The importance of the local community for the development of the school system during the 19th century has been touched upon by several researchers. However, interest in the changes to the school system in Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s has largely focused on developments at the national level. The picture has mostly been that the state, the formulating arena, set the rules and the municipalities, the realization arena, implemented nationally decided welfare policy. Here the interest is different; by focusing on municipal conditions and local interests, the implementation of political reforms, specifically the nine-year compulsory school, can be nuanced.

By a case study comparing two municipalities in the county of Värmland, Storfors and Arvika, with different local conditions and traditions of education, this study aims to investigate and analyse the establishment of the nine-year compulsory school at the local level, thereby making local interests and the importance of local conditions visible for the establishment of the compulsory school.

The processes in the two municipalities were affected by the state formulation arena's decisions but, as previous research has shown, there was a high degree of variation in how the school system was shaped locally. The same applies to local decision-making. It too was influenced and shaped based on local conditions. From the analysis of the process in Storfors and Arvika, three main results can be discerned: 1) the establishment of the primary school at the local level was largely about initiating and completing processes sideways, within and between municipalities, not only vertical processes between state and municipality. 2) The local tradition, which can also be called the local culture or the social mechanisms, influenced the processes in the two municipalities, and 3) the process in the local realization arena was largely driven by what we would call civil servants.

Teaching practices in transition: Swedish primary teachers as agents of change in reading education in the 1940s.

This article deals with primary teachers’ views on reading and literature teaching, as reflected in an archive consisting of more than 600 accounts of teaching experiences collected in 1946. By a close reading of a directed selection of 52 of these accounts – of which 14 are detailly presented – we can draw three conclusions: 1) We argue that many of the teachers regarded mother tongue as something more than just a “skill subject”; 2) The mate-rial indicates that mother tongue teaching was undergoing changes in a “progressive” direction at a time that previous research has regarded as a decline period for such ideas; 3) The analysis shows that the teachers both identified structural obstacles relating to these changes and used the obstacles as a point of departure for change. Altogether a complex picture emerges that can be highlighted as an example of teachers’ agency with relevance also to the current debate on reading and literature teaching in a democratic society.

The aim of the article is to deepen the knowledge of progressivism and how it was manifested in practice in Swedish secondary schools from a teacher perspective before it was prescribed in policy during the reforms of the 1950s. In the current educational debate, progressivism is blamed by some for being the root of a permissive style of education in decline that no longer provides any knowledge to students, and regarded by others as the starting point for the modern form of democratic schooling. The question we pursue is in what way progressive teaching practice existed before policy. We do that by investigating teacher narratives describing their own teaching practices found in a historical archive from 1946. Hence, rather than looking at the policy level as in most studies, we are unpacking the black box of progressive teaching. Through thematic analysis, we investigate 209 secondary teacher narratives from teachers of History, Biology and Mother tongue. We found that the theme of student participation was very frequently reported in 76% of the accounts, while student interaction (33%) and extended classroom (37%) were somewhat less reported. Hence, our study shows that progressive teaching existed in different ways before it appeared in policy.

Teachers' implementation of and attitudes to school reforms and overriding pedagogical ideals have long been a topic of debate and research. In this article, we centre on teachers' descriptions of how progressive teaching was conducted as well as on the teachers' reasons for implementing such teaching in the 1940s. This study is based on written material consisting of 360 elementary school teachers' accounts of their teaching collected in 1946. The material was collected by a government investigation of how progressive teaching was conducted in Sweden. The accounts offer detailed descriptions of how pupils were activated and how elementary teachers at the time could use the community as a teaching resource. The article is inspired by a prosopography approach, in which the basic assumption is that it is possible to extend knowledge of social processes and societal development by studying the group profile of members of various institutions such as political or professional organisations. The analysis is based on John Dewey's and Larry Cuban's perspectives on progressivism. We found that, according to teaching the theme of pupils participation was frequently reported in 59% of the accounts, while student interaction (35%) and extended classroom (16%) were less reported. The teachers motivated their teaching on the basis of general ideals, as democracy. Also important were practical circumstances such as available teaching resources as well as physiological aspects as student's interest and development.