My research centers on a public secondary school in a small Swedish city that has undergone a transformation from a mining town to a multinational industrial city and that has also rapidly experienced major demographic changes due to a large asylum immigration. The knowledge target is primarily oriented towards the secondary school students’ experiences and reflections on controversial issues and their thoughts and wishes on how teachers handle situations linked to these issues; those which in the thesis are designated as controversial because they deeply divide a society, generating conflicting interests, explanations and solutions based on alternative value systems (Andersson & Olson, 2014).
The data collection has been made during two longer and coherent periods of fieldwork in a public secondary school where fieldnotes have been taken during participant observations inside and outside of the classrooms. In addition, interviews have been carried out with 40 students in the age of 15 years, and with 12 teachers and other school staff.
The outcome of the study contributes with knowledge from a student perspective to the research field controversial issues; an area where there is a lack of research today.
According to Mary Douglas, each community has its own “cosmology” which also defines its members experiences and moral understanding of the world (Douglas, 2011, p. 4). In highlighting how the students perceive different topics as sensitive and difficult through an analytical lens of Douglas, I want to scrutinize how the student’s understanding of controversial issues relates to the institutional framework of the communities to which they belong (Douglas, 1996, 2011).