Att organisera specialpedagogisk verksamhet : En intervjustudie om hur rektorer beskriver arbetet med specialpedagogiska praxisgemenskaper och autonomi i grundskolan

Principals within the Swedish school system have a rather extensive mission, where they lead the inner work of the school, including the organization of how the school work with special needs education. With that said, principals play a very important part when it comes to creating communities of practice, a practice where the pedagogues can participate according to culture standards and within special activities in relation to the special needs education. In a community of practice focusing on special needs education, one can build a practice based view on how education should be organized and that in turn is a mean for development. There could be some challenges in this work though – challenges regarding visions about special needs education and differences in visions created by principals compared to visions created by SENCOs (special educational needs coordinators). Who’s in charge of special needs education practice when visions differs? It becomes a question in relation to autonomy and autonomous processes within the special needs education practice. Using a sociology perspective, focusing mainly on social practice, social systems and social facts, but also professional autonomy, this study uses a qualitative method to give more knowledge about principals’ organization of the special needs education practice. The study uses thematically opened interviews of principals in Swedish compulsory schools to collect empirical data and the analytical method uses codes, themes and conclusions related to the central concepts of the study: communities of practice, organizational culture and autonomy. The results of the study shows that the principals actively work with the creation of communities of practice within the special needs education practice but the result also shows problematic aspects of implementation of special needs education visions in ordinary education and everyday work. The results also show that principals consider themselves to have the outmost responsibility for the decisionmaking in special needs education practice. The results show signs of difficulty in delegation even though the principals show explicit trust in SENCOs. The conclusion of the study is that there are difficulties in the transfer of visions within a special needs community of practice while organizational conditions play a part in limiting autonomous work. The principals participating in the study face similar problems with student health care not being seen as a part of the regular education work, and there seem to be problems with teachers expressing issues concerning adjustments in the classroom in order to care for the need of each pupil in school.