”Varför tycker du man ska ha dödsstraff, då?” Ett sociologisk-didaktiskt verktyg för analys av klassrumsdebatter

Abstract

Debates, as the discursive curriculum activities they are, are occasionally arranged in classrooms. Here, the aim is to offer a tool for analyses of such activities. By adopting a sociological‐didactical perspective, this article takes Basil Bernstein’s conceptual pair vertical and horizontal discourse as its starting point. The ‘vertical discourse’ is roughly speaking school‐oriented whereas the ‘horizontal discourse’ is more often played out in informal contexts. These two central concepts will be specified in particular relation to the classroom debate as curricular content. Two contrasting authentic classroom debates were intentionally selected in order to try out the analytical tool. Both the debates deal with the same topic, i.e. death penalty. The debates, however, also differ from each other; they are put into practice in remarkably different ways and in different contexts, although they are both collected from, in a sociological perspective, supposedly less advantaged areas. I argue that the tool offered is a needed and fruitful way of capturing what happens in classroom debates.