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For this study, Swedish upper secondary schoolteacher students were interviewed about their experiences and perceptions of teacher work in light of the traditional gendered division of labor in teaching. While female teaching has been signified by caring work, male teaching has been signified by distant teacher-pupil relations and the use of bodily resources to discipline pupils. In this study, both genders expressed feeling comforted when teacher practice corresponded to the traditional gendered division of labor and experiencing unease when it did not. Women expressed shortcomings in their ability to perform authoritative work because of their lack of male bodily resources. This subordination has been understood as symbolic violence, processed by a gendered habitus that structures women to prefer a special type of teacher work. Despite a small female majority in the profession and in teacher education, male domination still permeates the professional properties of the upper secondary schoolteacher work.

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Reading Lolita in Teacher Education In this article an example of class room work on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita is used to discuss text selection in teacher education. My starting point is that text selection far too seldom becomes a matter of risk taking. What happens when you as a teacher deliberately choose texts that may provoke your students? What are the didactic and ethical possibilities and difficulties? My thesis is that the choice of provocative literature can function as a productive bridge between aesthetical and instrumental ways of reading. Texts which challenge core values of the school and »the myth about the goodness of literature« open up for dialogues about the what, how and why of literature instruction.

The marketization of the Swedish school system in the early 1990’s has led to an increased social segregation and organizational and pedagogical diversification, in terms of profiling, of Swedish schools. These differences are growing more visible and important for the teachers’ labour market since the teachers synchronise and incorporate professional dispositions and skills of only local validity and therefore only work in limited sectors of the school market. Thus, what seems like an extension of possibilities, through more diverse options, has transformed into a narrower and possibly more segregated labour market.