Local enactment of the Swedish national 'advanced teacher reform'

• The overriding aim with this paper is to study how the Swedish advanced teacher reform is enacted at a local level. More specifically, we have chosen to study the local process of application over the period of a few years in a middle-sized Swedish municipality. By regarding the linguistic dimension of the reform, analyses of the language used will contribute to illuminate tensions and power relations between different levels and actors in the local enactment processes. Thus, language plays an important role in shaping our understanding of policy changes and instead of just studying individual texts and actors, different speech acts must be related to a wider social context (Skinner, 2002). Our interest in the local enactment of the reform is to view and analyze language as a tool with which politicians, local administration and private agencies can shape their demands and desires with the reform. Simultaneously, language is also a tool that both enables and hinders teachers’ descriptions of professional competencies in their applications.Perspectives / Theoretical framework: The advanced teacher reform is part of international trends and movements. In text analyses of national expectations of the reform, many researchers show how not only national policy actors have had an influence on shaping the reform but also strong international actors like the EU and the OECD. Today, networks of policy actors, whether they are commercial, ‘grey zone’ (Lindblad, Popkewitz & Pettersson 2015) or politically appointed, are interrelated in a variety of ways in transnational and intra-national spaces of policy (Ball 2016). Altogether this means that various restructuring processes have led to circumstances whereby today’s national and local performance of school reforms are in a completely new political situation (Hopmann 2008). Thus, the local enactment of reforms needs to be understood in relation to a broader policy context, which is complex and occasionally holds paradoxical expectations, which also change over time.Data sources and methods: The aim is operationalized through analysis of how the language is used by local actors, as expressed in written form in authoritative local documents and complemented by interviews, in application templates and in applications from teachers who apply for a position as advanced teacher. The local case represents a Swedish middle-sized municipality with approximately 650 teachers employed in the compulsory school. Since the start of the reform there have been several application rounds from which we have studied the first and the second round. Our sample consists of 40 applications from the rounds 2013 and 2014. We have strived to represent both male and female applicants who work with pupils in diverse age and with different subjects. Each application consists of approximately 75–100 pages.Results: Our results are based on interpretations on how the language and formulations made by the applicants respond to the requested abilities in the application templates. The temporal aspect is important as we notice differences in what criteria the applicants pay attention to from one year to another. These differences are found to be related to both changes in the application templates as well as an increasing awareness among the applicants on what criteria the municipal school administration consider to be valuable. Taken together, in our analyses we found two major expressed abilities to be of interest. First and foremost it is about abilities to work with assessment and secondly it is about abilities to work with pupils influence. Assessment is especially interesting as we found obvious changes related to the concept between the two rounds. Formative assessment appears more frequently in the second round where we also notice how for example words like legally secure, fair, equitable and summative assessments appear as reinforcements in the applications. Furthermore words like evidence based, proven experience, collegial learning appears in the second round, but mostly without descriptions of its meaning.Relevance: Our results demonstrate how international trends and a national reform for improving teacher and teaching quality is being transformed on the local level. By showing this we believe that the local enactment of the Swedish advanced teacher reform is an interesting case for other countries.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Education

Pedagogik

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