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Abstract

This article analyses how students in two Swedish upper secondary schools with different demographics articulate inequalities, and how their positions in society give rise to different learning patterns. Using material from focus group interviews undertaken during a teaching module about trust, the article departs from the proposition that learning about trust in school also means negotiating trust and experiences from outside the school context. The article concludes that students who identify as non-ethnic Swedes must bridge the gap between the learning content and their own experiences. Such negotiations allow for a critical view on democratic institutions. However, this critical potential stems from a position that also necessitates more work to ‘learn’ the content provided, compared to the ethnic Swedes who encounter the teaching materials from a position where it can be inserted and combined with an already existing and matching worldview. The article argues that challenging the views and the normative position held by the latter group is a remaining task for citizenship teaching.

Keywords

critical citizenship upper secondary schools Sweden ethnicity gender

Introduction

Despite a strong discourse on Swedish exceptionalism regarding gender equality and non-discrimination (Nygren et al., 2018), Swedish schools are not freed from inequalities based on gender and ethnicity. In the Swedish context, the OECD (2015) has pointed out that inequalities in learning outcomes are entrenched in the current Swedish school system due to segregation. Further, in 2021 a heated debate burst out as it became known that the government had excluded immigrant students from participating in the PISA survey to boost Swedish results (e.g. Swedish National Audit Office, 2021).¹ Inequalities and structural discrimination based on race/ethnicity and gender have been evidenced to affect students’ learning possibilities (e.g. Mansouri and Kamp, 2007; Pérez-Aronsson, 2019; Rasheed et al., 2020), teachers’ expectations of students’ capacities (e.g. Jones and Myhill, 2004; Kempf, 2020; Martino et al., 2004; Oxman-Martinez and Choi, 2014), and what kind of citizenship teaching is provided (e.g. Gordon et al., 2008; Gustafsson, 2016; Osman et al., 2020).

Studies about teaching democracy in social science often stress the importance of enabling students to become critical and active citizens. This scholarship presents different ideas about what citizenship skills are necessary and how to best prepare students. Some scholars stress the necessity of practising deliberation (Englund, 2006; McAvoy and Hess, 2013), while others emphasize the importance of knowledge (Persson, et al., 2020; Sandahl, 2015). Westheimer and Kahne (2004), who mapped citizenship teaching in the US argue that teachers tend to aim for different types of citizens: a personally responsible citizen, a participatory citizen or a justice-oriented citizen. Proponents of critical and multicultural citizenship stress the ideals of societal change and justice (Castro, 2013). However, researchers have found that educational policy discourse (Knight-Abowitz and Harnish, 2006), social science textbooks (Arensmeier, 2018), and teaching in general (Børhaug, 2008; Westheimer and Kahne, 2004) are often geared more toward loyalty, obedience and cohesion within states. From a feminist intersectional perspective, these observations suggest questions about in what ways different experiences of structural inequalities play out in teaching and learning for critical citizenship.

This article is based on empirical evidence from focus groups undertaken in 2020 and 2021 before and after a teaching module on ‘social and political trust’. Four classes from two upper secondary schools situated in different demographic contexts in Sweden participated in the study. The aim of the article is to understand how students’ self-identified positions and lived experiences affect their learning for critical and active citizenship. The article seeks to answer the following questions: How do students position themselves and how do they speak about inequalities and differences? How does this affect learning for citizenship?

After a section presenting previous research, the Swedish context, and the intersectional approach of this article, I discuss the empirical material and method. After that, my findings are presented in two thematic sections. The first section discusses how the students position themselves in relation to an imagined ‘Swedishness’, and how this creates ties to their peers in the focus groups. The second section analyses how teaching, previous experiences and self-articulated group belongings affect citizenship learning.

Citizenship education and intersectionality

Teaching for critical citizenship includes providing students with motivations and values, the competence and willingness to participate in society, and to further their democratic ideals such as recognising that people may hold multiple perspectives on an issue (see, e.g. Haste, 2004). Researchers speaking of multicultural citizenship often stress the latter along with promoting equality and justice as essential values, inspired by either liberal (Kymlicka, 1995) or critical (Young, 1989) ideas about multicultural citizenship. Dilworth (2004, 2008) argues that multicultural citizenship teaching stresses the student’s ability to participate in producing an ethnically diverse and just society (see also Banks, 2008; Vickery, 2016), while Castro (2014) describes the aim of teaching critical and multicultural citizenship in terms of: ‘challenging gaps between the rhetoric of democracy and the reality of democracy; promoting critical reflection and consciousness; and encouraging collective action, or activism, as a way to transform institutional barriers to democracy’. (Castro, 2014: 191). An essential aspect of multicultural citizenship is, according to Vickery (2016), to combat ‘assimilationist notions of citizenship to legitimise the rights of citizens to hold allegiances to both their cultural and political communities’ (p. 31).

Accordingly, research on multicultural citizenship teaching seeks to challenge teaching practices which imply that group belongings which go beyond identification with the national context are seen as a problem. As explained by Dyrness and Abu El-Haj (2020) research on education for citizenship often aims to improve teaching methods to integrate students, rather than to view access to several cultural contexts as an asset for scrutinizing society. An increased attention to culturally sensitive teaching approaches (see e.g. Howard, 2021) and examples of transformative citizenship teaching, from contexts across the world is reported in the literature (see e.g. Starkey, 2021). However, the curriculum and teaching in the Nordic countries has been found to be particularly focused on consensus building and featuring self-characterizations of being especially egalitarian and human rights-friendly (Eriksen and Stein, 2022; Jaffe-Walters, 2019; Osler, 2017). According to Audrey Osler (2017) this leads to ‘a risk of moral superiority, in which the newcomer must be inducted into “our” human rights framework’ (p. 152). Research in schools in Norway and Denmark find that the idea of Nordic exceptionalism leads to the existence of a form of colourblind racism based on notions of Western and liberal thinking as an objective and non-discriminatory knowledge ideal (Eriksen and Stein, 2022; Jaffe-Walters, 2019).

The research presented in this article seeks to contribute to these findings by starting from an intersectional approach. The analysis will focus on how students position themselves and negotiate gender, ethnicity and class during a social and political trust teaching module, and how this affects their citizenship learning.

An essential context of this study pertains to the fact that while the history of Sweden includes colonialism both in areas outside of its current borders (Körber, 2019) and in areas belonging to the indigenous Sami population (Ojala, 2020), the term ‘ethnicity’ is in current Swedish public discourse most often used in connection to post-World War II immigration, referring to persons who are either immigrants or children of immigrants. I will use the words ‘ethnicity’ and ‘immigrants’, being aware that these words are problematic and that when talking about immigrants, this means constructing a category of ‘others’ out of people with varied experiences and situations. My ambition is, however, that this article will contribute to problematising such othering.

Turning to intersectionality, the word was coined by Kimberlee Crenshaw in 1990. She used the metaphor of a road crossing to analyse how gender and race constantly interacted in black women’s lives. Crenshaw’s article must, however, first and foremost be seen as part of the criticism black feminists had directed toward mainstream feminism for quite some time, arguing that white middle-class women had monopolised the category of ‘women’ (see, e.g. hooks, 1981; Lorde, 1984; Mohanty, 1988). Gender and ethnicity have also remained an important focus of intersectionality studies, despite criticism from theorists arguing that intersectionality must constantly problematise the ‘other question’: what other power structures are at work in any given situation (see, e.g. Matsuda, 1991). My approach to intersectionality in this article is to be sensitive to how students position themselves and speak about (in)equalities. However, my theorising also uses insights from feminist theory, critical whiteness studies, and postcolonial studies to problematise how the ‘norm’ is constructed as universal (Eduards, 2002; Santos, 2018; Tanner, 2018; Young, 1989).

The teaching module

The teaching model was developed in a collaborative research project aiming to develop and analyse new ways of teaching democracy in social science education. The research team consisting of two didactic scholars and two political scientists developed two similar teaching modules of 7–8 lessons about democracy from the perspective of political and social trust together with four upper-secondary social science teachers from two different schools. The two schools have been pseudonymised as Tulip High/Tulip and Rose High/ Rose in this article. The modules were designed according to the principles of inquiry-based teaching (Swan et al., 2018). The teachers subsequently used the designs to teach one class of students respectively as part of the regular curriculum of the social science 2 course (Swedish: Samhällskunskap 2) in the second year of upper secondary school. Each of the four selected classes consisted of 32–34 students enrolled in the economics, social science or natural sciences programs.

The module was structured by an overarching ‘compelling’ question, and each lesson was governed by sub-questions derived from the original inquiry (e.g. Swan et al., 2018). Using government agencies as examples, the focus was on the concept of trust. The inquiries started with the compelling questions, ‘Should government agencies be trusted?’ (Tulip High), and ‘Can Swedish society be strengthened through increased trust?’ (Rose High). After studying what a government agency is, students explored the levels of trust in society, how trust in government agencies arise, increase or decrease. The students were provided with a simple graphic model of ‘the building blocks of trust’ for theoretical scaffolding (see Holmberg and Weibull, 2013 for the content of this model). Decision-making and other government agency activities and their implications for democracy were explored using the model in relation to textbook material and various case descriptions. The teachers provided different cases in different classes. The cases were chosen based on the teachers’ knowledge of their students. While the research team initially tried to have the teachers to use the same cases, the teachers from Rose objected with the argument that it would not work for their students. In hindsight, this indicates the importance of teachers knowing their students, and how this enables them to be sensitive to their students’ life-worlds in order to pick cases which engage and come forth as relevant to their experiences, something which is in line with culturally sensitive pedagogy (Howard, 2021; Lynn, 2006). The cases which were finally chosen related to the police, care facilities for disabled people, migration authorities and social insurance. Most cases included decision-making dilemmas, such as: ‘Should the police always write a ticket, regardless of mitigating circumstances?’ or ‘To what extent should the migration authority consider individual circumstances in their decision-making?’

In a previous article reporting from this project (Jansson et al., 2023), I and my colleagues conclude that teaching about trust and government agencies confronted students with the outcome of democratic decisions rather than descriptions of how democracy ideally works. As recommended by Castro (2014), this design came to contrast the idea of democracy with its actual outcomes, something which encouraged critical citizenship thinking. Our previous research found that the teaching increased students’ knowledge and critical citizenship skills in both schools (Jansson et al., 2023).

Methods and material

The two selected schools are of the same size, with around 1200 students each. They were actively chosen to be middle range in terms of the grades students’ needed to be enrolled. Tulip High had higher merit points for admission than Rose High (Upper Secondary Schools Admission Office, 2018). The schools are situated in areas with different demographics and socioeconomic compositions. Tulip High is located in an upper-middle-class area dominated by ethnically Swedish inhabitants. Rose High is situated in a lower-middle-class/working-class area with a more significant portion of inhabitants with a family history of migrating to Sweden. Each of the four selected classes consisted of 32–34 students enrolled in the economics, social science or natural sciences programs. About half of the lessons were held online because of the pandemic. The online lessons made student interactions more difficult to observe and, as we found, interaction was less frequent. All but one lesson was observed by the researchers (in total 25 lessons). Before and after the teaching module 6–8 students from each class participated in a focus group interview. Background data for students was collected through a survey sent out to all students at both schools before teaching.

This article is based primarily on the focus group materials. The first empirical section where I analyse how students position themselves in relation to their peers in the focus groups, is solely based on focus group material. In the second empirical section about critical citizenship learning, I use the classroom observations as a backdrop. The cases and the model used in teaching were much discussed by the students during the second focus groups. Typically, the examples brought up in the focus groups were also those which attracted most discussion in the classroom.

The survey data shows that both schools had an overrepresentation of students identifying as women (59% Tulip and 76% Rose). In Rose High, 46% of the students identified as ‘Swedes’, and 36% identified themselves as ‘feeling both Swedish and belonging to another country’. Thirty-six percent of Rose High students had parents with a higher education degree. In Tulip High, 91% of the students identified as Swedes, 7% felt they belonged in Sweden and another country, and 80% had parents with higher education.

The students participating in the focus groups were enrolled in second year, upper secondary school, aged 17–18 years old. Six to eight students from each participating class were selected by the teachers. Each of the four groups were interviewed before and after the teaching module. All in all, there were four focus groups, and eight focus group interviews. The focus groups were held physically at the schools. The selected students were reasonably representative in relation to the over-all composition of students in the two schools. In relation to the classes in which the teaching module was implemented, the focus group participants were representative of their classes in terms of group belongings. There are some indications of a selection bias related to good academic achievement. One of the focus groups consisted of only young women (the class they were recruited from consisted of women and only two men), while the others had an equal division between young men and women. The focus group participants were not specifically asked about their ethnic or socio-economic identifications, but from the material it is possible to interpret the Tulip High groups to consist of students who identified as Swedes, while they varied somewhat in how they identified their socio-economic status. The participants from Rose High identified themselves as both Swedes and as having ties to another country, except for one student in each group. Among those who expressed a more precise ethnic affinity apart from Swedish, it was articulated in terms of religion – Islam – or a geographic belonging in the Middle East. Socio-economic status was not indicated during the focus groups in Rose High.

The researchers all identified, and would appear to the students, as Swedish or Nordic. So did three of the teachers, while one teacher would appear as having ties outside of Sweden. The appearance of the researchers and the fact that they worked at the university influenced the meeting with the students in the focus groups. Our interpretation was that during the first meeting, all students wanted to show that they were knowledgeable. We also sensed that the students in the Rose High groups felt that we considered them as ‘representatives’ for the sociodemographic profile of the area. We found that the students became more secure and relaxed during the second round of focus groups. Presumingly, this was due to them becoming more accustomed to speaking about trust after the teaching module and that they knew us and how we acted during the interviews. The group of researchers continuously reflected on what happened during the focus groups and how the students different group belongings affected our interpretations. Further, we also reflected on the fact that our language and vocabulary were similar with the way the Tulip students spoke, and that we more easily identified with those students and the ways they expressed themselves. At some points we found that we had to re-evaluate our own interpretations of the material, especially in terms of how we decided what could be characterized as qualification of knowledge.

The first focus group session started with an elicitation assignment, where the students were asked to rank government agencies and political actors according to which one they trusted the most. After this, their motivations for ranking the different actors and agencies were the starting point for discussions about various aspects of trust. The second session started with a question about what they had learned, and starting from there, discussions about trust and democracy ensued. The researchers moderated the deliberations, sometimes asking a student to develop their thoughts but also posing questions to make the conversation move on or to change the direction of the discussion. All sessions were recorded and transcribed. The focus groups were undertaken in Swedish, and all quotes from the material in this article have been translated into English by the author.

While the teaching has been found to have impacted on students’ critical citizenship knowledge (Jansson et al., 2023), this article focuses on how students position themselves, and hence on variations between student groups. Theoretically, the article starts from the insight that students learn both inside and outside school, and that their experiences of society influence their learning (Dyrness and Abu El-Haj, 2020). To understand how the teaching in combination with the students’ experiences of inequalities results in different learning patterns and different conditions for becoming critical citizens I searched the material for articulations of experiences and positions, how the students contrasted their position with others and what positionings the teaching module gave rise to. For this purpose, focus groups are a good choice since the method produces co-constructions of meaning. This entails that the position students carve out for themselves must also be recognised by the others in the group. However, the meanings expressed in the material cannot be disentangled from the situation in which they were produced (Philipps and Mrowczynski, 2021; Silverman, 2017). I will now move on to discuss the results, starting with how students position themselves.

Imagined Swedishness and protective masculinity

The students at Rose high continuously negotiated what it meant to be enrolled in a school in a suburban area described as affected by social problems. While they expressed trust in authorities and their peers, they also voiced concerns, especially about public authorities being racist. As one student said when discussing the police: ‘We hope they [the police] protect the inhabitants. However, I have also experienced that they do not’. The students referred to themselves as ‘dark’² and discussed experiences of having been racialized. In the focus group context, talking about themselves as ‘dark’ compared to Swedes revealed how they believe they would be perceived by authorities such as the police. Hence, they constructed themselves as ‘others’ and positioned themselves against an imagined ‘Swedishness’.

A telling example concerned the Swedish debate about immigration and integration. One student commented on the current media debate about stricter immigration regulations and more police in the suburbs:

They [the politicians] argue for more policemen in challenged neighbourhoods [Sw: utsatta områden],³ which sends the signal to the police that ’we are going to get these wogs [Sw: blattarna]’.⁴

This statement shows a critical reading of current news reporting from a viewpoint where the student finds himself not only constructed as ‘other’, but as part of a group constructed as the problem.

In general, inequalities were discussed within the framework of racism in the groups at Rose High. The Rose High students often used personal experiences to discuss and problematise the concept of trust. When students articulated experiences of racism, even those who did not participate in actively constructing the existence of racism validated the stories of their peers.

S1:

I have had two employers; both were Turks. It is like, those are the jobs I can get. Swedish employers do not get back to me – contacting employers of a foreign origin is easier.

S2:

Well, I think like this, foreign employers trust other foreigners more.

S1:

Exactly.

S3:

But even so, this is based on some racism.

S4:

I see what you mean, but don’t you think it is a sign of people having more, kind of, trust for those who are similar to themselves? But of course, that, in turn, rests on segregation and all of that.

In this exchange, the students validate the woman’s experience of only being able to get a job from a foreign employer by analysing in what way this was an expression of racism. Doing so, the self-positioning as ‘other’ was accompanied by a sense of community in the group. The few group members (one in each group in Rose) who did not share the experiences of racism were often silent, and they did not voice their different ethnic position as Swedes.

Turning to Tulip high, identity markers were related to being a good student or being economically privileged. Their discussions on trust concerned established principles in liberal democracies, which they supported. This can be illustrated with an example where the argument for why courts are trustworthy and fair was because of ‘strict regulations’, judges having ‘long education’, and that ‘both sides are represented’. Or as one student argued:

OK, all laws might not be one hundred per cent, but the court’s task is to ensure that the laws are followed, and in Sweden, I believe that everyone is judged according to the laws.

This opinion that the laws – decided by politicians – may be flawed but that the judicial system is unbiased reflects the discussion in the group where non-discrimination, objectivity and impartiality were stressed as necessary for trustworthiness. Further, these principles were seen to characterise the Swedish system, which the students embraced. This corroborates what has been shown in previous research, that rights and non-discrimination are strongly connected to Nordic, in this case Swedish, national identity (Eriksen and Stein, 2022; Jaffe-Walters, 2019; Osler, 2017). Not least this became obvious as several students expanded their own ‘opinions’ to be representative of the general population. One young man argued, ‘I have always had a positive opinion about the police – and that is a common opinion too’. Another male student held a similar position: ‘It is natural [to trust authorities]’. The idea that it is ‘natural’ to have the same trust as oneself, or that one’s own opinion is like most people’s beliefs, is a way of positioning oneself as an example of the universal citizen: There is no discrepancy between society’s norms, what is taught at school, and the ideas held by the individual.

In Tulip High the ‘other’ was constructed in opposition to the individual/societal norms embodied by the participants themselves. One young man explains why he trusts the political system:

I have high [political] trust, but it is also about your parents. I am rather well off, but it is also about your parents and what privileges you have. If you have relatively poor parents and live in a neighbourhood where people are poor – then I think people will have less trust. Moreover, I do not think that is because they are examining society more critically, but it is about whom you connect with.

This quote is intriguing in that it acknowledges the student’s privileges but quickly goes on to mainly discuss how those who are ‘different’ hypothetically deviate from what is constituted as ‘good’, that is, having high trust, while simultaneously dismissing their lower trust to be the result of a more remarkable ability to scrutinise authorities.

Being Swedish was never mentioned explicitly in the Tulip High groups. However, it did constitute an important silent tie, as the students seemed to strongly identify with the values attributed to the Swedish political system. The overall non-articulation of group belonging contributes to my interpretation that the students primarily positioned themselves as good students. This positioning is connected to their being in school. This ‘identity’ can easily be exchanged for another in a different context. This tells how privileged groups are not articulated as groups at all. A phenomenon described in whiteness studies (Frankenberg, 2004; Tanner, 2018) and feminist studies (see, e.g. Eduards, 2002). Instead, the group constituting the ‘norm’ remains invisible, and their members are therefore perceived as first and foremost individuals who may take on and lay off identities, such as students, train conductors, or CEOs, and consider themselves entitled to present their experiences as universal or natural.

While Rose High students discussed inequalities based on race/ethnicity, Tulip high students tended to word inequalities in economic terms. When describing broader societal issues, they often refered to geographic segregation. In media reporting, segregation is often discussed in terms of challenged neighbourhoods, a concept which is tightly connected to suburbs where many inhabitants with an immigrant background live (e.g. Puur et al., 2019). However, some Tulip high students tended to speak of such segregation in terms of ‘poorer’ [Sw: fattigare] areas, a wording which refers to economic deprivation. Whether this is because of a reluctance to touch on the topic of (non-Swedish) ethnicity or something else, is difficult to say.

Young women, both in Rose and Tulip High spoke of experiences related to gender. One Tulip High woman argued that she ‘cannot afford to have trust’: ‘I am a young girl, and I live in a challenged neighbourhood, and I have sort of witnessed things’. This statement is imbued with intersections between age, gender, class and ethnicity, although class and ethnicity are phrased as geographical segregation. However, what is picked up by the others in the group is gender.

In all groups, and in both schools, gender is primarily discussed in the context of social trust, that is, trust in fellow citizens. This indicates that inequalities based on gender are understood as an interpersonal problem, rather than a political or institutional problem. Female students tell about feelings of vulnerability when walking home at night, alone in a deserted part of the neighbourhood, or being looked at by men at the gym. When these episodes are brought up, the men validate the women’s stories. The young men also tend to describe their own behaviour undertaken to ease women’s fear – for instance, walking on the other side of the street or ensuring that women are not intimidated by their presence at the gym. By explaining how they behave to ease women’s concerns, the men take on a protective masculinity. As Iris Young has pointed out, protection implies a specific way of organizing gendered relations where the protector remains in power but simultaneously is seen as benevolent (e.g. Eduards, 2007; Young, 2003). Protective masculinity hides gender inequalities and promotes a community across gender difference. Taking on a protective masculinity makes it possible for men to acknowledge that they understand the women’s concerns about men, but despite them being men, they are not the problem.

In both groups, explicitly or implicitly, the essential group ties were formed either as being ‘other’ to an imagined Swedishness or as a non-articulated identification with Swedishness. This renders the students’ as either positioned as ‘other’ and the ‘problem’ or as universal individuals. These different positions affect the learning and developing of critical citizenship knowledge and skills during the teaching module, which I will now go on to explore.

Citizenship positions

The students’ different experiences positioned them differently regarding how they described their possibilities to act in society. Generally, the students in Tulip high found it very unlikely that they would be unjustly accused by the police or maltreated by authorities. Moreover, they were confident that if something wrong would occur, they could correct it. As one of the participants put it when discussing the hypothetical situation that she was misquoted after being interviewed by a journalist: ‘If that were the case, I would contact the newspaper and see if it was possible to change’. The combination of trust in that they will be treated correctly and that they can correct potential mistakes is empowering. Conversely, the students who fear being treated wrongly based on ethnicity instead express the fear that they will be questioned if they try to correct mistakes.

My brother was in a traffic accident. . .the police constantly asked questions like, ‘are you sure this was what happened’ and the ambulance staff asked, ‘is there something you want to tell me that you did not tell the police’. . .. and so on. . .

Interviewer:

So you mean that he felt questioned?

Yes.

This kind of narrative, expressing both the fear of being maltreated and the fear that no one will believe what you say, can be understood as a mechanism of disempowerment.

These respective empowering and disempowering features stems from the students’ previous lived experiences. The teachers tended to be sensitive to these different experiences in their teaching. For instance, the four teachers used somewhat different cases in their classes. The case most discussed in the focus groups at Tulip high was a true story about dental experiments on children with cognitive disabilities in Sweden in the 1950s, known as the Vipeholm experiments. The students generally interpreted this case as one of ‘blind trust’, which had gone wrong because no one questioned the experts and no one from the outside oversaw the experiments. The students did not problematise that those subjected to the experiments were disabled. Further, the fact that the case was situated in the past created distance, making it easier to dismiss structural inequalities. As noted by Eriksen and Stein (2022) in their study of how teachers in Norway talk about racism as no longer politically relevant, placing inequalities in the past facilitates the omission of structural problems, as the stories feed into ideas about a dark history which has been abandoned in favour of the current enlightened state. All in all, while the case did address the problem of ‘too much trust’ and obviously made the students aware of the necessity of scrutiny of experts and institutions, the case simultaneously allowed the students to remain in their comfort zone as it did not provoke discussions about power structures nor present time discrimination against disabled. It is also worth noting that this use of examples which are decoupled from the students’ own life worlds is similar to how the Tulip students themselves often used examples from newspapers or other sources, rather than departing from their own experiences.

The teachers in Rose high used fictional but realistic cases about police officers’ decisions to ticket or let pass minor traffic violations and a case about a decision made by the Swedish Migration Authority to deport a woman and her child from Sweden. Some of the participants expressed a slight surprise that the teachers had chosen examples where decisions made by the police could be discussed and even deemed wrong, rather than using cases where the police were portrayed as univocally correct. One student argued that this led her to trust the school more than before.

Especially the case based on the Migration Authority was actualized during the focus group interviews. This case was upsetting because the students thought the migration authority ‘did not consider all of the circumstances’. However, they also pointed out that even if they disagreed with the decision, the Migration Agency employee was following the legislation and ‘doing her job’. This discussion shows that the students understood that even if authorities follow democratically decided legislation, this does not mean that the result will be congruent with what the students believe to be morally right. The cases apparently reflected situations that reminded the students of their own lives. For example, one student told a story about a friend of his family who had been deported. Discussing these cases increased the students’ understanding of how government agencies work and gave them the tools to understand better and articulate what they believed was wrong.

Some materials were also used in all classes in both schools. For instance, all classes were presented with a model featuring aspects that are perceived to promote trust in government authorities. Among these were transparency and efficiency, which did not cause much discussion (apart from the students’ amusement in realizing that the secret police (SÄPO) is the most trusted authority in Sweden, despite its not-so-transparent activities). However, aspects such as ‘shared values (Sw: värdegrund)’ and ‘justice/fairness (Sw: rättvisa)’ became points of deliberation in the Rose high classroom (observation notes). In a focus group, one student noted:

I think these shared values’ are strange because they can never be fulfilled. Some people will agree, and others will disagree. When you do something about this, it will be improved for some people but worse for others. The majority might agree, and then the majority is strengthened, but there will also be those who disagree and will be even more marginalised.

When we asked one of the groups in Tulip high to discuss the same building brick of ‘shared values’, this led one of the students to explain:

I guess there are rather apparent templates for what is right or wrong. Of course, it can vary between persons what you believe is more important. . . and some people might have absurd ideas about what is right, with which no one else agrees. Nevertheless, speaking of people in general, I believe everyone relates to the same ideas about what is right and wrong (Sw: värdegrunder).

This reflection suggests that a standard set of shared values exists. Further, referring to ‘absurd ideas’, this quote indicate that the shared values are somewhat objectively correct, and not believing in these values means being deviant.

The more intense discussion about this aspect in Rose High and the strong conviction of the existence of shared values in Tulip High indicates that the students’ respective positions influence how they approach the teaching content. For Tulip High students, the model seemed to conceptualise trust as a set of ideas they could relate to and agree with. These ideas and values were defined but seldom questioned. In short, the student’s position as middle-class Swedes aligned with the teaching material and hegemonic discourse. Learning about the concept of trust qualified their knowledge and validated their position as citizens.

For the participants in Rose High, on the other hand, the model must be negotiated to fit their experiences and worldview. Learning about trust qualified the students’ reasoning and provided them with tools to articulate what they believe is wrong. However, their learning also included a negotiation which bridged their experiences with learning content based on a hegemonic gaze on society. Such negotiations allow for scrutinising how trust is conceptualized and to identify problems in the democratic system. However, this critical potential stems from the students being in a subjected position. While this creates learning opportunities, it also demands more work and engagement from these students. Further, this bridging of experience with teaching content is not always easy to articulate in a way that is immediately recognized as developing knowledge. In the research team’s interpretations of the material, we often found that we did not use such reasoning as examples of learning, even if these, when taking a closer look, included both critical analysis and deep knowledge about the political system. This insight from our research begs the question of what sort of knowledge and learning is recognized in schools, and indicates that the role of norms, identities and language may be important aspects to explore further. However, it is equally important to investigate how to challenge the worldviews of those students who position themselves as the norm.

Conclusion

This article has analysed how students in two different schools with different demographics position themselves, articulate inequalities, and how their positionality affects how and what they learn and how they are positioned as citizens.

The analysis shows that students in the current segregated school system took on either a position as ‘the other’ in relation to an imagined Swedishness or as a ‘non-group’ based on belonging to the ethnic Swedish middle class. Further, while female gender was articulated as ‘other’ in both groups this did not challenge the essential ties of the sense of belonging to the group. Partly this was because the voicing of being a woman as a vulnerable position gave rise to the reproduction of a benevolent protective masculinity on behalf of the men in the focus groups. This served to place gender inequalities outside the members of the group. Another finding is that students who positioned themselves as the other concerning ethnicity spoke of almost all inequalities from this perspective. Students who positioned themselves as not belonging to any group discussed most inequalities in terms of economy/class.

One important feature seemed to be that the voicing of inequalities was always made with reference to experience. It is also notable, that experiences were not used by those who positioned themselves as the norm, who instead referred to their opinions as ‘normal’ and universally objective. This indicates that the non-articulated group of ‘Swedish middle-class men’ stand out by not having to refer to experiences to motivate their opinions, and that all ‘others’ need to position themselves in relation to this group.

I have further argued that students who are not ethnic Swedes need to bridge the content of teaching with their experiences. While such negotiations can lead to learning, it is also more demanding than absorbing information which fits already existing worldviews and identifications. I argue that such bridging must be understood as invisible learning labour since it is demanded but seldom credited.

Teaching which relates to how the students’ themselves describe their lived experiences can be argued to enable critical learning in students who have experienced othering. On the other hand, when teaching relates to students in the norm-group by validating their position, it does not help this group to critically reflect on their own position. Hence, one insight from this research is that it is necessary to analyse further the ‘non-group’ identity and to develop teaching which acknowledges that this too is a specific position rather than a universal point of reference. Such studies are also necessary to unpack the hidden learning included in positions constructed as ‘other’ and to acknowledge the insights and learning that stem from this, even if it does not align with the current Swedish gaze on society represented in teaching materials.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Johan Sandahl, Patrik Johansson, Maria Wendt, Kjetil Børhaug, Michele Micheletti and Jan Germen Janmaat for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. I also want to send my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and careful readings.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, grant number 2019-03439

ORCID iD

Maria Jansson

Notes

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