How teachers value skills and content in Technology teaching in Swedishcompulsory school – a “climate” change

In the Swedish curricula, Technology is described in terms of five skills and core content divided into three areas. In this paper, we interpret and define the three areas of core content, founded on different scientific base areas (SBA): (1) Engineering science, (2) Developing and making and (3) Human, society and environment.The SBA-model is based on the Swedish Technology curriculum and is constructed with inspiration from previous research in natural science education (Östman, 1995); with relation to the philosophy of technology knowledge (e.g., Ropohl, 1997) and to technology education; in curriculum emphasis (Klasander, 2010), in different views of technology among students (DiGironimo, 2011).Technology has developed from being a vocational subject to a broader, complex and comprehensive subject. Evaluations show that teachers in Sweden have difficulties in interpreting the content of the whole subject and its skills. During the autumn and winter 2018-2019, CETIS developed a material for inspiration of teachers, which shows the width of the subject including skills, content and time consumption. In the present study, we showed the material to about 130 teachers. We asked them to discuss it in groups and to fill in a form. In the form, they were asked to value the five skills of technology, based on how important they rate the skills in comparison to each other. They could also express their opinions of the material. We analysed their values of the skills and their opinions about content in relation to SBA. The result shows that the teachers focus on SBA 2 Developing and making and SBA 3 Human, society and environment when they teach Technology. Compared to previous studies, the focus in teaching is transferred towards social and environmental aspectsQC 20190916