Where the law ends understanding begins : An analysis of referents in the Swedish educational act and how they are understood by interpreting high-school teachers

This essay consists of a heuristic analysis of referents in the Swedish educational act, leaning on the methodological guidelines of discourse analysis. The overall aim of the essay has been to analyse in what way language in the educational act works as guidelines and law in relation to teachers’ work. To correspond to this aim an openly structured questionnaire has been used, providing an empirical view of how teachers understand certain words, or referents, in the educational act. This empirical data has then been shaped to a spectrum view of the definitions of the referents showing a number of deductable facts, including the significance of the apparent use of institutional and professional language, which then have been viewed from two theoretical perspectives. The theories are a structuralist one represented by Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a sociolinguistic one represented by Michel Foucault and Norman Fairclough. The theoretical analysis is based on three stages of the constitution of meaning in the communication between the educational act and the interpreting teachers. Four questions has guided the analyses and reads as follows: Which referents are used in the educational act to describe the purpose and forming of the education for the students?; How are said referents interpreted by active teachers?; Which are the gains of the understandings provided by the theoretical perspectives of the analysis of referents in relation to the empirical enquiry?; How are the referents to be understood functioning as imperative law regarding the teacher and its practice? The main conclusion of the essay is that depending on our theoretical understanding of language, the function of the Swedish educational act as imperative law with a clear relationship between vision and reality is questionable. Therefor it is important to acknowledge the need for guidelines in teachers’ interpretation of the law, better ensuring consensus in how central values of the school corresponds in practice.