När PBS kom till byn : Berättelser om erfarenheter av ProblemBaserad Skolutveckling

This thesis presents a study on different school actors’ narratives about how they have experienced a participation in a school development collaboration called PBS, problem based school development. A school development and research project based at Karlstad University. The analysis is inspired by a narrative approach and a critical perspective on policy, were policy is understood as both text and discourse. The aim of the study is to show how the carrying through of this new policy (PBS) is received and reconstructed in three Swedish municipal settings. In the analysis the participant’s narratives are also related to the reconstructions of the field of education politics that has been carried out the last decades, here in Sweden as well as in other countries around the world. In this study 46 interviews were carried out. Official texts from each of the three school organizations have also been studied. As analytical tools parts of a model called the zoom-model and three different concepts, taken from the field of organization studies have been used. The overall result shows that those who work in schools today are engaged in a large amount of development works, claims and ways of working that they themselves choose to enact. The results also show how the interviewees receive and charge these ideas with their own previous experiences and how this is done in discursive contexts that shape what is considered normal and evident. One conclusion is that further attention ought to be made to the significance of the local context when it comes to carry through a new idea on development and change. A conclusion drawn from how interpretations and reconstructions of both development models prior to PBS and of the national steering model came to play important roles in how PBS was received and reconstructed in the studied municipalities. But different interpretations of the PBS model also led to tensions within and between the different areas of the organizations. Tensions that can be described as dilemmas, implicated by an ongoing cacophony of policy voices, whose prescriptions pull on different directions. When the PBS-policy arrives in this discursive room the results show how this policy can become a tool in line with new discursive narratives of education, regardless the intensions formulated in the context of policy text construction.PBS-Problembaserad skolutvecklin