Klassrummets moraliska ordning : iscensättningen av lärare och elever som subjekt för ansvarsdiskursen i klassrummet

The perspective of this dissertation is grounded in the ideas and concepts of Michel Foucault. In analy-sing our empirical material we used his notions of discourse and discoursive practice, power, govern-mentality and subjectification. We were also inspired by Thomas Popkewitz, Jennifer Gore and Nicolas Rose. The aim of this dissertation is to elucidate how teachers and students are constructed as moral and ethi-cal subjects. It is our intention to bring into sight the moral order of classrooms, exemplified through the concept of responsibility. We used participant observations, in-depth interviews and governmental committees’ reports to answer our research questions. The study was carried out in six Swedish schools, grades 5-11, where lessons were videotaped. When asked about the meaning of responsibility teachers and students spoke of order, social functioning and self formation. Teachers said that the construction of responsibility is dependent upon the atmosphere in the classroom, and that it may require training, but some saw it as inherent in human nature or con-structed by students themselves. According to students, understanding, interest and fun facilitate their assumption of responsibility. Power relations in action were analyzed from the videotapes. The power techniques we called Invitation and Normalizing judgements were crucial for the construction of the responsibility governed by the self. Teachers were confronted with their own classroom practices by means of stimulated recall episodes. Our analysis focused on the rules and standards by which the meaning of teachers’ work was construc-ted. References to psychological conceptions were frequent, populational reasoning occurred, and histo-rical assignments were inscribed in the ways in which they spoke about their roles. Our results display three different discourses on responsibility: a behavioristic, a naturalistic and a hu-manistic discourse. There are traces of a behavioristic discourse at the macro level in government rep-orts written in the 1970s but the naturalistic discourse is predominant during that period. In reports written in the 1990s the humanistic discourse is central