Delaktighet i grundsärskolan

: nio lärares uppfattningar om begreppet delaktighet i förhållande till elever med AST i grundsärskolan

Abstract

Participation is a concept that is seen in national governing documents, as well as in international conventions and declarations, and it has been updated since Sweden adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a law in 2021. Previous research shows that the definition of the term may seem unclear and that research on participation for students with both ASD and ID is flawed. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to study and analyse teachers' perceptions of the concept of participation and how it manifests itself in relation to pupils with ASD in compulsory schools for students with intellectual disability. It also highlights the possibilities and limitations teachers see regarding participation for the student group. The study has been conducted with a qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews with nine teachers who teach students with ASD in compulsory schools for students with intellectual disability. In the study, the results are interpreted with the support of the dilemma perspective as well as the concepts of mediating, artifacts, proximal development zone and scaffolding in sociocultural theory. The results show that participation is perceived by the teachers as something all students are entitled to, but that several teachers are unsure how to interpret the term. Moreover, our study shows that participation is described by teachers with a variety of words such as: to participate, to contribute, to influence, to be involved or to have influence. Hence, something that is perceived as central to participation is that students, to varying degrees, should be able to make choices and influence their school day. However, teachers and students find themselves in different school contexts and in our study, we discovered that what one teacher describes as an opportunity may, in another context, be seen as a limitation.

Date of Award	2022-Jun
Original language	Swedish
Supervisor	Sarah Rangstrand Hjort (Supervisor), Lotta Anderson (Assessor) & Daniel Östlund (Examiner)