tandfonline.com – The Swedish Sámi boarding school reforms in the era of educational democratisation, 1956 to 1969

ABSTRACT

This comparative curricular study examines the educational functions of the Swedish Sámi nomad school curricula before and after a central school reform in the 1960s. Due to the reform, the nomad school, a boarding school system for the Indigenous Sámi people in Sweden, was formed to bring about systemic changes in the education of Sámi children, to be more inclusive, and to meet new democratic educational demands. This study presents an in-depth examination of the written curricula through a thematic analysis by scrutinising the nomad School syllabi of 1956 (UP56) and 1969 (Lgr69), with an emphasis on aspects of continuity and change. In theoretical terms, the study is inspired by Biesta’s educational functions. This study identified the continued importance of reindeer husbandry (RH), while the reform transformed the traditional RH context towards adaptation to the needs of the Swedish meat industry, in a period marked by intrusion into traditional Sámi lands. The study also found that although the education system set out to protect the Sámi language after the reform, the Sámi language was consistently given a low degree of importance in the curricula. Another source of tension concerns the explicit policy to open the Sámi education for all Sámi children at the same time, educating differentiation among Sámi.