‘I think I would have learnt more if they had tried to teach us more’ – performativity, learning and identities in a Swedish Transport Programme

Abstract

This study is based on an ethnography that was carried out in the Transport Programme (TP) in a Swedish upper secondary school (in this paper referred to as Rockmeadows High). The research is part of a larger project focusing on discourses on Intelligence in Swedish upper secondary school, and how these are produced and used in different educational contexts. The title of the article quotes Emily, a hardworking and high-achieving TP student. Emily is disappointed that the academic courses much of the time operate on a rote level, and that teachers’ expectations on the students in the programme generally are quite low. The present study also indicates, in line with several studies of vocational education in Sweden, that academic courses in vocational programmes often seem to provide scarce opportunity for theoretical learning and higher order thinking. Others suggest that the vocational courses present better conditions for such learning. The present article explores learning and instruction in different subjects and the conditions that are structuring them. It discusses the possibility that performativity pressure is one of the structuring forces. ‘Performativity’ is used here to refer to the notion that individuals and systems are valued based on their measured performances in regard to standards, and identified by those standards. Thus ascribed values become ends in themselves and render the use value of knowledge subordinate to the exchange value. This means that not only knowledge but also the pedagogical interaction and relationships become commodified. This is exactly what happens when new managerialism and economic rationality are imposed on the education system, as it has been throughout the Western world in the last decades. Swedish educational policy has gone far down this road, focusing measurable outcomes, individual choice and competition on all levels as means for quality. Still, not all spheres of education are dominated by the economistic rationality, as this articles aims to demonstrate and discuss.

Keywords:

• vocational education
• identity
• motivation
• performativity
• ethnography
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my deep gratitude to the students and teachers at Rockmeadows High for generously sharing their time, knowledge and experiences. Many thanks go to the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments and advice have helped me improve the paper, to Anna-Carin Johnsson, Peter Erlandson and Marianne Dovemark for helpful discussions and to Dennis Beach for great support and comments on earlier draughts. Final thanks go to the Swedish Research Council for funding.

Notes

1. A C-license is required for driving a HGV and an E-license for a HGV with a trailer. B-license is for a car.

2. Beth Hatt (2007) found that students who failed the traditional school subjects tended to adopt an identity as ‘street smart’ or ‘practical’, as opposed to ‘book smarts’. A similar notion to ‘street smart’ (having ‘practical intelligence’ developed through experience and doing, rather than ‘theoretical intelligence’ earned by studying) was strongly valued in the transports courses in Rockmeadows High (Korp 2011).

3. According to Kozulin (1998, 55), theoretical (as opposed to ‘empirical’) learning is what leads to generative knowledge: ‘to understand a process or an object theoretically is to construct its ideal form and be able to experiment with it. (…) A theoretical concept is “generative” in the sense that it should be possible to generate from it a number of empirical outcomes, it is universal so that all empirical data are explainable through it, and it should not require previous knowledge of all those phenomena it is expected to explain’. The concepts theoretical and empirical learning resemble Bernstein's (1996/2000) concepts vertical and horizontal discourse and could be linked to these in that a vertical discourse in the classroom is generative and allows the students to engage in theoretical learning in order to develop conceptual knowledge, while a horizontal discourse allows only for empirical learning that involves only the superficial aspects of a learning object.