”Det är svårt att lära en gammal hund att sitta och på en skola finns det många gamla hundar” - En kvalitativ intervjustudie av lärares erfarenheter av sitt handlingsutrymme.

Sammanfattning

The Public Health Agency of Sweden are reporting negative statistics regarding the mental health of the LGBTQ-community. The Swedish National Agency for Education has therefore tasked all Swedish teachers and schools to implement a more inclusive way of processing questions regarding the LGBTQ-community in their ways of educating. The aim of this study is therefore to scrutinize teachers' own view of their discretion to implement these types of questions in their respective subjects. The chosen methods for this essay were qualitative semi-structured interviews with four different teachers with different subjects and workplaces. To complement the interviews, we also conducted an analysis of documents consisting of articles written by teachers or of teachers experiences regarding the subject of the essay. To analyse our results we used Michael Lipsky's theory of street-level bureaucracy. Our study found that, as a teacher, implementing new ideas and reforms in schools in Sweden is navigating a conglomerate of factors. One of the most influential difficulties according to our results were found in the relationship between the teachers and students. These relationships often had a connection to prevailing norms both in the classroom and society as a whole. Which led to an education that catered to the pupils and the specific teachers' own norms and expectance of acceptance rather than the demands from governing bodies. Resources in the form of knowledge of the given subject and a lack of time to implement changes also made up a restraint in the teacher's discretion.