Mid Sweden University

The context for this study is the last decades changes in formal education as well as in society. In Sweden, likewise in many other countries, there is an enhanced focus on assessment for learning as well as assessment of learning, on individual students’ results, grades, and national testing. Simultaneously, today’s students have grown up with the Internet and are used to share pictures with friends in informal networks on social media. In the latest two Swedish curricula (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011, 2022) it is stated that students are to take a personal responsibility for their academic success, and to develop an eagerness for lifelong learning. However, the students are not only to take responsibility for their learning; they are expected to be wanting to take responsibility for their learning. This is to put the responsibility for learning on minors who cannot foresee the long-term consequences of how they deal with schoolwork in for example informal networks out of the teachers’ supervision. This study/presentation emphasizes the clash that appears between on the one hand New Public Management’s focus on efficiency and measurable results in formal education, and on the other hand the individual students’ achievements seen in the light of teenagers’ everyday life such as sharing pictures and information with peers through digital technology.

The aims of public education are, according to the curricula (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011, 2022), that students, among other things, are to develop democratic values which will be needed as future citizens. When it comes to writing assignments, students are according to the curricula to learn to compose texts on their own in assignments given by the teachers. However, the curricula simultaneously stress that students should be given opportunities to co-write texts together with peers, give feedback to peers’ texts as well as to receive feedback from peers on their own texts. However, it is not stated in the curricula how these co-composed texts are to be assessed and/or graded.

Goffman’s (1990) concept of backstage and frontstage of public life is used as an analytical tool. It is “backstage”, out of the public eye, that people prepare the impression they intend to give of themselves to the “audience” frontstage. In this study, backstage is considered as the students’ interaction with peers out of the teachers’ awareness in order to ameliorate writing assignments for assessment. The writing assignments they hand in for assessing and/or grading is considered as a token of the impression they intend to give of their performances and ability to the assessing teachers. The concept “backstage pedagogy” (Rönn, 2023a) depicts a complex system of assistance between classmates who are loyal to their peers – but not to the formal educational system. Some examples of such assistance between peers were:

·       swapping computers between peers behind the teachers’ back so the more high achieving students could write original texts for classmates,

·       copying peers’ assignments (e.g. calculations in Mathematics),

·       sending text messages to more high achieving classmates and ask them to forward a picture of their completed writing assignment so the requiring student later on could reformulate the text “in own words”, and that

·       more high achieving peers logged into classmates Google classroom-accounts and wrote original texts and/or provided extensive revisions for their peers.

The aim was to explore and give an account for the clash between formal educations’ focus on measurable results and the students’ informal social strategies in assisting peers without the assessing teachers’ awareness.

The research question is:

What might the consequences be of the students’ backstage pedagogy, seen as a in the light of fostering future citizens with democratic values?

Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used

The ethnographic study on which this presentation is based, explored students’ informal interactions with peers regarding formal schoolwork (Rönn, 2023a). The method design created a means to get access to students’ (often) low-voiced informal conversations and interactions with classmates inside the classroom and beyond the teachers’ supervision. The qualitative method design comprised observations (4 months), an innovative and discreet staging of audio-visual recordings that rendered possible for the students to become “oblivious” of being recorded (2 weeks), as well as 18 semi-structured interviews (4 group interviews and 14 individual ones) with the students in one class with 25 students at a Swedish municipal lower secondary school. The scope of the interviews were: view of schoolwork, grades, assisting peers, and future plans. The data collection was carried out when the students were in grade 8 and 9 (14-15 years old), which is the two last years of compulsory school in Sweden. The school was selected through scrutinizing descriptive demographic statistics for lower secondary schools in a few Swedish regions and municipalities, in order to get access to a school where approximately 50 % of the students had a foreign background (but with few newly arrived students) in order to enhance generalizability (Larsson, 2005).At school the teachers used Urkund (now Ouriginal) for plagiarism control of the student’ writing assignments. However, when the students write original texts for peers, and/or reformulate peers’ completed writing assignments in their “own words”, the texts tend to pass the plagiarism control.The students and their guardians gave their informed consent and the Regional Ethical Review Board reviewed the research plan.

Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings

The backstage pedagogy mirrors the curriculum (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2022) and illustrates a clash between two co-existing and contrasting educational systems: the formal educational demands, the curriculum, and the students’ informal and non-transparent system of assisting peers which can be regarded as a soft resistance of submitting to formal educational demands and grading.Some examples from the curriculum that the backstage pedagogy mirror are:• That students did co-write texts, but also wrote original texts for peers for assessing without the teachers’ awareness.• The assessment for learning’s aim to visualize the students’ learning in terms of scrutinizing where the individual student is, where (s)he is heading, and how (s)he is going to get there. The students responded by turning formal assignments into informal activities, dealt with individual assignments socially, and made the visual learning invisible for the teachers.One of the curriculum’s aim is to foster democratic citizens, and this aim coexists with a focus on individualization, competing and formative and summative assessment. What future citizens might become of students who, without the teachers’ awareness, who• rely on informal contacts to compose formal assignments for assessment, and• recycle peers’ arguments within a text instead of making their own opinions/voices heard.Who will be able to express their own opinions in writing? Who will be able to resist fake news?According to the curricula, public education should foster future citizens. There appears to be a mismatch between the curricula and the students’ informal networking out or the teachers’ supervision. It seems problematic to let today’s youth, who have grown up with informal interactions through social media and digital technology, take responsibility for their own learning in a formal school context which is heavily focusing on the individual learners’ measurable performances and grades.

References

Goffman, E. (1959/1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin.

Larsson, S. (2005). Om kvalitet i kvalitativa studier. Nordisk Pedagogik, 25(1), 16-35.

Rönn, C. (2023a). Backstage pedagogy: Compulsory school pupils’ informal social strategies when dealing with formal individual writing assignments for assessment. Linnaeus University Press. Växjö.  https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-125604

Rönn, C. (2023b). Students’ social strategies in responding to leaked National tests at a Swedish municipal compulsory school. Cogent Education, 10(2). Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2253711

Rönn, C. (2022). Pupil’s informal social strategies in a Swedish compulsory school – What pupils do and say, out of sight of the teachers, while managing written individual assignments. Educational Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2022.2054955

Rönn, C., & Pettersson, D. (2023). Swedish students’ everyday school life and teachers’ assessment dilemmas: peer strategies for ameliorating schoolwork for assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. Advance online publication. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-022-09400-3

Swedish National Agency for Education. (2011). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket.

Swedish National Agency for Education. (2022). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket.

Neoliberal reforms have had a massive impact on formal education, internationally as well as in Sweden, during the last decades with e.g. an enhanced focus on effectiveness, performativity, measurable results, transparency, as well as on the individual pupil’s achievements and responsibilities. 

The last Swedish curricula for compulsory school, the ones from 1994, 2011 and 2022, have an increased focus on the individual pupil’s performances, formative and summative assessment of the pupil’s achievements, and on the individual pupil’s willingness to take responsibility for their own learning. With a starting point in Rönn’s (2023) comprehensive study, this paper/presentation aims at analyzing the study’s findings from a new over aiming neoliberal societal perspective. 

In line with ethnographic educational research, Rönn’s study emphasized and analysed educational structures imposed upon subordinate groups such as pupils aged 14-15, at a municipal Swedish school. Fieldwork, audiovisual recordings and interviewed explored what happened in the juxtaposition between an enhanced focus on the individual pupil and the phenomenon of informal social networks. The results showed, from a pupils’ perspective, that pupils applied a backstage pedagogy and informally interacted with classmates without the teachers’ awareness, such as writing original texts for peers and reformulating classmates’ texts before handing them in for grading as tokens of individual performances. 

Likewise Erlandson et al. (2023) who analyzed two Swedish teachers reforms and their impact on educational and teachers’ social life in upper secondary school from a neoliberal perspective, this paper aims at highlighting curricula changes regarding pupils’ (personal) responsibility for their schoolwork and achievements on the one hand, and how the pupils position themselves in relation to being assessed and graded, comprising their resistance towards individual achievements for assessment, from a neoliberal societal perspective. Erlandson et al. highlight that neoliberal solutions in educational settings currently are regarded as impossible to avoid and that the reforms often are looked upon as a one-sided narrow-minded paved road in line with the society’s ongoing neo-liberalization without focusing on the negative long-term consequences. 

Watzlawick et al. (2011) argue, that a narrowminded regard on what a “solution” to an issue is, in particular concerning wider fields of e.g. political and economic changes, can worsen the problem in target. In light of this, the aim of this paper/presentation is to pinpoint never-ending neoliberal educational reforms’ impacts on the everyday life in school settings, and to problematize and discuss the need to actively question to what extent more neo-liberal educational reforms could solve any current educational issues. (How) Is it possible to start breaking the “more of the same” neoliberal “solutions” in education?   

References

Erlandson, P., Kjellsdotter, A., & Karlsson, M. R. (2023). Neoliberalisation and educational reforms: impacts on teachers in a single school context. Educational Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2023.2210781 

Rönn, C. (2023). Backstage pedagogy: Compulsory school pupils’ informal social strategies when dealing with formal individual writing assignments for assessment. Linnaeus University Press. Växjö.  https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-125604 

Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J. H. and Fisch, R. (2011). Change – Principles of Problem formation and problem resolution. Norton & Company.

This ethnographic study in education, based on observations, audio-visual recordings and interviews, explored pupils' supportive interactions in a year eight class at a Swedish school. Goffman's dramaturgical theory of the presentation of self was used as a theoretical framework with a focus on the pupils' interactions with their classmates in backstage spaces when they prepare performances in the form of writing assignments to be handed in to teachers. Some pupils took responsibility for having an assignment to hand in to teachers, but not for their learning process in planning their work and writing the assignment themselves, in line with the formal requirements of a goal-oriented school system. The findings showed that pupils applied informal social strategies when managing formal individual assignments. Some examples of these strategies were: swapping computers with classmates during lessons and writing for peers, logging in to peers' Google Classroom accounts and writing for them, and forwarding pictures of completed written assignments to peers to be reformulated in their peers' "own words". The intention of these interactions was to portray a favourable impression of themselves and their abilities to the assessing teachers. The pupils' strategies tended to reinforce classic socially reproductive patterns and generate inequalities between pupils; pupils with higher levels of social and economic capital seemed to profit more and achieve better grades than others. These informal networking strategies co-existed with, and were in opposition to, the formal school context, and were difficult for teachers to detect due to their taking place backstage, out of teachers' sight.

In Sweden, likewise in many other countries, there is an enhanced focus on assessment for learning as well as assessment of learning, on individual pupils’ results, grades, and national testing. In the last Swedish curricula (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011, 2022) it is stated that pupils are to take a personal responsibility for their academic success, and to develop an eagerness for lifelong learning. Moreover, they are to learn to e.g. compose texts on their own in writing assignments given by the teachers. Simultaneously, the aims of public education are according to the curricula that pupils are to develop democratic values and solidarity. When it comes to writing assignments, the curricula as well as in the comment material to the Course Plan (e.g. Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017) stresses that pupils should be given opportunities to co-write texts together with peers, give feedback to peers on their texts as well as to receive feedback from peers on their own texts. However, it is not stated in the curricula how these co-composed texts are to be assessed and/or graded. 

The background for this presentation is a more comprehensive study from a Swedish municipal lower secondary school of which some parts have been published (Rönn, 2022; Rönn and Pettersson, 2023). Within the frames of an ethnographic study with an outspoken pupils’ perspective, the researcher conducted observations in one class during several months in Year 8 (14-year-olds) with a focus on how they collaborated informally with classmates during lessons in several school subjects. The aim was to explore how they assisted peers in low-voiced conversations out of the teachers’ supervision. One year later, when the pupils were in 9th grade (the last year of compulsory school in Sweden) the researcher interviewed pupils in the same class, in total 18 interviews on their view of schoolwork, grades, assisting peers, and future plans. At this stage, no interviews with the teachers were conducted, but at the school Urkund (now Ouriginal) was used for plagiarism control of the pupils’ writing assignments. The aim of the study was to explore and provide an account of what informal social strategies pupils apply in dealing with formal individual assignments as well as to try to understand how these strategies could be understood in a formal school context heavily relying on formative assessments of writing assignments and summative assessing of the individual pupil, such as e.g. tests and the National Tests. The results showed that pupils, out of the teachers’ supervision, since Year 6 (12 year-olds) had applied various informal social strategies. Some examples of this were that: a) high achieving pupils in the class, on requests from peers, forwarded pictures of their completed writing assignments to classmates to be reformulated in the classmates’ “own words”, b) pupils could swap computers behind the teachers’ back and write original texts for peers, and to c) pupils logged into classmates’ Google Classroom-accounts and wrote original texts for peers or make comprehensive proofreading of the peers’ texts. The aim with these informal social strategies was, according to the pupils, to achieve better grades with little efforts for some of the 11 pupils. When the pupils started forwarding pictures of completed assignments in Year 6, they did not understand that they were not meant to do this (Year 6 is the first year in Sweden that pupils are graded). It is important to keep in mind that this is a generation who are accustomed to share pictures of everything in their everyday life. It was not until Year 8 that they started to understand that the exercises were not meant to be completed this way, but then it was difficult for them to stop using these informal social strategies. One finding was that the pupils considered sharing pictures and reformulating peers’ writing assignments rather unproblematic. The pupils were loyal to their (close) friends, and few pupils regarded their strategies in a bigger context of solidarity, of equity of grades locally and nationally. Since the findings of the study have been reported back to the teachers and headmaster of the school, they have changed their way of working. For example, only texts which are written during lessons at school are now graded; the pupils can prepare for the writing at home but the writing has to take place at school. The teachers at the school have inspired other schools to follow their example. This has led to that the parents to pupils at one school in another part of the municipality, where most parents are well- educated high-income earners, complain loudly when they are no longer alowed to help their children with writing assignments for assessments. 

With a starting point in the findings from the more comprehensive study, this presentation will focus on dilemmas in the curricula; how the aim of solidarity and the fostering of democratic citizens are to coexist with an enhanced focus on individualization, competing and grading. It also problematises what future citizens are to become of pupils who, without the teachers’ awareness, apply the above mentioned informal social strategies; thus pupils who rely on informal contacts to compose formal assignments, recycle peers’ arguments within a text instead of making their own opinions/voices heard rely on the willingness/time of peers to fulfill the tasks given by the teachers, do not consider it problematic that they are graded individually for the achievement of 

someone else miss out years of exercises in composing their own texts • 

According to the curricula, public education should foster future citizens. In practice, there seem to be a dilemma in the tension between pupils’ collaboration (and in particular pupils’ informal social strategies in composing texts together with peers without the teachers’ awareness) and individual achievements for assessment in the competition for elevated grades which will be highlighted in the presentation. Moreover, how can teachers help pupils to an awareness about some of the problematic aspects of the pupils’ informal social strategies on both an individual as well as societal level – as in becoming future citizens. 12 Bibliography 

Rönn, C. (2022). Pupil’s informal social strategies in a Swedish compulsory school – What pupils do and say, out of sight of the teachers, while managing written individual assignments. Educational Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2022.2054955 

Rönn, C. & Pettersson, D. (2023). Swedish students’ everyday school life and teachers’ assessment dilemmas: peer strategies for ameliorating schoolwork for assessment. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-022-09400-3 

Swedish National Agency for Education (2017). Kommentarmaterial till kursplanen i svenska 2011: reviderad 2017. [Comment Material to the Course Plan in Swedish 2011: revised 2017]. Skolverket. 

Swedish National Agency for Education. (2011). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket. 

Swedish National Agency for Education (2022). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket. 

In contemporary ways of thinking about education there is an enhanced focus on individual students’ results and less on students’ collaborative processes for attaining good results. This may appear peculiar, given that the Swedish curriculum for the nine-year compulsory school states that students should be given opportunities to compose texts together with others and give and receive feedback on them. This is also in line with societal desires to motivate students to take responsibility for their lifelong learning. The evolving ethnographic research design, comprising observations, audio-visual recordings and follow-up interviews with students at a Swedish lower secondary school (Years 8 and 9), investigated the informal social strategies that students enacted when doing formal schoolwork and how they reflected on them. Goffman’s (1959/1990) dramaturgical metaphors of the back region, front region and impression management were applied as theoretical points of departure. The findings showed that some students worked hard at their schoolwork in ways that corresponded with societal desires and ideal learning curves. Other students aimed at more effortless achievements and relied heavily on peers and digital devices when taking shortcuts to produce formal assignments. These students’ potential learning curves showed a broken arrow of knowledge development, resulting in assessment dilemmas for teachers and possible mismatches in their grading. 

This study was carried out at a Swedish municipal lower secondary school, with one class in focus. The ethnographic research design comprised four months of observations during lessons and breaks, and two weeks of audio-visual recordings in year 8 (when the pupils were 14 years old) followed by 18 semi-structured interviews with the same pupils one year later. Aiming at getting as close as possible to the pupils’ informal conversations and interactions with classmates out of the teachers’ (and researcher’s) supervision and earshot, an innovative staging of recording devices was applied (Rönn, 2021). Goffman’s (1959) theatre metaphor, in which people’s behaviours are considered as being enacted either on the “backstage” or “frontstage” of social life was applied as theoretical framework. The concept “backstage” was used for pupils’ interaction with peers out of the teachers’ sight – inside the classroom as well as outside and after school.

The findings showed that pupils activities backstage, comprised e.g.

a) logging intoclassmates’ Google classroom accounts and write original texts for peers,

b) swapping computers with peers behind the teacher’s back and write original texts for classmates,

c) taking pictures of their completed individual assignments and forwarding them to peers who reformulated the texts “in own words”, and

d) sharing leaked National Tests on the class’ informal Snapchat-group.

Consequently, some pupils’ “individual” assignments were produced in collaboration with peers in backstage spaces. According to the pupils, the teachers were not aware of this, which was confirmed by their teachers.

The findings illustrate how ethnography as method can be used to develop and refine Goffman’s (1959) theory. In his theater metaphor, backstage activities are face-to-face and synchronous. However, this study show that pupils’ backstage activities can take place in different backstage spaces, each one with its own interactional patterns; synchronous face-to-face interaction (inside the classroom), synchronous person-to-person interaction (phone calls after school), asynchronous person-to-person interaction (e.g. forwarding pictures of completed assignments to peers) and asynchronous person-to-people (communicating through the class’ Snapchat group). By applying ethnography, four backstage spaces (which pupils can swap between) have been identified. This is similar to Hillyard (2010), who demonstrated examples of expanding Goffman’s theory of etiquette into etiquettes (plural), and thus how theory conceptually can be refined as a result of empirical research in applying ethnographic ideas in practice. Through applying ethnography, a contribution to the expanding Goffman’s theoretical framework was made.

Goffman, E. (1959/1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

Hillyard, S. (2010). Ethnography’s Capacity to Contribute to the Cumulation of Theory: A Case Study of Strong’s Work on Goffman. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39(4), 421-440.

Rönn, C. (2021). Gaining Access to Students’ Informal Conversations with Peers: An Explorative Approach on Educational Research and Staging of Recording Devices. In L. K. Sarroub & C. Nicholas (Eds.), Doing Fieldwork at Home: The Ethnography of Education in Familiar Contexts. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Informal networking, where people share information and experiences, in for example Social Medias such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, is increasing worldwide. At the same time there is a development towards an increased focus on the individual and the individual pupil’s achievements in formal education in many countries (cf. Carlgren, 2015) including Sweden (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019). According to the Swedish curriculum (2011) pupils are intended to develop their sense of taking responsibility for their learning and an eagerness for lifelong learning. Visible learning (Hattie, 2009) and the closing of pupils’ achievement gaps have had a considerable impact on curricula and teaching methods world-wide and especially in Sweden. The teachers are required to ask questions such as “Where is the pupil?” Where is (s)he heading?” and “How is (s)he going to get there?” 

It is not only teachers who assess the pupils’ results; pupils need to develop abilities to assess their own written assignments as well as those of their peers; in the Swedish curriculum and its annotations it is stressed that pupils must learn to compose text together with peers, and give and receive feedback from peers, in order to develop their skills (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017, 2018). Furthermore, summative assessments have gained ground in Swedish schools. This includes extensive national testing (Lundahl, 2009) with the aim of enabling equitable and equivalent grading (National Agency for Education, 2019). Over recent years, numerous National Tests have been leaked in Sweden before the scheduled test-date. In order to prevent the leaking in the future, the National Tests are to be digitalized in 2023 (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2020).

The aim of this study was to explore and analyze what informal social strategies pupils apply in dealing with regular individual schoolwork and how this could be understood from goal-oriented and result-oriented school contexts, with specific focus on pupils’ achievements and where the pupils are constantly assessed and graded. 

The theoretical framework is Goffman’s (1959) theater metaphor, in which people’s behaviors are considered as being enacted either on the “backstage” or “frontstage” of social life as a part of impression management. In this study, backstage is used for pupils’ interaction with peers beyond teachers’ sight. Frontstage is used for assignments handed in to teachers in order to be assessed.  

This ethnographic study comprised four months of observations and two weeks of audio-visual recordings of one class in year 8 (14 year-olds) in spring 2017, followed by 18 semi-structured interviews with the same pupils one year later at a Swedish municipal lower secondary school. At the school, about 90% of the teachers were qualified teachers, and the teachers of the selected class were still working at the school in autumn 2021. The Regional Ethical Review Board in Umeå, Sweden, reviewed the study.

The analysis showed that some of the pupils took responsibility for their learning and developed an autonomy in line with the curriculum’s (and teachers’) intentions, and (to a great extent) did their assignments on their own. In order to obtain more elevated grades with minimal effort, others relied on the achievements of classmates, which tended to go unnoticed by teachers. For example, out of the teachers’ supervision some pupils logged into their classmates’ Google classroom accounts (both inside and outside the classroom) and wrote original texts for them, others took pictures of their completed assignments and forwarded to peers who reformulated the texts in their “own words”. Not knowing who had sat in front of the computer and produced a text led to an assessment dilemma. The results indicate that the visual learning’s central questions, the a) Where? b) Where to? and c) How? may deviate for teachers in assessing pupils, and for pupils in assessing their own and their peers’ texts. In interviews with pupils in Year 9, where they took 15 National Tests, they told abundantly about the leaked National Tests and the leaked teachers’ assessing instructions, which were spread nationwide through social media. These documents were shared by the pupils in the class’s Snapchat group, and pupils helped peers to prepare for the National Tests with help of the leaked ones. The pupils who relied on classmates with regular schoolwork were more likely to read the leaked tests beforehand. Exclusion mechanisms related to gender, language mastery in Swedish, as well as socio-economic issues, appeared in the pupils’ informal social strategies. More details of the findings will be presented at the conference. 

In accordance with Lantz-Andersson, Linderoth, and Säljö (2009), it is the user of the technology device who decides how to use it. In the present study, computers, smartphones and social media facilitated the pupils’ informal social strategies out of the teachers’ sight when doing regular schoolwork and preparing for the National Tests. This leads to unfair assessment and grading, since the ability and knowledge of some pupils will not be reflected in the handed in assignment.

The study exposes an issue, where curricular changes bring less desirable “results” than the intended one, and where the control system for equitable grading was sidestepped at two levels by the informal social strategies applied by the pupils: the classwork grading as well as with the National tests which are to regulate the classwork grades. In a goal-oriented and result oriented school context with an enhanced focus on assessing and grading the pupils, the pupils applied informal strategies and used digital technology out of the teachers’ supervision; some pupils made the visual learning invisible for the teachers by moving it out of the teachers’ sight, and some pupils turned the individual assignment social when relying on assistance from peers (Author, 2022, accepted).

It is important to discuss and further explore the pupils’ rationale behind their informal social strategies and their sharing and reading the National Tests and the teachers’ assessing instructions beforehand. 

References:

Author (2022 accepted). Pupil’s informal social strategies in a Swedish compulsory school – What pupils do and say, out of sight of the teachers, while managing written individual assignments.

Carlgren, I. (2015). Kunskapskulturer och undervisningspraktiker. Daidalos.

Dahlstedt, M., & Fejes, A. (2019). Shaping entrepreneurial citizens: a genealogy of entrepreneurship education in Sweden. Critical Studies in Education, 60(4), 462-476.

Goffman, E. (1959/1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: a Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Routledge.

Lantz-Andersson, A., Linderoth, J., & Säljö, R. (2009). What’s the problem? Meaning making and learning to do mathematical word problems in the context of digital tools.                       An International Journal of the Learning Sciences, 37(4), 325-343.

Lundahl, C. (2009). Varför nationella prov? : Framväxt, dilemma, möjligheter. Studentlitteratur.

Swedish National Agency for Education (2017). Kommentarmaterial till kursplanen i svenska 2011: reviderad 2017. [Comment Material to the Course Plan in Swedish 2011: revised 2017 ] Skolverket.

Swedish National Agency for Education (2011). Läroplan för grundskolan,               förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet. Lgr 11, www.skolverket.se.

Swedish National Agency for Education (2019). Sammanställning av lärarnas enkätsvar om nationella prov – baserat på enkäter för lärare inom grundskoleutbildning läsåren                       2016/2017 och 2017/2018. Skolverket.

Swedish National Agency for Education (2020). https://www.skolverket.se/om-oss/var-                      verksamhet/skolverkets-prioriterade-omraden/digitalisering/digitala-                      nationella-prov/digitalisering-av-de-nationella-proven (Downloaded 2020-01-                      27)

In the Swedish curriculum’s pupils are intended to develop their sense of taking responsibility for their learning as well as an eagerness to learn their life through. Simultaneously there is an extensive assessment culture at school comprising formative assessment such as visual learning, as well as summative assessment. 

The aim of the study was to identify social strategies applied by pupils in their informal networks, when assisting classmates with formal individual written assignments to be assessed by teachers.

The theoretical framework is Goffman’s theater metaphor, in which some of people’s behaviors are considered as being enacted on the “backstage” of social life. In this study, backstage is used for pupils’ interaction with peers beyond teachers’ supervision. 

This ethnographic study comprised four months of observations, two weeks of explorative audio-visual recordings and 18 semi-structured interviews with pupils in one class at a Swedish municipal lower secondary school. The school’s merit rating for year nine was 10% below the national average, and 90% of the teachers were qualified, registered teachers who had worked at the school for several years.

The analysis shows that some pupils take responsibility for their learning, as well as for assuring that some of their classmates have an assignment to hand in to teachers. These pupils seem to develop an autonomy in line with the curriculum’s (and teachers’) intentions. Other pupils rely on the achievements of their classmates in order to obtain more elevated grades with little efforts which tended to unnoticed by teachers. Examples of this are that some pupils swap computers with classmates’ behind the teachers’ back and write for peers, log into peers’ Google classroom accounts and write original texts for them and/or take pictures of their completed assignments and forward to peers who reformulate the texts “in own words”. Leaked National Tests are also shared on the class’ informal Snapchat-group. 

Pupils took responsibility for having an assignment to hand in, but not necessarily for their learning due to that some assignments were products of backstage collaboration with peers. The findings suggest that pupils with the most powerful informal network, and friends willing to assist, profited the most of the pupils’ strategies. Moreover, the findings suggest that the pupils’ strategies reinforced classic socially reproductive patterns and inequalities related to gender, socio-economic features, and language mastery in the language of instruction (Swedish). These informal networking strategies co-exist with, and are in opposition to, the formal school context – and are difficult for teachers to detect due to them taking place backstage. This results in an assessing dilemma for teachers who are unaware of who has produced the texts.

In a school context emphasizing the individual’s responsibility and assessment of their assignments, some pupils make the visual (the process of writing assignments for formative assessment) invisible for their teachers, and cope with individual assignments by applying informal social strategies with their peers. 

The study is of interest for the Nordic countries, due to the curricular changes towards e.g. digitalization and visual learning. 

In contemporary ways of thinking about curriculum there is an enhanced focus on individual students’ results and less on students’ collaborative processes for attaining good results. This may appear peculiar, given that is stipulated in the Swedish curriculum that students should be given opportunities to compose texts together with others (Swedish National Agency for Education,2017) and to give and receive feedback (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018; 2022). Feedback by peers is normally thought in relationship to self-regulated learning; desired by asociety in which willingness for life-long learning is thought as a prerequisite for future successful citizens. However, neither in the curricula (Swedish National Agency for Education 2018; 2022) nor in the national commentary material (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2017) is it regulated in any detail how this peer assistance in learning is to be carried out – which suggests that students and teachers are expected to find their own ways forward. Simultaneously, the importance of computers and digital devices have evolved both inside and outside of the classrooms and have changed the opportunities for learning. This situation creates new dilemmas for teachers on how to e.g., assess individual students’ levels of knowledge. In our study we elaborate on an imagined ordering of knowledge, which we call the ‘the arrow of development’. This ordering indicates that knowledge is intellectually sorted and organized based on a reasoning on different values or an increased complexity, which is said to equal the ‘nature’ of knowledge – from the memorizing of facts to the more complex proficiencies of e.g., understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating (cf. Bloom et. al., 1956). By an ethnographic research design, comprising observations, audio-visual recordings, and follow-up interviews with students at a Swedish lower secondary school (Years 8 and 9), we investigate the informal social strategies that students enact when doing assignments and how they reflected on it (cf. Rönn, 2022). Goffman’s (1959/1990) dramaturgical metaphor of back region, front region and impression management was used as the theoretical point of departure. The findings showed that some students put efforts and hard work into schoolwork that corresponded with societal desires and ideal learning curves (Rönn & Pettersson, 2022 submitted). Other students aimed at more effortless achievements and relied heavily on peers and digital devices when taking shortcuts to produce formal assignments. These students’ potential learning curves showed a broken arrow of knowledge development, resulting in assessment dilemmas for teachers and possible mismatches in their grading. An educational dilemma appears: Are teachers assessing the curriculum performances of individual students or those achieved by several students in a collaborative learning process?

References:

Bloom. B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Longmans: London.

Goffman, E. (1959/1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

Rönn, C. (2022). Pupil’s informal social strategies in a Swedish compulsory school – What pupils do and say,out of sight of the teachers, while managing written individual assignments. Educational Review. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2022.2054955

Rönn, C. & Pettersson, D. (2022, submitted). Swedish Students’ Daily School-Life and Teachers’ AssessmentDilemmas: Peer Strategies for Ameliorating Schoolwork for Assessment.

Swedish National Agency for Education (2017). Kommentarmaterial till kursplanen i svenska 2011 reviderad 2017. [Comment Material to the Course Plan in Swedish 2011: revised 2017] Stockholm.

Skolverket. Swedish National Agency for Education (2011/2018). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet: reviderad 2018 (Fifth edition, ed.) [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Classand School-age Educare].

Skolverket. Swedish National Agency for Education (2022). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet (Fifth edition, ed.) [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Skolverket.

Informal networks where people share experiences and events in for example Social Medias such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat increase worldwide. Simultaneously there is a development towards an individual focus on the pupil in formal education in many countries (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010) comprising Sweden (Beach & Dovemark, 2011). Summative assessment has gained land in Swedish schools, including an extensive national testing (Lundahl, 2009). It is stated in the Swedish curriculum (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2018) as well as in curricula in many other countries; that pupils are to learn to identify their weaknesses and strengths in order to get accurate help and guidance from both peers and teachers (Harrison & Howard, 2013).

The theoretical point of departure is Goffman’s (1959/1990) theater metaphor, in which people’s behaviors are considered as being enacted either on the “backstage” or “frontstage” of social life. In the study, the “frontstage” is used for pupils’ interaction with teachers in handing in written assignments for assessing or grading. “Backstage” is used for pupils’ quiet informal conversations with classmates inside the classroom as well as interaction outside school which take place out of the teachers’ gaze, where pupils, learn the “line” for the frontstage encounter with teachers.

The purpose was to explore pupils’ applied informal social strategies in “backstage spaces” when dealing with formal individual tasks such as individual written assignment and National Tests. The research questions were:

1. What backstage spaces do pupils use together with peers when dealing with individual written assignment and preparing for National Tests?

2. How can the pupils’ activities in backstage spaces be understood?

The ethnographic inspired study, conducted by the author, comprised four months of observations and two weeks of audio-visual recordings in a 8th grade class. One year later, in 9th grade, 18 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with the pupils were carried out. There were 25 pupils in the class and 50 % had a foreign background. Two third of the pupils were girls.  The discrete staging of the audio-visual devices (Rönn, 2021) rendered possible to record pupils’ low-voiced informal conversations between peers during lessons – thus a backstage space inside the classroom. The interviews revealed backstage spaces for pupils’ informal social strategies outside the classroom and outside school, too. The Regional Ethical Review Board in Umeå, Sweden, reviewed the study. Pupils and their guardians gave their written consent.

The pupils were willing to assist classmates inside and outside the classroom. Some of the informal social strategies pupils applied backstage were: a) swapping computers with peers behind the teachers’ back and writing (or revising) texts for friends, b) logging in to peers’ Google classroom accounts and write assignments for them inside or outside the classroom, c) using smartphones to send text messages to classmates after school; asking those who had completed the given assignment to take pictures of their assignment and forward it to the requesting classmates – in order to be rewritten “in their own words” and handed in to teachers for assessment, d) sharing leaked National Tests and/or the teachers’ assessing instructions for the National Tests on the class’ Snapchat-group.

One finding was that the pupils who tended to supply assistance to peers, in writing for peers and/or forwarding pictures of completed assignments to be rewritten in the classmates’ “own words”, put more time and efforts into schoolwork and considered assignments not only as tasks to complete and hand in to teachers, but as a process of learning for future needs. They had a more long-term perspective of schoolwork, which correspond to the teachers’ and curriculum’s view. Pupils who received assistance tended to have a short-term perspective on schoolwork; focusing on accomplishing assignments with little effort – and handing them in to teachers for assessing and/or grading. These pupils developed a dependence on the pupils with a long-term view of schoolwork – which might render them more vulnerable when it comes to school achievements and later on higher education and working life.

The study identified four different backstage spaces where pupils applied informal social strategies out of the teachers’ gaze in producing texts to hand in to teachers. These backstage spaces have different characteristics:

1. A backstage space for synchronous face-to-face interaction at school – mainly inside the classroom – which comprises explaining to peers and swapping computers with peers.

2. A backstage space for synchronous person-to-person interaction outside school, where oral synchronous interactions takes place on the phone between two pupils. This occurs outside the school premises and after the school day – beyond the teachers’ gaze.

3. A backstage for asynchronous person-to-person interaction outside school, based on written texts messages such as SMS to classmates. The delay between the sent message and the reply makes the interaction asynchronous. This is used for request for pictures of completed assignments to reformulate in “own words”.

4. A backstage asynchronous person-to-people interaction outside school, which takes place on social media, such as for example the class’ Snapchat group where the pupils’ shared the leaked National Tests.

The results may be understood as though, pupils move schoolwork backstage to be carried out in informally in collaboration with peers in a school context with enhanced focus on graded individual assignments. In the interviews the pupils said that it was in order to achieve good grades with little efforts that they applied the above social strategies for individual assignments. Girls with a Swedish background tended to gain the most of the system – and boys were partially excluded.

The fact that the strategies accounted for take place backstage and out of the teachers’ supervision, renders it difficult for teachers to correctly assess and/or grade some of the pupils’ written and handed-in in assignments (mainly the one’s with a short-term view of schoolwork). Consequently it becomes problematic to cater for the individual pupil’s needs for support and guidance (the where is the pupil, where is (s)he heading, and how is (s)he to get there?). The needs of pupils with short-term view of schoolwork tend to go unnoticed – even though they might achieve good grades.   

References:

Beach, D. & Dovemark, M. (2011). Twelve years of upper-secondary education in Sweden: the beginnings of a neo-liberal policy hegemony?. Educational Review, 63(3), 313-327.

Goffman, E. (1959/1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin.

Harrison, C., & Howard, S. (2013). Bedömning för lärande i årskurs F-5 : inne i "the primary black box". Stockholm: Liber.

Lundahl, C. (2009). Varför nationella prov? : Framväxt, dilemma, möjligheter. Lund:                       Studentlitteratur.

Rizvi, F. & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing Educational Policy. Abingdon: Routledge.

Rönn, C. (2021). Gaining Access to Students’ Informal Conversations with Peers: An Explorative Approach on Educational Research and Staging of Recording Devices. In L. K. Sarroub & C. Nicholas (Eds.), Doing Fieldwork at Home: The Ethnography of Education in                       Familiar Contexts. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Swedish National Agency for Education (2011/2018). Läroplan för grundskolan,                        förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet. Lgr 11, www.skolverket.se.