Teacher or friend? – consumer narratives on private supplementary tutoring in Sweden as policy enactment

Abstract

Private supplementary tutoring (PST) is a worldwide enterprise that comes in a variety of forms and with a growing number of students. Sweden, together with the other Nordic countries, has a relatively short history of large-scale organised supplementary education, which can be explained by its confidence in regular mainstream education. In recent years though, this picture has partly changed, and today families in Sweden are offered different kinds of education services outside the ordinary school system. This paper targets how PST is legitimized and justified through marketing as a solution to problems related to the education of children. Through a positioning analysis of three consumer narratives published online by a PST company, this paper aims to further our understanding of which functions PST fills within the Swedish education system. Results show that private tutors appear in the consumer narratives as compensating for shortcomings in schools and families as well as complementing the support that parents and teachers can offer children. These findings signal that PST marketing creates demands for different kinds of support which may, in the long run, rewrite the map of the Swedish education landscape.

Private tutoring in a high socio‐economic secondary school in Israel and pupils’ attitudes towards school learning: A double‐edged sword phenomenon

“…Unlike school teachers, private tutors who interact with pupils on a more individual and personal basis seem to provide the care and support that pupils need while being exposed to pressure for high academic achievements. The present study, which is based on a quantitative analysis, corroborates with a recently found narrative in Swedish education, presented by Hallsén and Karlsson (), who elucidate that PT contributes to the individual pupil by providing encouragement and motivation on a more personal level compared to that expected from school teachers. This seems also to hold true for the Israeli education system, where the average class size is high (28 versus 23 in the OECD), limiting teachers’ ability to provide more personal and individual consideration to each pupil.…”

“…However, there is no clear examination of the link between pupils’ views and experiences of private tutors on their attitudes towards school teachers. Learning about the possible effect of PT on school teachers can be drawn from Hallsén and Karlsson's () study in Sweden, which was based on qualitative data analysis of stories published on a website of a private supplementary tutoring company. They concluded that ‘The private tutor appears … as a solution to problems that are beyond both parents and school, and thus as indispensable … The marketing of private tutoring can … work to delegitimize formal education … and encourage parents to take the expected responsibility for the education of their children by looking for help outside of the formal education system’ (p. 12).…”

A question of time and place: student tutors’ narrative identities in for- and non-profit contexts in Sweden

“…Up until now, comparative studies on tutors have gathered and analysed quantitative data on tutor characteristics in terms of education, employment, main profession, and age. There is, however, a growing number of qualitative studies looking more closely at tutor identities and roles in different ST contexts (Barkhuizen 2017;Davis 2013;Hallsén and Karlsson 2019;Kozar 2013;Popa and Acedo 2006;Trent 2016;Yung and Yuan 2020). These studies focus, as qualitative research tends to do, on local manifestations of ST.…”

“…The role of high-stakes exams in the formal educational system is relevant to tutor identities, as shown by Yung and Yuan (2020) study of tutor biographies posted online in Hong Kong, in which a discourse analysis illustrates how an entertainment business discourse was used to promote the hybrid tutor identity of the 'exam expert-star teacher ' (p. 11). Formal education may be relevant to online marketing in other ways as well, as shown in a study of online ST marketing by Hallsén and Karlsson (2019). Through a positioning analysis of three consumer narratives used for marketing purposes on the website of a Swedish ST company, they illustrated how the tutor identities of stand-in teacher, older sibling, and parental control instrument were constructed in relation to a discourse on parental responsibility for children's academic achievements.…”

“…In non-profit tutoring, tutees depend on the tutors being available within the timeframes set by the organisation, making the narrated long-term interaction between Nasrin and the student stand out as unusual and Nasrin's engagement something out of the ordinary, which she herself comments on during the interview. In contrast, the social interaction between Henrik and his tutee is portrayed as a business transaction between a provider and a consumer of tutoring services (for further discussion of this topic in Sweden, see Hallsén and Karlsson 2019) in which personal engagement like that described by Nasrin would stand out as unusual.…”