This paper covers both a brief general presentation of the project ‘Understanding curriculum reforms: a theory-oriented evaluation of the Swedish curriculum reform Lgr 11, Curriculum for the compulsory school,2011’ and an in-depth  study of classroom discourses in relation to whole-class teaching from a curriculum theory perspective (Deng & Luke 2008, Lundgren 1989). Based on background studies on transnational and national policy moves and the configuration of the Swedish curriculum reform into actual curriculum (Wahlström 2014, 2016, Sivesind & Wahlström 2016, Nordin & Sundberg 2016), a teacher survey with 1900 informants and 18 interviews with teachers regarding their experiences of the curriculum reform Lgr 11 has been conducted (Wahlström & Sundberg 2015).  Central for the project is a comparative classroom study comprising social studies (history, geography, religion and civics) in school year six in six classrooms in six municipalities, comprising 70 videotaped lessons.

Theoretical and methodological approaches

The purpose of the present paper is to explore how the curriculum is enacted on the classroom level, in terms of ‘curriculum events’ (Doyle 1992). More specifically, the aim is to explore how the rationality of the curriculum structure and content transforms into the rationality of the classroom teaching: How can classroom discourse be understood as part of a wider context of curriculum? What different rationalities, linked to curriculum, may underlie teachers' choice of teaching repertoires?

Drawing on Doyle (1992), pedagogy is not viewed as a neutral form of teaching methods, but rather as a combination of curriculum text and the discursive practice created in the classroom when a specific curriculum content is transformed to be the subject of actual teaching. The main unit of analysis is ‘tasks’, defined as a continuing theme that stretch over a sequences of lessons. A thorough framework has been worked out for the coding of the 70 lessons with reference to Alexander (2001) and Klette et al. (2005) as well as complementing with a coding of content.

Key findings

There are significant differences in the teaching repertoire between the start, the middle and the end of a curriculum task, despite the fact that all lessons in the data are considered as whole class teaching.  In the start and the end of a task recitation is a dominating teaching repertoire, while shorter individual work and assignment-driven work in pair or small groups are the most common teaching repertoires in the middle of a task. With reference to Skidmore (2006) and Molinari et al. (2013), I explore, why recitational approaches to teaching continue to be prevalent despite the obvious problems of this approach raised by classroom researchers. I elucidate how the IRF pattern can be understood from a Swedish standards-based curriculum perspective (Sundberg & Wahlström 2012). The significance of the paper is to conceptualise classroom research from a curriculum theory perspective to gain new insights on the influence of curriculum content for teacher's choice of teaching repertoires.