Teacher authority and the hidden curriculum in the classroom : A comparison of a municipal school, an independent school, and an international school in Sweden

Sammanfattning: In educational research, the concept of school climate has been linked to quality teaching, teacher-pupil relations, and explicit values education, among others. In Sweden, despite showing positive teacher-pupil relations, critiques towards classroom management and a lack of teacher authority, which affect its school climate, have been made. This research aims to compare different teacher-pupil authority relations and their influence on the transmission of the hidden curriculum in Sweden. The study is going to be framed within the perspectives, definition, and current research on the hidden curriculum transmission and Wrong’s types of authority applied to classroom contexts. Non-participatory observations were conducted in a municipal school, an independent school, and an international school located in Sweden to collect data for this research. These observations take place within two Grade 9 classrooms of grundskola, and a Grade 3 classroom of gymnasieskolan. Maribel Blasco’s operationalisation of the hidden curriculum is adapted to classroom contexts to conduct the observations. Findings were described and compared considering the author’s ontology and epistemology, the operationalisation of the hidden curriculum, and the theoretical framework that guided this research. The findings of this research relate to the implicit transmission of values through authority responses, the teacher’s classroom management strategies and teaching style, their consistency and coherence in the application of classroom rules, and the implicit transmission of messages through pedagogical strategies. The researcher outlines the implications that this study has for teacher training programmes in Sweden. The direction of further research is also delimited.