This article examines the relationship of curriculum and didactics through a social realist lens. Curriculum and didactics are viewed as linked and integrated by the common issue of educational content. The author argues that the selection of educational content and its organisation is a matter of recontextualising principles and that curriculum and didactics may be understood as interrelated stages of such recontextualisation. Educational policy and the organisation of pedagogic practice are considered as distinct although closely related practices of 'curricularisation' and 'pedagogisation'. Neo-Bernsteinian social realism implies a sociological approach by which educational knowledge is recognised as something socially constructed, but irreducible to power struggles in policy arenas. More precisely, curriculum and didactics are not only matters of extrinsic standpoints. Recontextualising practices may also involve intrinsic features, that is, some kind of relatively generative logics that regulate curriculum design as well as pedagogic practice. In order to highlight certain implications for both curriculum and didactic theory, the author develops a typology that is analytically framed by principles of extrinsic relations to and intrinsic relations within curriculum or didactics.

This study examines parental involvement in urban public schools, focusing on how parents in organised school-centred networks support, navigate, and negotiate from their different social positions. The multiple case study of specialised music programmes provides insights into parent strategies and behaviours in intermediate practices between school-based socialisation and extracurricular activities largely run by the parents associations. The paper draws on data from in-depth focus group interviews with members of parents associations in socially, culturally, and historically different schools. Findings demonstrate that parent approaches to specialised education and their modes of involvement vary according to social class, resources, and school culture. There are class-based differences in parent strategies and the way their collective symbolic capital is used in policy negotiation. However, relationships between a parents association and the school administration are generally regulated by the social and cultural history of a particular school.

The following article examines the emerging historical legitimacy of specialised comprehensive schools in Sweden. During the 1980s, neoliberal ideas were gaining ground in Swedish educational policy. As a result, the social democratic government began to relax the rigour of the unified, state-regulated educational system. Specialised music classes played a significant role in this context, as such programmes were increasingly considered models for specialisation and deregulation. The establishment of specialised music classes in Sweden was symptomatic of the national adoption of neoliberal principles in education policy. The case study design uses qualitative document analyses of archive materials including public investigations, minutes of political meetings, and newspaper debates. The discursive legitimation of specialised comprehensive education is seen as dependent on three interrelated frame factors: ideology, economics, and law. Within this framework empirical knowledge of the transformative educational policy of the 1980s is analysed.

No abstract

This paper reports on a study of the recent curriculum reform of the Swedish uppersecondary school, Gy11. Although aesthetics were not made compulsory subjects by this reform, all students have a statutory entitlement to be offered a minimum of one course in an aesthetics subject. We wished to determine whether students are actually being given the opportunity of choosing such subjects. The study is a theory-based and content-oriented evaluation. Data are based on curriculum studies and a comprehensive survey of upper-secondary school principals. Our findings indicate that while principals have generally organized aesthetics courses, students seldom choose this kind of educational content. Instead, students' selection is ruled by indirect methods of manipulation.