Teachers’ situations of choices – A qualitative interview study on five teachers’ reasoning about the design of religious education (RE) in upper secondary school.

Religious education (RE) is one of eight mandatory courses in upper secondary school in Sweden, due to the curriculum of GY11. It has a broad and extent content in comparison to its limited educational time, giving an indication that RE teachers need to make strategic didactical choices. This study focuses on lifting the RE teachers’ own voices by finding out situations where they describe a need of making didactical choices, what didactical choices they end up doing and what motivates those choices. Based on grounded theory, five qualitative interviews with RE teachers in upper secondary school has been interpreted and extracted as the empirical basis of the presented result. The results connect the situations of choices with the decision basis and didactic choices, where the final didactical choice can be understood from the two other factors. The result also leads on to three aspects of decision basis: the student, the teacher, and the organization of school. Thus, the result should be interacted with contemporary studies, as it only aims to be comprehended as one perspective, opening for and hopefully inspiring to further research