Search

Competence-based approaches (CBAs) in education have become an internationally important educational policy concept in recent decades. However, a substantial body of research has suggested that in ...

In this article, we explore the processes of transfer and translation ofeducation policy in a study focusing on the relationship betweenthe Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) and Sweden. The purpose of the study is to investigatehow selective borrowing occurs both in terms of references todifferent types of knowledge sources underpinning the argumentsand shared discourse formations. The data were obtained fromtwo policy reports: an OECD review report of the Swedish schoolsystem and a Swedish follow-up report proposing actual schoolreforms. The method was twofold: first, mapping, categorizing,and counting all the textual references in the two documents;second, critically analyzing the discourses emerging in the twopolicy texts. The results show that international references play asignificant role in substantiating arguments for Swedish educationpolicy. Both policy texts share a policy discourse characterized bysuspiciousness toward the professionalism exercised by teachersand local education authorities. Bibliografiskt granskad

Discursively learning outcomes have been embedded within an education-policy context characterised by a shift from teaching to learning. In the dominant education policy discourse, learning outcome ...

Since WWII, Sweden has had an international reputation for being modern and progressive, with schooling that provides equal opportunities for all children. Analysing local enactment of the national pursuit of modernisation in two contrasting municipalities, this paper offers new perspectives on Swedish education history beyond the image of schooling as a uniform national project. The concepts of technological development and internationalisation are applied to capture the ideas and visions inherent in this modernisation. The study demonstrates, through the example of the rural municipality of Tierp and the municipality of Stockholm, the complexity of the modernisation process and the interplay between divergent interpretations of national reforms and local enactment of modernisation. KEYWORDS: Modernisation, local school history, policy enactment, curriculum theory

In the European neo-liberal policy context, there has been an increase in pressure on teachers to exercise a type of professional responsibility that contributes to the development of a competitive knowledge-based economy. From a communication theory perspective, this paper examines if it is at all possible to talk of professional responsibility in a policy context characterised by individualisation, standardisation and accountability. Methodologically, this text joins a critical tradition of educational policy research, which emphasises the need to combine critical examination with empirical analysis. Critical discourse analysis has been used for the systematic analysis portion of this text. Central official policy texts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European Union and the 2011 school reforms in Sweden have been analysed. The results show that while demands for increased professional responsibility among teachers have been made by policy actors at different levels, the neo-liberal policy context offers limited opportunities for teachers to actually exercise this type of professional responsibility, if seen as a communicative practice based on the idea of relative autonomy. The paper concludes with a prospective discussion in which teacher professionalism is linked to the creation and maintenance of ‘spaces of communication’, as well as a look at the challenges faced by policy makers at all levels if they are to facilitate such spaces.

In this paper we will address the impact of Europeanisation on national curriculum reforms with empirical reference to the Swedish compulsory school, and based on the concept of competence discuss the question of transnational curriculum convergence. The main interest is directed towards how the answers to the question of what counts as knowledge and skills are changing in national curricula. The analysis shows that the recent Swedish compulsory school reform converges to the broader European knowledge discourse on the underlying level of philosophical ideas, but also that several core concepts used in European policy texts are being reconceptualised and given a different meaning when recontextualised in the national arena.

In this article, we analyse key policy documents on teacher quality produced by the OECD and the EU during the period 2005 to 2017 using an educational connoisseurship and criticism approach. The purpose of this article is to explore how Eisner’s concepts of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism can be understood and used to analyse educational policy, especially how teacher quality is discursively constructed in transnational authoritative texts on education policy. Eisner’s three aspects of criticism, description, interpretation and evaluation can be utilised in a differentiated critical approach to the analysis of transnational policy documents on education. While the critical descriptive discourse can be viewed as ‘identifying a simple relationship’ between social development and educational needs, the interpretative critical discourse can be regarded as ‘recognising the complexity’ of teachers’ tasks in changing societies and the critical evaluative discourse as ‘recognising and problematising contradictory interests’ that affect teachers’ work. We argue that the philosophical concepts of connoisseurship and criticism contribute to policy research by demonstrating that a multifaceted concept of teacher quality is needed to capture the complex nature of education.

The aim of this article is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the internationalisation of the Swedish school, seen from a municipal level. The paper draws on an examination of local school policy in two Swedish municipalities between 1950-2000 from a historical curriculum theory perspective, taking into account the socio-historical context of schooling, including school politics, school administration and school practice. The international influences and exchange within the two municipality cases has been traced by searching for educational efforts that include international elements such as introducing new subjects, programmes, immigrant education, study trips abroad and/or conferences. The result shows that the Swedish school has been subject to transnational exchange long before entering the ‘era of globalisation’. It also shows that the extent and the forms of transnational exchange differ radically between municipalities, which in this paper are discussed in terms of ‘different worlds of internationalisation’.

Centralisation in an era of decentralisation – on the contradictory governing of school. The movement towards greater decentralisation is not seldom the obvious starting point for the study of school governance. In this article this assumption is analysed and problematised based on a reading of central education policy texts related to the last two curriculum reforms for the Swedish compulsory school ( Lpo 94, Lgr 11) and the EU’s overall growth policy from 2000 onwards. The result shows that although the school’s governance rightly can be described in terms of decentralisation, there are several parallel movements that point in the opposite direction. An increased influence from the EU over Swedish education policy, an increased central interest for school content issues, concentration of free schools to a few large corporations, and that teachers’ professional judgments are replaced by standardised and centrally-designed material are discussed as four such processes. The assumption of school decentralisation thus requires qualification and clarification in order to serve as a basis for the study of school governance.

European educational policy on lifelong learning has undergone great changes during the last three decades to become a highly complex phenomenon with several internal and external actors involved. The discourse of lifelong learning has undergone great changes, from its initial engagement when it was a matter of social and humanitarian issues as outlined in the early documents of UNESCO, to emphasising lifelong learning as a moral and individual obligation in a more competitive and market-oriented language. In a European context this language of competition to a large extent derives from the vocabulary set out by the Lisbon strategy where competition is a key theme. A policy trajectory that has taken the discourse from an initial phase of great social visions to a second phase focusing on the need for self-regulated and morally responsible citizens. Recent research on the topic indicates that we are now standing at the threshold of a discursive shift where action instead of visions is at stake. Against this background I would like to ask if there is evidence enough to suggest that European policy on lifelong learning is now experiencing a discursive shift into what could be described as a new phase? And if so, how could such a shift be described and what are the implications at an individual level? I take my theoretical point of departure in Habermas`s theory of communicative action using as analytic tools his concept of system and life-world as representations of different rationalities. I use critical discourse analysis as a methodological framework in order to understand how the rationalities bound to the concepts of system and life-world become visible through different actors and actions in the policy discourse of lifelong learning. A number of research reports and policy documents on lifelong learning recently published within the European Union have been read and analysed. The analysis of the empirical material points to a direction where it is relevant to speak about a new "phase" of lifelong-learning discourse emerging in European policy, characterised by the urgent need for implementation. In this paper a tentative conceptual framework is presented as to how this new, action-oriented "phase" can be understood. The policy trajectory of lifelong learning is not to be understood here as a linear development where one phase follows another in a well-defined manner. Instead it is seen as an ongoing discursive struggle where different concepts over time replace each other as fundamental for the discourse and its actors in the new phase represented by concepts such as "crisis" and "implementation".

In this article, we present a comparative research project on municipal school policy in Sweden 19502010 which in our view contributes to the research fields of education policy and curriculum theory. Our project which started in 2014 links to a line of international research on education policy concerned with the tensions between decentralisation and globalisation and comparative research investigating transnational transfers of education policy ideas. In this article, we provide some preliminary findings which display municipal school policy dealing with national and transnational school initiatives and affecting local school actions. Most of the findings in this article concern the time period 19501975, during which the present two Swedish school forms, Grundskolan (a 9-year comprehensive school) and Gymnasieskolan (upper secondary school), were introduced and established.We compare local policy, through six interrelated indicators, in two municipalities with different structures and origins. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that municipal school policy research in a comparative and historical perspective is an important field of research as it reveals the complexity of school governance. Historical studies of municipal school policy and practice are crucial for exploring different dimensions of curriculum theory, including the transnational dimension.Keywords: local school policy; local school history; education policy; curriculum theory; globalizationCitation: NordSTEP 2015, 1: 27009 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27009

IMAGES OF BILDUNG – AND ITS ABSENCE FROM POLITICAL DISCOURSE ABOUT LIFELONGLEARNING. Studying a sample of what has been written about the conceptsBildung and lifelong learning, we find little connection between the two. Theterm Bildung, mostly used in the hermeneutic tradition, is understood as anindividual’s way of interpreting the world. The skills of interpretation createindividual freedom and a potential to achieve communicative capacity, whichis essential in developing a deliberative democracy. In contrast, with the termlifelong learning, which is mostly found in a political context, the perspectiveof individual freedom in the above-mentioned sense is put to one side infavour of individual adjustment to economic needs. This essay raises ques-tions about the importance of understanding the concept of Bildung in aknowledge-based community.