Description
Over a period of thirty years, education systems globally have implemented neoliberal ideological reforms of decentralisation, deregulation and privatisation (Robertson, 2007). In what has been described, albeit simplistically, as a shift from government to governance (Jessop, 2000), teacher professionalism has become an important political strategy with which to steer teachers’ work and education more generally (Klette, 2002). Thus, while neoliberalism calls for ‘more market, less state’ (Jessop, 2016), teachers in many countries have experienced increased state-level intervention, regulation and scrutiny through professional competency frameworks, standardised curricula and assessments, and systems of performance management and quality assurance. Situated within a wider Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2016), these policy reforms have contributed significantly to the intensification and extensification of teachers’ work (Stevenson, 2017). In this context of low autonomy and high accountability, scholarly research suggests that a discourse of managerial professionalism has emerged dominant (Kennedy, Barlow and MacGregor, 2012; Sachs, 2003).While the above analysis is significant for highlighting the dual impact of marketisation and managerialism on teachers’ work, there is the risk that policy discourses of teacher professionalism are interpreted only as a strategy of state governance. In fact, modes of governance are multiple, multi-scalar and culturally varied, and need to be understood in the context of the ecological dominance of the economy in its globalising form (Jessop, 2000). Equally, within these new governing regimes, education policy actors represent a wide range of public and private, state and non-state interests who vary in their ‘authority to speak’ and thus their capacity to shape policy textually and discursively (Bourke, Ryan and Lidstone, 2013). To address some of the inherent complexities of policies and politics of governance and explore how and why certain discourses are mobilised, this paper compares the dominant discourses of teacher professionalism and their modes of development in two distinct European contexts: England and Sweden.
| Period | 3 Sept 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event title | European Conference on Educational Research 2019: Education in an Era of Risk - the Role of Educational Research for the Future |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Hamburg, GermanyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |