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- Foss Lindblad, Rita, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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Changing discourses on qualities of educational research in Sweden : A contribution to the symposium: Educational Research Qualities in Question: Nordic Perspectives on Research Policy and Research Evaluation in Swede
- 2014
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Ingår i: NERA 2014 Session program.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- his is an analysis of discourses educational research quality in Sweden with the aim to highlight different ways to describe and evaluate educational research. Of special interest is here the period 1990-2014 when higher education is in a period of expansion and restructuring with changing demands on research evaluation combined with changing ways of funding higher education institutions and research. The ambition is to define this trajectory with different actors and controversies. The Swedish case will be related to a Nordic (Norway) and an Anglo-Saxon (Australia) case. The study is carried out from a dynamic nominalist perspective (Hacking, 1999) focusing on actors and institutions at work. Issues and controversies will be defined in relation to discourse analyses of policy documents, research reviews of different kinds (research councils, research assessment exercises etc) and on thin and thick descriptions (Porter, 2012) of research. Conclusions: Firstly, educational research assessments are in transition - from internal professional initiatives and collegial decision-making to external administrative initiatives and principles for new public management. Secondly, research evaluation exercises are having an increasing globalizing tendency concerning criteria for research quality and are also increasingly based on international reviewers. Thirdly, there is an ongoing debate on the composition of measurements such as citation impact or peer review. Fourthly, given these tendencies educational research in Sweden is in a a turmoil considering addressees of educational research as well as struggles for research resources with other disciplines and faculties. Given this it is vital to analyze the field of educational research. Relevance to Nordic educational research: this symposium will serve as an input to continuing analyses of educational research policies and formation in the different Nordic countries. Attachment to NERA-network and symposium: Politics of Education and Education Policy Studies Network and the symposium "Educational Research Quality in Question: Research Evaluations and Research Policy in Sweden in a Nordic Perspective"
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- Foss Lindblad, Rita, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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Co-production of comparative education research and welfare state education policy. : A contribution to the panel session "How Educational Sciences Became Reasonable: Their International Emergence in the Post War Years" at the CIES 2018 Conference in Mexico City
- 2018
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Ingår i: The program for the Comparative and International Education Society Conference 2018 in Mexico City..
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The focus of this study is the intimate relations between educational research and its social and political embeddings, seen through the lenses of international large-scale assessments (ILSA) such as the IEA TIMSS- and the OECD PISA-programs. While increasing influence of these assessments on educational policies is widely recognized (e.g. Ozga & Lingard, 2007) and the meta-theoretical rationality on which they are operating (Grek, 2009), the constitutive elements and dynamics involved in producing their success stand out as a more open question (e.g. Wagner, 1987, on national variations). Our case is the transition of Swedish Welfare State (SWS) after WW2 and the development of international comparative research in education. With the specific ambition of not letting us fall into the pitfalls of science/politics dichotomies, we are addressing the dynamics of science/society coproduction (Nowotny et al, 2003; Jasanoff et al, 2001). This case is of significant interest: Firstly, the SWS had a recognized centralistic organization with high reliance on science (Fridjonsdottir, 1987). This organization restructured thoroughly in the 1990s with an increasing emphasis of ILSA (Lindblad, Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2015). Secondly, in the emergence of international assessments Swedish researchers played an important role (Husén & Postlethwaite, 1996). The specific time-space reveals uneven patterns in science/society coproduction where IEA is manifesting success as well as a breaking-point in a today highly weakened regime of how the relevance of international comparative education is to be secured, and what this means. Our study is based on a combination of policy documents from state commissions and parliamentary bills, research reports and evaluations of ongoing changes in policy and research as. We identified characteristic phases in the welfare state governance from expansion and centralistic governance over deregulation and decentralization and later into the introduction of a voucher system and governing by results. The analyses resulted in three major conclusions: − At the start comparative education research was rare and had a humanistic base in comprehending education in other contexts. The emerging ILSA was based in the social sciences where comparisons centered on differences in efficiency over national contexts. − During the first decades of ILSA there was little evidence of societal relevance, e.g. in use for policy decisions and reform initiatives. However, the societal relevance increased drastically, given the restructuring of the educational system and the increasing importance given to supranational organizations. − ILSA was from the beginning strongly contextualized and dependent on external resources. The making of the IIE opened up new possibilities for ILSA in Academia, but it is the more recent changes in governance and changes in methodology as well as technology that has allowed the success and dominance of ILSA in research and policy discourses Given these conclusions ILSA turned out to be a successful but contested approach to educational research. For the coproduction of science/society the combination of a strong emphasis on ILSA in social and political discourses on education plus the closing down of the International Institute of Education and the transfer of PISA studies to Pearson is congenial to this development.
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- Foss Lindblad, Rita, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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Constructing Teacher Professionalism between Organizational Decision-making and Work-life Autonomy : After-work from European Research on Professional Knowledge under Restructuring
- 2011
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Ingår i: AERA 2011 meeting program: Inciting the Social Imagination. - 0163-9676.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- A basis for this paper is an international comparative study on Professional Knowledge under Restructuring, carried out with the support of the European Commission. The research was carried out by researchers from seven European countries, It is our ambition to do some necessary after-work by reflecting on this research – the process of work as well as the outcomes. However, from a historical perspective, the “professionalism” of teachers is a new phenomenon. While early studies more directly concerned themselves with understanding the very authority of professionals as a social fact, with the consequence that teachers was either excluded, e.g. in the classical work of Parsons, 1939, or met with skeptical attitudes, e.g. by Wilensky (1964) and Etzioni (1964) as well as Lortie (1975), the literature on professions and professionalism now seems generally more “normative” in its orientations. As the inflation of the literature on professionals and professionalism has increased dramatically since the 1980s and early 1990s, we will argue that this normative shift not only means a shift in orientation, but also in the rationalities and functions of the talk of professionalism itself. At this point in time, it is more obvious than ever that the very talk of professionalism embrace the ambition to re/shape its very nature, e.g. what the professional lives of teachers’ means and how it should be lived. The shift from representation to performativity is in academic literature actualized and displayed in many different ways. Important for this study is, on the one hand, the ways in which it has meant a shift in the understanding of educational policy, where concepts such as “performativity” (Ball, 2003) and “governmentality” has become important for new understandings on the (re)structuring of educational systems worldwide (Lindblad and Popkewitz, 2004), and, on the other hand, a shift in the elaborative understandings of professionalism has opened up for an interest of daily work and life of teacher and the realities they face and shape. The more dynamic aspects of the life and work of the professionalism of teachers are put to the fore in these, mostly, post-empiricist and post-structuralist, scholarly work is in the theoretical focus of this paper. We share the epistemological insights of these traditions, and hold the thesis that significant differences in the ways in which teachers experience and live their professional lives make sense on bases of the differences by which they experience and make sense of their own – as well as policy-makers – technologies for handling, stimulating and controlling learning activities inside and outside classrooms (cf Fournier, 1999; Foss Lindblad & Lindblad 2009). Thus, this inclines an epistemological twist, leading us toward a more generative understanding of professional knowledge and the ways it is narrated and important for educational practices.
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- Foss Lindblad, Rita, et al.
(författare)
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Higher Education and Research in a Steady State : Changing premises and practices for educational research in Sweden.
- 2016
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Ingår i: Nordic Journal of Educational Policy, NordSTEP. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2002-0317. ; 1:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter addresses changing premises and practices for and in educational research in the case of Sweden. The ambition is to analyse changing preconditions for educational research and potential implications of this for research practices and knowledge production in the field of education. The text is organised in three inquiries: First, we present a general framework of transitions in the system of higher education and research as a combination of expansion and contraction. Second, we analyse educational research in Sweden, its trajectory, playground and play performances, indicating possible changes in the rules of the game. Here we apply an international perspective. Thirdly, based on this, we discuss the current situation - the condition we are in for educational research, and where to go?
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- Foss Lindblad, Rita, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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Higher Education and Research in a Steady State – On changing premises and practices for educational research in Sweden.
- 2016
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Ingår i: Elmgren, M.; Folke-Fichtelius, M.; Hallsén, S.; Román, H. & Wemke, W. (Red): Att ta utbildningens komplexitet på allvar. - Uppsala : Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. - 9789155494759 ; , s. 209-225
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Considering current discourses on educational research at universities, research councils and government the preconditions for educational research are in transition. Catchwords like “World class,” “excellence,” “strategic,” “visionary,” “multi-disciplinary,” and “internationally competitive” are repeatedly used among financiers and higher education institutions (HEI) and reflect what is at stake and what has come into focus. This is combined with an increasing emphasis on competition for research funds, publication impact, international networking and research cooperation in research projects. In sum, what is communicated to the research community with such an emphasis today is competition, positioning in research hierarchies and demands for strategic action in order to obtain funds and to produce what is regarded as high-quality research of social and political accountability.
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- Foss Lindblad, Rita, 1953, et al.
(författare)
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Higher Education Policy and Changing Transnational Expertise in Sweden : A contribution to the symposium Globalization and The Nordic model - conflicting, resisting and converting tendencies in policy of education
- 2014
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Ingår i: The NERA 2014 Session Program. - : NERA. ; , s. 58-59
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper aims to analyze current impact of transnational organizations and multinational corporations in governance of higher education in Sweden. We put this in context of welfare state restructuring and performative governing by means of indicators and ranking and related to changing policy demands on research and expertise. Are these changes in higher education policy and research policy working in tandem as could be suggested by science - technology studies (Nowotny et al, 2003)? Our study will be based on policy network analysis and identification and analyses of expertise in education policy discourses. We analyze current policy discourses (since 2006 and onwards) giving special attention to what expertise that are referred to in these discourses, as well as the meanings and objects of the expertise concept in use. In relation to our aim of analyzing the impact of transnational organizations and multinational corporations in educational policy making, we refer to the studies on transnational governance by Djelic Sahlin-Anderson (2006) and the increasing use of incomplete organizing (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2010) in higher education. Concepts of "thin descriptions" (Porter, 2012) and potential "looping" (Hacking, 2004) are used here. As a result important changes in higher education governance and expertise are identified. Our analyses lead to a discussion of couplings between governance and research policy in higher education. This paper is attached to the symposium "Globalization and The Nordic model - conflicting, resisting and converting tendencies in policy of education" in Network 21, "Politics of Education and Education Policy Studies". References: Ahrne, G. & Brunsson, N. (2009). Complete and incomplete organisation (Scores Reports 2009:2). Stockholm: University Djelic, M. L., & Sahlin-Andersson, K. (Eds.). (2006). Transnational governance: Institutional dynamics of regulation. Cambridge University Press. Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate. D. Sperber, D. Premack and A. J. Premack. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 351-94. Nowotny, H.; Scott, P.; Gibbons, M. (2003): Introduction: Mode 2'Revisited: The New Production of Knowledge. Minerva, 2003, 41.3: 179-194. Porter, T. M. (2012). Thin Description: Surface and Depth in Science and Science Studies. Osiris, 27(1), 209-226.
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