Swedish Schools Need Teachers Who Are Strong Leaders: Discourses on 'Teach for Sweden'

In recent years, the neoliberal Swedish political establishment has made a series of arguments that education, and teachers in particular, have failed, while at the same time overseeing an educational regulatory system that hasn't responded to the needs of schools (Beach & Bagely, 2012; Bylund & Player Koro, 2024). As a result, Teach for Sweden (TFS) (alongside other private education facilitators) has been marketed as a programme that aims to solve the problems of contemporary Swedish schools. Despite this, national research on this programme is scarce. In Myer's study (2019), he illustrates how TFS is created as an elite organisation using the symbolic language of the 'Teach For' model, referring to the 'top students' and 'world-class schools'. Dahlstrom (2013) argues that the leadership associated with TFS is that favoured by the new public management, i.e. a focus on measurable outcomes that reduces teaching to preparing for tests and exams. While the views and voices of TFA graduates have been studied internationally (Brewer & deMarrais, 2015; Matsui, 2015), as well as what counts as knowledge within the TFA organisation (Bailey, 2015), there is a lack of Swedish studies that examine how actors discursively position themselves within the TFS context. Therefore, the aim of this study is to a) analyse the subject positions that are constructed in conversations with TFS graduates and how these positions relate to the teacher subjectivities that this programme produces, and b) what problems these subjectivities seek to support or solve. The theoretical framework is post-structuralist theory with discourse analysis as the methodological approach (Foucault, 1980). Our starting point is a Foucauldian inspired analysis that provides an overarching view of the concept of discourse and gives us a starting point for revealing power relations. Further, the analysis is informed by discursive psychology (Poller & Whetherell, 1987) and discourse theory (Fairclough & Fairclough, 2012). We present an ongoing study comprising interviews with TFS graduates associated with different universities in Sweden. The findings are discussed, and discourses identified as part of the ideal model presented as TFS. Based on previous studies, we expect our findings to shed light on how new teacher subjectivities is negotiated and the tensions involved.