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- Lund, Torbjørn, et al.
(författare)
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Using translation theory to understand and improve reforms in schools
- 2018
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Ingår i: Redress. - 1039-382X. ; 27:1, s. 8-13
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ongoing reforms are constantly influencing practices in schools. Schools have to adopt both national reform ideas and local school initiatives in order to meet new standards and demands and to develop new practices. New practices and ideas are expected to be transferred from contexts outside schools into schools and from one school to another. The schools’ unique contexts are rarely taken into consideration. Adopting ideas and implementing them in practice is a complex process, and the quality of the outcomes tend to vary. Sometimes schools succeed in implementing an idea in practice, with the desired outcome, but other times they are unsuccessful. This article introduces a theory that teachers can use in order to better understand and improve reform processes.
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| 3. |
- Nehez, Jaana, et al.
(författare)
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Teachers translating new knowledge about middle leading in a school and a preschool
- 2018
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Ingår i: Redress. - 1039-382X. ; 27:1, s. 14-19
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In Swedish education, there is an ongoing shift from schools being organisations where teachers teach and head teachers lead to schools being more complex organisations with the ambition to distribute the leadership among both school leaders and teachers. Signs of this shift include new career positions for teachers such as lead teachers, facilitators and professional development leaders. Teachers with these roles have a formal or informal position as middle leaders, similar to what has happened in Anglo-American countries such as Australia and the US. However, the development in the Nordic countries is more recent. This recent shift is a consequence of an increased focus on international assessments and comparisons such as PISA and TIMMS tests. Local schools have to adapt to continuously changing conditions and constantly prove that they provide quality education in comparison with other schools and preschools. They are under pressure to update themselves continuously on best practice in education, and to respond to new political initiatives and the latest educational research. This tends to lead to an increased responsibility for both school leaders and teachers in middle leader positions. In this article, we look at the new kinds of leadership that have emerged in response to this context, that is, teachers in new middle leader positions whose job it is to develop schools educationally. This idea of middle leadership has travelled into the Swedish context and is now being translated differently by schools depending on their local context. Each author of this article has been involved in one municipality’s struggle to adapt to this situation. In the Swedish municipality of Helsingborg, the schools and preschools are organised into four different districts. In one district, the headteachers agreed to implement what they chose to call process leaders, who are teachers with a responsibility to lead various professional development processes at their schools and preschools. To support these teachers in taking on this new role, a course on professional development and school development was established by the municipal school development office. The course supported teachers in how to lead school-wide processes of professional development. Two professional strategic developers working at the local school board, with expertise in professional and school development and also teacher leadership, led the course. We focus on how the teachers at one school and one preschool translated some of the knowledge from the professional development course to their own teaching and leading practices. The emphasis is mainly on the contextualisation process, or on how ideas and tools from the course were taken up and translated in different ways into new practices at the school and preschool. Studying how ideas and tools are brought into practice is important in order to understand how to bring about changes in schools and preschools. However, despite a great deal of research in this area, the actual practices that support school-wide change, particularly when it comes to teacher leadership, are poorly understood. This article will hopefully help teachers and leaders understand how such change may work, using concepts of translation. Viewing the process of change as a translation makes the process leaders translators of new knowledge. When bringing the new knowledge into their school and preschool, they can use different translation rules for different purposes. They can copy, add, omit or alter the knowledge in the process of contextualising it into their own practice, leading to great diversity in outcomes. In this article, we will describe such processes in greater detail.
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