituted and then according to five themes related to the position of the teacher. The second part of the empirical study focuses on education as it is constructed in the discursive practice examined, progressing step by step towards achieving the specific aim of the study. The findings here include the following: a situation for education is established which involves a clear distinction between two different ways of perceiving education; a space of possibility for schooling is opened which excludes certain issues; a preferred school is formed in which priority is given to subject knowledge and order; distinct subject positions are offered to different figures in education, including teachers who are given an authoritative voice and educational researchers who are not; and finally the “good teacher” constructed is an expert who bears and transmits subject knowledge and a proponent of traditional values who manages to individualise teaching. It is also found in the study that a conservative discourse serves to provide an illness for a remedy that is put forward by a neo-liberal discourse, and that media logic is at work in the framing of educational issues in the practice studied