Abstract
This chapter has been developed from some recent research viewed in relation to an article by Beach and Dovemark entitled Making “right” choices: an ethnographic account of creativity, performativity and personalised learning policy, concepts and practices. This article was first published in the Oxford Review of Education in July 2009. It uses data from ethnographic investigations in two Year 8 classes in two middle-sized secondary schools about a kilometre apart in a Swedish town in the western part of the country. One school stands in a predominantly middle-class area of privately owned ‘low-rise’ houses whilst the other is in an area of ‘high-rise’ rented accommodation, where the first language of many homes is not Swedish. The differences between the two catchment areas are important. The school in the low-rise community has become a magnet school for high-achievers and the children of white and wealthier parents. The school in the second area belongs to a stigmatized peri-urban space that has suffered in recent years from multi-level poverty. Situated in the national education political context following the stabilisation of general trends of decentralisation and privatisation in the governance and control of educational processes and outcomes in Sweden subsequent to the Swedish education decentralisation and privatisation acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it examines how pupils experience their education in school and how they and their performances are assessed and valued by teachers.
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Beach, D. (2018). Performativity, Creativity and Personalised Learning. In: Structural Injustices in Swedish Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95405-9_3
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