An investigation of factors marginalising the Bildung goals of the Swedish gymnasium curriculum in chemistry teacher’s reports of their teaching

Sammanfattning: Bildung (in Swedish bildning), has historical relevance for the Swedish education system and remains a crucial element of the Swedish school curriculum today. Significantly, economic goals also inform the content and form of the curriculum with research findings suggesting that these goals dominate over, or marginalise the curriculum’s humanistic or Bildung goals. Since evidence suggests that both Bildung and Bildung-related capacities may have crucial importance in terms of the level of meaningfulness individuals experience in relation to the knowledge they learn and the contribution they are able to make in the promotion of healthy democratic societies, such a marginalisation may represent a significant risk to pupil’s (and society’s) health. A question of relevance to educational research therefore is in what aspect, if any, do economic goals, as manifested within the Swedish school education system, marginalise the curriculum’s humanistic or Bildung goals in gymnasium school teaching? Three chemistry teachers were recruited from gymnasium schools in Southern Sweden and interviewed using a semi-structured interview developed by the author. Developed in two parts, the interview sought first to garner teacher’s vision for their teaching. The second part sought to garner information related to the choices teachers make in order to realise their vision for their teaching. In total six unique theoretical perspectives related to ‘Bildung’ and two perspectives related to ‘an economically-driven view of education’ were used to identify content in the interview transcripts that was consistent with these two themes. The incidence of and relationship between the themes was then evaluated for all three transcripts. Common trends amongst the three interviews were also identified. Results. The study’s results show that economic goals in the form of external contextual factors impact the working realities of all three participating teachers so that Bildung-related dimensions found in their respective visions for their teaching become marginalised. In addition, ‘implicit’ factors, that is, factors particular to the teachers themselves that are outside of their awareness, marginalise Bildung by limiting teacher’s potential for engagement in a Bildung-related didactic praxis. The major implication of this work is that this result represents a call for higher educational institutions to more deliberately foster a Bildung-related didactic praxis (a Bildung-Didaktik) in trainee chemistry teachers, something which in our view is most powerfully achieved through teacher training itself being grounded upon a Bildung-related didactic praxis or Bildung-Didaktik.