SENCOs’ agency in Swedish upper secondary schools. A lifeworld phenomenological study of how Special Educational Needs Coordinators navigate and manage their everyday worklife.

Abstract

The research interest in this thesis concerns what it means to be and to act as a SENCO. More specifically, the thesis explores nine SENCOs’ lived experiences of agency. To study this, focus has been directed towards existential aspects of their everyday worklife, such as intersubjectivity, corporality, temporality, spatiality and ethics. The research gap this thesis wants to address is further knowledge regarding the professional role of SENCOs in upper secondary schools, with a specific focus on agency. The study utilises a lifeworld phenomenological approach. To get access to the participants’ lived experiences, a hermeneutically informed research design was employed. Three interviews were conducted with each participant, and on two occasions between these interviews, the participants wrote diaries. The empirical material generated for the study was analysed utilising the hermeneutic circular motion. The analysis was aided by phenomenological theory. Findings in the study suggest that the participating SENCOs utilised intersubjective relationships to create and maintain agency and to deal with an unclear definition of their role and remit. There seemed to be a continuous push and-pull movement regarding the demarcation of the SENCO role and remit between agents within and outside of school. Between these agents and settings, SENCOs performed competitive and collaborative boundary work. In addition, the participants’ moral responsibilities seemed central to their choices of tasks and missions, as an expression of equity and equality, alluding to a professional ethos. Furthermore, several findings in the thesis highlighted the ways in which existential aspects characterised how the participating SENCOs maintained and created agency, especially when acting as agents of change. A further conclusion of this thesis is that the participating SENCOs everyday worklife appeared to be in a continuous state of becoming. Moreover, dealing with different understandings and attitudes towards inclusion appeared to be prevalent. Finally, the professional role of the participating SENCOs seemed to become political when they displayed a political agency rooted in their morale, understood here as an expression of a professional ethos. In this, the participating SENCOs seemed to represent a view on education that contrasted current neoliberal tendencies, such as marketisation, measurements, standardisation, quality control, and viewing students as customers