Resisting the standards agenda? Swedish subject teachers and special educators’ discourses on teaching students with different needs

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of Swedish subject teachers and special educators’ discourses on the teaching of students with different needs in order to study their enactment of inclusive education in relation to competing demands. Drawing on notions of policy enactment, policies are here not only understood as regulatory texts, but also as carriers of discourses with certain ideas of what is common sense or true. In particular, the analysis aims to explore local school actors’ opportunities for resistance towards dominant standards policies that has been argued to constrain inclusive ambitions in schools by promoting competition and standardised goals of performance. Three discourses were discerned in the analysis: a standards discourse, a subject-teaching discourse, and a discourse of well-being, which are discussed in relation to each other and to the idea of inclusive education. While the standards discourse was dominant in the interviews, the analysis also shows how the interviewed teachers and special educators moved between different discourses, which provided some opportunities to challenge standards thinking. However, such resistance was not necessarily connected to a movement towards inclusion.