ABSTRACT
Traditionally the social identity of the teaching profession rests on the responsibilities associated with instructing pupils in a classroom. Explaining curricular content, keeping order in the classroom, monitoring and evaluating student progress, and interacting with pupils within the school setting have been the traditional core duties of teachers since schools were first established in ancient Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago (Gadd 1956; Kramer 1949). This image of instructing pupils as the core of what it means to be a teacher is reciprocated in the corresponding obligation of pupils to learn and to acquire specified curricular contents. When entering school, children are defined through the social identity of being a pupil, and the institutionally relevant entitlements and obligations when acting in this capacity are different from those that apply when acting as a child. In recent decades, schools in many countries have been given wider responsibilities for the young generation and their socialisation and welfare. One sign of this at the institutional level is that pre-schools and after-school activities of various kinds have been introduced. Another sign of this development, and the focus of this chapter, is that teachers and schools are assumed to take a broader responsibility for pupils and their social situation. For instance, schools and teachers are expected to establish and maintain in-depth contacts with parents (cf. Edwards, this volume) to monitor and support children’s social, emotional and cognitive development, to intervene in cases of bullying in the school context and to cooperate with other social institutions when the need arises (Edwards 2004). Thus, schools, and teachers and other professionals, are becoming responsible not only for learning and curricular activities but also for the well-being and social adaptation of pupils. This widening of responsibilities in terms of socialisation that the institution of schooling has assumed can also be understood against the background of broader social changes that have to do with factors such as the increasing
participation in the labour market of parents (and particularly of mothers), new demographic conditions (including migration and urbanisation), new family patterns and so on. In the Swedish context, this development is obvious in curricular documents as well as in the emergence of new institutional practices within schools during recent decades (Hjörne 2005). One element of such changes is the focus on what is now officially referred to as ‘pupil health’ (Börjesson 1997). Although this term may appear vague, it nevertheless signals an explicit recognition of the politically formulated idea that schools should assume a broader responsibility for children’s development and welfare; schools should actively seek to promote pupil health, and they will be held accountable for how they do this. In the particular case of Sweden, this development is a result of the directives from the government (SOU 2000) requiring that schooling should no longer be conceived as consisting of two parallel activities or responsibilities, where pupil-care initiatives were geared towards those who had special problems or learning difficulties, while the majority could engage in learning without such support. Rather, promoting learning and individual development should be conceived as one activity aimed at promoting what is referred to as ‘pupil health’. This is an interesting reconfiguration of responsibilities in the sense that the output of education should not only be knowledge and skills, but also pupils who are in good health psychologically, socially and otherwise, and who are prepared for the strains of modern life. The study to be reported here concerns how schools handle these institutional responsibilities of promoting pupil health and well-being. One institutional setting of particular relevance in this context in the Swedish school is the so-called ‘pupil-health team’ (cf. Hjörne and Säljö 2004, 2006, 2008). The terminology used here is interesting. Previously, these teams, operating in very much the same way, were referred to as ‘elevvårdsteam’, which literally translates into ‘pupil-care teams’. The new terminology, however, is based on the metaphor of ‘health’, and the ideology of promoting health, which can be found elsewhere in society, emphasises preventive work and early intervention,1 rather than care when the problems have already manifested themselves in a serious manner. Pupil-health teams meet regularly and their institutional role is to discuss, analyse and take decisions on matters of pupil health and wellbeing in the school. The questions in focus in this presentation concern how this work is performed and how pupils’ problems in school are understood and negotiated. What are the discursive resources the teams use when analysing pupil-health issues and when taking decisions on how to work with problems? How does this focus on health manifest itself in the practices and decisions of the team?
