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- Lindgren, Joakim, Dr, 1971-, et al.
(author)
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Swedish students’ voices on schools’ work against degrading treatment in times of juridification. : Socialisation and identity in transformation?
- 2018
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In: ECER 2018. - : EERA, European Educational Research Association.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Contribution: Juridification is a multifaceted phenomenon that has attracted extensive international scholarly interest (Teubner 1998, Blichner & Molander 2008). Broadly, it can be said to encompass both positive and negative aspects of democratization within the modern welfare state that involves a general increase in legal and regulative processes as means to resolve social and moral problems related to social inclusion and exclusion, recognition and misrecognition. Juridification in education has been studied and problematized in relation to education policy, governing and school inspection (e.g. Hult & Segerholm, 2016, Novak 2018), and also consequences for teachers’ work in school (e.g. Bergh & Arneback 2016, Gibson 2013, Runesdotter 2016). Since 2010 Swedish teachers and other school staff are obliged to report incidents of degrading treatment in school to the governing body and directly investigate and act on these incidents (SFS 2010:800). Overall, schools’ work against degrading behaviour is characterized by increasing awareness of formal obligations and rights and expanding forms of investigations and documentation. Our interest here is focused on how such changes affects students’ socialisation and identity. From this perspective juridification draws attention to developments where social integration and more intuitive forms of everyday communication, norms and values becomes reified by legal logic (Habermas 1987). Honneth (2014) has offered examples of social pathologies resulting from juridification. In the words of Loick (2014: 766) these pathologies take the form of ethical injuries or distortions which makes it difficult for “individuals appropriatively (sic!) to re-enact established social practices” (Loick, 2014: 766).In previous studies, based on interviews with teachers, concerns are raised about such problematic consequences of juridification in education (Hult & Lindgren 2016). This study is a first attempt to address this problematic. The overall aim of the study is to explore how new judicial forms of work against degrading treatment in Swedish schools affect young people’s socialisation and identity. We analyse interviews with students from grade five and grade eight when reasoning about degrading treatment: How do they define degrading treatment? How they react to and act in situations involving degrading treatment? Method: This paper is part of an on-going project studying effects and consequences of new forms of work against degrading treatment in Swedish schools, with a focus on students’ socialisation and identity development through interviews with children, parents, school staff, head teachers and municipal officials. Although juridification in education has been detectable for quite a while and has been studied through documents (e.g. Carlbaum 2016, Lindgren, et al. 2012) it is notoriously difficult to empirically identify effects on school practices, socialisation and students identity. However, school actors, especially those working long time in school have contributed to illuminate some consequences of juridification (e.g. Hult & Lindgren 2016). Even though students do not have direct access to historical perspectives including experiences of changes in school we still find it interesting and important to find out how they think and reason in the light of changes in schools’ work against degrading treatment in times of juridification. For this paper we analyse interviews with 28 grade five students (age 10-11 years) and 37 grade eight students (13-14 years). The interviews were performed in two municipalities and in two schools in each municipality. The students could choose if they wanted to be interviewed with one or two friends or individually. All in all 34 interviews (13 in grade five and 21 in grade eight) were done with students, most of them with two students each and mostly lasting about 30 minutes. The interviews were fully transcribed and in a first step thoroughly read in order to find different ways of how students react and act in situations of degrading treatment. Statements from grade five students and grade eight students were analysed separately in order to find similarities and differences between students of different age, since former teacher interviews had indicated possible differences (Hult & Lindgren 2016). In the first step also, the interviews will be related to Cohen’s (2005) four approaches to conflict resolution (see also Hakvoort 2008).Expected Outcomes: In this paper we expect to generate a range of deductive codes that will render possible forthcoming analysis in the project concerning differences between municipalities and schools when it comes to work against degrading treatment. Young people are generally knowledgeable about the topic and this awareness appears to bring about expectations when it comes to actions and measures in school against any such behaviour. Students often try to settle problems by themselves, but they also want teachers to intervene and investigate. According to students, teachers often fail to recognize, understand and manage problems with degrading behaviour. Overall, the results show that young people’s life in school is not ‘colonized’ by legal logics, rather their way of reasoning indicate amalgamation where identity and ways of understanding degrading treatment includes traces of juridification. For example, extensive investigations in school about degrading treatment paradoxically appear to fuel fear of sharing information with teachers (eg. “snitching”). Moreover, humor – which is a crucial dimension of the social fabric that fills purposes of both identity construction (Norrick 2010) and cognitive development (Vygotsky 1978) – appears to be increasingly risky and problematic for young people as internal jargon is frequently experienced as offensive and degrading by outsiders. Such results brings this study in contact with wider discussions of social change in terms of intolerance, entitlement, resentment and resilience.
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- Segerholm, Christina, et al.
(author)
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Evaluating Quality Assurance in Swedish Higher Education - Policies and Practices
- 2018
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In: Abstracts. - : EERA, European Educational Research Association.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Contribution: Evaluation and quality assurance has become increasingly common in governing education in Europe and elsewhere. This is perhaps particularly visible in higher education (HE) where European policy for HE in general, and quality assurance in particular, have evolved in the wake of the Bologna process. Especially the period from 1999 and onwards within the European Higher Education Area reflects an increased interest in policy formation. Organizations like the European University Association (EUA) are occupied by different policy-making activities, and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) has taken lead responsibility for policies concerning quality assurance and published the second version of European standards and guidelines (ESG) for these activities in 2015 (ENQA 2015). These standards and guidelines have to be adhered to for membership in ENQA, something that Sweden was denied in 2014. After being member for several years the Swedish Higher Education Authority (SHEA) failed to live up to the requirements of having a national system that a) assessed HE institutions’ internal quality assurance systems, and b) was sufficiently autonomous from the government (Segerholm & Hult 2015). In 2017, Sweden implemented a revised national system of quality assurance. One component in this new system is that the SHEA evaluates the higher education institutions’ (HEI) own internal quality assurance systems, and it is hoped that that this revised system will meet the ENQA membership requirements.This overall policy context forms the basis for this paper, in which we aim to study the most recent Swedish national evaluation and quality assurance system in HE by exploring:a) The influx and embeddedness of European quality assurance policy in this system andb) The enactment in two higher institutions’, with a particular focus on the design of the internal systems for quality assurance and the organisation, experiences and mobilization of resources in the external SHEA assessment of these internal systems.Theoretically, we draw on resources that view evaluation and quality assurance as part of governing, where governing is understood as activities composed of assemblages of places, people, policies, practices and power (Clarke 2015, 21). We also recognise the active part the nation state (government, parliament and national agencies and authorities) (Sassen 2007), and higher education institutions take in policy learning (Alexiadou 2014), translating and interpreting European policy, where the particular national and local contexts are essential in how policies are enacted (Ozga & Jones 2006; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow 2013; Ball, Maguire & Brown 2012).Method: Methodology This study is part of the research project “Governing by evaluation in higher education in Sweden”, in which a number of sub-studies have been carried out. To explore the influence of European quality assurance policy on the latest Swedish system, we lean heavily on some of these sub-studies in which we have described and analysed the relation between European quality assurance policy and Swedish national policy of quality assurance in HE. Our empirical data include national and European policy texts, and interviews with ten national Swedish ‘policy brokers’ with experiences from for instance government ministry and its agencies, and/or organised interests and associations in the HE sector. To explore the enactment of the latest Swedish system in two higher institutions, we draw on near 30 interviews with a) national officers at the SHEA, b) central management officers, teachers, and students at the two higher institutions and c) evaluators in the external assessment panels. These interviews were conducted at different stages of the evaluation process in order to capture experiences and impressions from the evaluation processes as they unfolded. In addition, we analyse a range of documentary materials produced during and before these processes, such as self-evaluations and descriptions of the internal quality assurance systems from the HEIs, the SHEA guidelines, evaluation reports and SHEA decisions. The two HEIs were selected out of four in a SHEA pilot process. They illustrate the internal work with quality assuramce systems at HEIs that are neither full universities nor extremely small and specialised HEIs.Expected Outcomes: Conclusions Our preliminary results indicate a strong influx of European quality assurance policy in the recent Swedish system. The Swedish policy brokers reported contacts and cooperation with a large number of European organizations and networks working with quality assurance issues in HE. To them it seemed a given that the Swedish quality assurance system should be compared and valued in relation to other European quality assurance systems. The most important actor to provide this information is the ENQA which opens up for mutual agreements and standards like the ESGs. The governmental directives for the new quality assurance system also clearly stated the ESGs as a mandatory starting- point (Skr. 215/16:76). The design of the internal quality assurance systems at the HEIs share some features like the incorporation of the ESGs, recurring processes at all levels, external evaluators, as well as diligent documentation concerning internal policies, regulations and routines, and levels of decision-making. It is mainly the central management at the HEIs that has been engaged in the SHEA evaluations. Teachers seem to have been fairly little mobilized and not noticed the SHEA processes much, while having been more engaged in actual internal quality work. Also, we discuss the possible consolidation of a “professional field”, in which individuals develop particular “expertise” in quality assurance, its special knowledge base and vocabulary. Furthermore, our preliminary results show that the SHEA processes consume quite a large amount of resources like time, number of persons involved (both at the HEIs and at the SHEA), and also trigger emotional strain and different feelings.
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