Exploring Education Policy Transformations and Agency in a Postcolonial Context: The Case of Launching the Preparation Scheme in Greenland in 1961

Using the prisms of post-colonial history together with the theoretical concepts of policy instruments and uploading and downloading, this chapter investigates how different actors in different arenas of the Danish-Greenlandic education system have emerged, interacted, and struggled to shape and develop policies and practices. The chapter focuses on a particular policy instrument called ‘the Preparation Scheme’ [præparandarrangementet] which was launched in 1961 and remained in operation until 1976. The purpose of the scheme was to identify promising Greenlandic children and send them on a one-year school stay in Denmark to boost their Danish language skills and prepare them as spearheads for the modernization of Greenland according to a Danish development trajectory. Analytically, the chapter explores the historical compositions of actors inhabiting the arenas in Copenhagen, Nuuk and the Greenlandic school districts in 1961 when the policy instrument was launched, and it investigates the emergence of policy–practice nexuses revolving around such a new policy instrument. The chapter finds that a conducive environment for the enactment of the preparation scheme ranging from the centre to the periphery eventually came into existence. This environment was conditioned on the alignment of cultural scripts between Copenhagen and Nuuk, positioning Greenland as an object of a modernization process. In this way, the chapter adds to our knowledge about how a policy instrument is recontextualized in a downloading and subsequent uploading process in a post-colonial context.