New Wine in Old Bottles or Old Wine in New Bottles. The establishment of the multidisciplinary field of didactics of the mother tongue school subject

Several Swedish reforms in the early 2000s had the goal of laying a more solid research foundation for teacher education.

This project aims to investigate how mechanisms such as funding, knowledge production, and career paths contribute to and counteract the establishment of new research areas related to the teacher profession.

The project focuses the establishment of the multidisciplinary field of didactics of the mother tongue school subject (Swedish) which accommodates both language and literature.

The investigation of the dynamics between adaptation and change in the development of new research areas is guided by three overarching research questions: How has the establishment of subject didactics in general and Swedish subject didactics in particular entailed the creation of a new interdisciplinary field in opposition to, and under development of, older disciplines? ·         How has the material and intellectual structure of the academic field changed in terms of new academic positions with new content and merit assessment?

How has subject didactic knowledge been received by the professional field? These issues are foregrounded in work packages in which corpora are compiled for discourse analysis. WP 1: white papers and official reports as well as theses and articles from the field of subject didactics of Swedish. WP 2: job announcements and merit assessments of applicants.

WP 3: reviews in teacher journals and research popularizations for teacher training