Abstract

Our main purpose in our essay is to find arguments for and against pupils' influence in the teaching of social science. We want to illustrate the importance of pupils' influence in the classroom but most importantly in the subject social science. Our question is: What arguments are there for and against pupils' influence in primary schools teaching of social science and what is the school's mission? We looked at different studies about the effects of pupils' influence in the classroom. There are different arguments regarding whether it is beneficial to give pupils space to have an influence in their education or not. We have discussed the different opinions and arguments that we found, and how pupils' influence can have an effect on the teaching of social science. Pupils' influence can have different effects on the pupils and their knowledge. But pupils' influence is mainly affecting them in a good way. To find useful sources, we have used keywords that are related to the topic. We have used dissertation and other scientific resources in order to find answers to our main question. 

Our scores showed that pupils' influence is an important part of the school's mission to raise democratic citizens. Pupils' influence in the teaching of social science will help them develop an interest and knowledge in the subject. It is challenging for the teacher to plan a lesson based on pupils' consent. Therefore, it is important to have an open discussion with the pupils about how they would like to work with the subject. But it is also important for the teacher to stay within the school's teaching commission.

Our main purpose in our pilot study is to study pupils' influence in class council and socialscience from teachers' perspective. We want to find out how teachers' include pupils in classcouncil as well as how they create engagement in the subject of social science to meet therequirements for students' influence in the syllabus. The previous studies about pupils'influence showed that pupils don't show interest in class council and therefore do not engageactively in democratic moments such as class council. Class council can be experienced as along process by the pupils as it makes them feel that they have not been involved and hadinfluenced in different matters. We interviewed ten teachers and a student coordinator thatworks at a school in Malmö, to be able to answer our issues. Balli Lelinge has written a lotabout pupils' influence and democracy, therefore we used a lot of his work as our theory in thispilot study. We also used deliberative democracy as our theory. The result showed that teachersfeel that pupils actually want to be included in pupil council. Some teachers include pupils byplanning different lessons in social science out of their interest. The conclusion showed thatthe teachers argued against themselves. Students don't have enough knowledge about studentinfluence.