sv Between stipulated objectives and open-ended meanings

Emancipatory aspirations in theachers’ descriptions of their assessment practice in civics and history

Abstract

Previous studies of assessment in history and social studies in the Swedish school, have primarily focused on what teachers assess or how students achieve (Berg & Persson, 2020). However, the aim of this article is to examine the way different understandings of the emancipatory potential within the mentioned subjects actualize various chal-lenges and opportunities in the assessment process. The collection of data is founded on eight interviews with teachers based in upper secondary school in the central region of Sweden.

The discussion concerning the crucial conditions necessary to induce a new generation to comprehend and transform the existing social conditions may appear polemical. While some researchers emphasize the importance of what (preestablished) knowledge is conveyed (cf. Young, 2013), others emphasize the value of letting teaching correspond to the uniquely situated interests, questions and demands of individual students (cf. e.g. De Lissovoy , 2010; Tur Porres et al., 2014).

Nevertheless, in the eight interviews with teachers, the balance between the preestablished knowledge and the adjustment to individual demands, appears to be less dichotomic. In the convention of professional teacher assessment, the adaptation rather seems to take a dialectical form in the encounter between subject content and the student. A teacher may both express obstacles associated with predictability and convey an effort to make the assessment process as open as possible (cf. Biesta, 2009). The way the student acts has an influence upon, though it is not alone decisive for, the content assigned for teaching.