In 2017 Carin Fröjd graduated as a teacher in civic and history education for upper secondary school. After graduating she worked as a teacher in a Swedish gymnasium until 2020 when she started her PhD at Örebro University. Her supervisors are Prof. Christian Lundahl and Prof. Andreas Bergh.
Interviewer: How did you find out about the graduate school?
Carin: I think the first one to reach out to me actually was an old university teacher that taught me at the teacher program while I was working as a teacher. He said, ”There are positions available if you are interested to apply.” So, I think that was how I got to know about it. Initially I got another PhD position directed at teachers’ professional development. But since my perspective was one of contemporary history, I was affiliated with the graduate school in applied history of education – I thought the applied history part sounded really interesting.
Interviewer: What is the topic of your research?
Carin: I am exploring a concept of citizenship, how that has been formulated in vocational education and specifically by the teachers and even more specifically by the vocational teachers. So, in post war time I am recording the vocational teachers’ voices basically. From 1948 till 2011. It’s three main curricular changes that I am looking at.
Interviewer: What type of source materials are you using to analyze that?
Carin: My main material is the lower vocational teachers’ unions material that became a confederation in 1948. So that is my main material, basically.
Interviewer: How did you become interested in your topic?
Carin: There is a quite well documented gap between the vocational students and the higher educational preparatory students’ civic capabilities and general confidence in democracy. Since I am a history and civics teacher and been teaching at both tracks, this of course, interested me. While studying teacher education we read about this and mostly from a social didactical perspective or educational sociology perspective. But working as a teacher I got more and more interested in what kind of citizenship education actually took place in the vocational education and the vocational teachers’ role in the vocational subjects. I think that the previous research has a very presentist and individual perspective on controlled classroom studies with the purpose to figure out ‘what works’ and might underestimate important historical contexts and long-term prerequisites for the development of different groups or nation-based logics of citizenship understandings. So that is what I am trying to bring in to the previous research.
Interviewer: Did you change your topic since you started your thesis?
Carin: No, actually I did kind of small adventures out and went to other directions, but actually I think I recently returned to my original idea. I kind of returned to my experience as a teacher and that made it feel right and interesting again.
Interviewer: Aside from your research what other activities do you do for the graduate school?
Carin: In the beginning we had quite a lot of courses together and that was super interesting and very important for getting an international and comparative perspective, both geographically and temporarily. Now we are doing some workshops for every term basically. We have visited each other’s higher seminars and have been going to conferences together. We have also had a bit of discussion fikas discussing text or interesting topics. That has been really rewarding.
Interview by Michal Mehrens , MA, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
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