Andreas Bergh

Why Quality in Education – and What Quality? – A Linguistic Analysis of the Concept of Quality in Swedish Government Texts

This article analyses why the concept of quality has become such a central theme in Swedish education policy, and what quality or qualities successive governments have pursued between 1990 and 2010. The analysis is based on a close reading of a collection of policy texts from the late 1980s onwards.With a linguistic and historical perspective, the theoretical approach is inspired by Quentin Skinner (1988a, 1988b) and speech act theory.The study shows that certain “criteria of application” long associated with education have gradually been challenged and partly marginalised by criteria highlighting results and relating to market and system needs. As a consequence it can be argued, with support from speech act theory, that use of the concept of quality has led to an acceptance of new social perceptions in education.

A changed language of education with new actors and solutions: the authorization of promotion and prevention programmes in Swedish schools

This article demonstrates how changes in the language of Swedish education policy have opened up a new social perception of education, in which space has been created for new actors, models and solutions in terms of managing activities in schools. Specifically, it seeks to illustrate how various promotion and prevention programmes have been authorized and disseminated without critical inquiry or resistance in the education sector. To this end, we analyse how the specific, essentially contested concepts of health, value base and communication have been employed in authoritative national documents over the two last decades. For our analysis, we draw on speech act theory, with a focus on linguistic performativity, as we have been interested in analysing how concrete authoritative actors have ‘performed’ various arguments. The analysis helps us to understand how the linguistic force originating from authoritative agencies can be used by different actors as a way to legitimize their arguments and actions. The results demonstrate how different national authorities, as a consequence of their use of the three concepts analysed, have contributed to the establishment of promotion and prevention programmes in education.

Local quality work in an age of accountability – between autonomy and control

This article analyses a specific part of the actions taken to improve the quality of Swedish education, namely the expectations formulated in national policy documents for the quality work that local authorities, schools and teachers are supposed to undertake. For the empirical analysis of how these expectations have changed over the last two decades, two sets of theoretical concepts have been combined: management of placement and management of expectation and autonomy and control. The specific research question is: How can local systematic quality work be understood in an age of accountability and what are the implications for teachers’ practices? The results show that expectations for local quality work have changed radically during the studied period. There has been a significant change in the language used, the content of education has been recontextualised and there are obvious changes in the relation between local autonomy and national control. It is argued that these changes are a consequence of the changed design of the education system, rather than an answer to a content-related question of what is educationally desirable. As a consequence, paradoxical expectations land at the local level and have to be resolved by teachers.

Conflicting goals of educational action : a study of teacher agency from a transactional realism perspective

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relate their situational agency and professional assignment to the national curriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds theoretically on transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviews with teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during the enactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dual perspective of teachers’ relation to the curriculum as both collectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal and realistic–practical relation, we term the future as ‘projective experiences’, the presence as ‘practical-evaluative experiences’ and the past ‘iterational experiences’ in relation to agency. Especially, we are interested in the ‘what’ in the curriculum – what the teachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affects how they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensional structures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that the crucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse on knowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity of assessment and its pedagogical consequences.

Local enactment of the Swedish ‘advanced teacher reform’

Abstract This article focuses on a new form of governing that targets a selected group of teachers. Specifically, it analyses how the Swedish so-called advanced teacher reform is enacted at the local level and discusses its implications for teachers’ professionalism. The methodological approach enables a local analysis in a broader international policy context. Using characteristic elements from curriculum theory to analyse the relationship between different levels and elaborating on the linguistic turn of curriculum theory, three concepts are central in the analysis: enactment, linguistic criteria and professionalism. Empirically, the study draws on material from a two-year application process in a medium-sized municipality. The result demonstrates that the local enactment process is clearly influenced by transnational policy trends and that less allowance is made for teachers’ own experience-based knowledge in the second studied year. The linguistic analysis shows how the applicants using the ‘right concepts’ were selected to become ‘advanced teachers’. As complex and qualitative aspects disappeared from the agenda, this type of governing, with its standardized use of language, may reduce schools’ educational potential. Changes like this raise new questions about how schools can maintain and develop democratic and professional values whilst being exposed to new policy trends.