Ni får ju prata, men... : om skolans pedagogiska idéer och uppdrag utifrån begreppet kommunikation

The purpose of this study is to describe the three most significant pedagogical ideas and their impact on the national curriculum from the concept of communication. As the school is a social learning community this study looks at some teachers’ perceptions and experiences of teaching with a communicative approach, and the obstacles they claim to meet. The educationist Kieran Egan argue that these three pedagogical ideas are incompatible and that a curriculum that compromises them is doomed to fail. He mean that a new coherent view on education is required and should be based on students’ understandings. The knowledge should be presented as it easiest can be comprehended during a person’s intellectual development. The study includes qualitative interviews with four teachers that teach students from 6 to 9 years old, and field observations in their classrooms. The main conlusions are that a communicative approach requires a suitable classroom design that enables co-operative learning. The teachers in the study pairs their students two and two or four and four to enable that a dialog occurs between the students, on the subject of the lesson. The classroom design also makes a statement of dissociation with traditional teaching if the teacher’s desk is placed in the back of the classroom, out of focus. As the national curriculum highlights the importance of communication all teachers in the study encourages their students to co-operative learning and communication, but find the noise difficult to handle. It’s their conclusion that smaller groups of students is highly desirable and possibly the only way to overcome the incompatibility that exists within the curriculum