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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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Coproduction of Comparative Education Research and Welfare State Education Policy
- 2018
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)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.References:Fridjonsdottir, K. (1987). Social Change, Trade Union Politics, and the Sociology of Work. In The Social Direction of the Public Sciences (pp. 249-276). Springer Netherlands.Grek, S. (2009). Governing by numbers: The PISA ‘effect’ in Europe. Journal of education policy, 24(1), 23-37.Husén, T., & Postlethwaite, T. N. (1996). A Brief History of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (TEA). Assessment in Education: principles, policy & practice, 3(2), 129-141.Jasanoff, S. Markle, G. E., Peterson, J. C., & Pinch, T. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of science and technology studies. Sage publications.Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D., & Popkewitz, T. S. (2015). International comparisons of school results - A systematic review of research on Large Scale Assessment in education. Stockholm, Sweden: Swedish Research Council.Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2003). Introduction: Mode 2'Revisited: The New Production of Knowledge. Minerva, 41(3), 179-194.Ozga, J., & Lingard, B. (2007). Globalisation, education policy and politics. The RoutledgeFalmer reader in education policy and politics, 65-82.Wagner, P. (1987). Social sciences and political projects: reform coalitions between social scientists and policy-makers in France, Italy, and West Germany. In The Social Direction of the Public Sciences (pp. 277-306). Springer Netherlands.
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| 10. |
- Foss Lindblad, Rita, et al.
(författare)
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Educational Restructuring and Educational Research in Tandem?
- 2014
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The starting point for this study is that educational reform and educational research is moving in tandem, as could be expected from theoretical insights of the co-production of science and society in Science and Technology Studies. The ideas of relevance in educational research plays a vital role here and will be in focus when the interplay between the restructuring of educational systems and the reforming of educational research are analyzed.
Our focuses on prevalent ideas of relevance in educational research aims to show ways in which these ideas has been important in the restructuring of educational systems and research and what consequences it has had on the expertise of teachers and researchers. The study is based on the case of educational reform in Sweden in relation to changing demands on educational expertise and research over a period of twenty years. The case is of special interest for understanding interrelations between educational restructuring and educational expertise. Swedish education is a radical example of (global) trends in restructuring since the early 1990s, but the transition of Swedish educational research follows only recently, and still with some exceptions, the very same trends. Our analyses are based on two different kinds of sources – a selection of policy documents from the Swedish government and documentation of strategic instruments developed and used by Swedish Research Councils for the renewal of educational research, as well as an analysis of the concrete outcome of its uses in terms of approved research applications.
Our results are presenting large changes in educational research policy, which has moved educational research from (a) a disciplinary organization in terms of “pedagogic” towards a multidisciplinary “educational research field”, and (b) which in tandem with Higher Education reforms has led to increased dependences and competition of external research funds, where (c) productivity in terms of international scientific publications is becoming the most important indicator for scientific quality. This dependency is combined with increasing demands for quantitative studies of school performances and international comparative studies of different kinds, all supposed to function in the control and surveillance of educational systems. However, these findings are complemented by another finding, where the relevancy of educational research for the teaching professions is emphasized, underlining the needs for praxis-relevant research either to be carried out in teacher education departments or otherwise expected to serve the needs of the teaching professions. Similar patterns are identified in Norwegian educational research policy and will be compared to the Swedish case. In sum, and taken together, our research findings shows a new and more subtle governing of the ways in which educational research now is engaging with educational practices on systems and school levels congenial to restructured education. It should alarm us for the prevalent dangers of creating an incapacity for more “radical” (reflexive and critical) forms of research practices to supersede current educational regimes.
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