Dion Rüsselbæk Hansen

What are they talking about?: The construction of good teaching among students, teachers and management in the reformed Danish upper secondary school

This paper analyses how leaders, teachers and students are realising the reform of the Danish upper secondary school. We illustrate how they articulate good teaching: what they say characterises it, and what they think can facilitate and prevent it. Our claim is that reform discourses and changes to the organisation of teaching and teacher work create new ways of talking about teaching: new values are espoused, new dilemmas, rationalities and conflicts show up. From our point of departure in discourse and actantial analysis, we show that students, teachers and school management speak differently about good teaching. They have different ways of relating to other discourses when articulating good teaching. Management takes up the reform discourse when speaking of good teaching, which is related to the realisation of self-governing teacher teams. The teachers also refer to the reform discourse. But they also speak within a ‘typical’ teacher discourse in which good teaching depends on the teachers autonomy to exercise individual judgement. The students, on the other hand, position themselves within a psychodynamic discourse where good teaching is related to the teachers personal signature. Therefore, as we will argue, realisation of the reform of Danish upper secondary school is happening in unforeseen ways.

The ‘strong’ state and the ‘soft’ market in educational reform processes: Management philosophies and their consequences

In contemporary western society, welfare work in general, particularly in education, has been struck by an endless series of policy reforms, discourses and technologies. These have consequences not only for the production of professional identity, but also for the way educational tasks are understood and handled. Inspired by the work of post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault, Rose, Ball, Alvesson and Willmott, and the psychoanalytical thinker Žižek, the authors describe some of these consequences by analysing two examples which stem from the Danish educational context: upper secondary schools and vocational educational training. The first example shows how a ‘strong’ state logic results in a focus on numbers, which leads to a form of cynical leadership and an undermining of teachers’ professional judgment. The second example shows how leaders and teachers in a vocational training school, with help from critical utopian action researchers, seek to innovate their practices in accordance with ‘soft’ market logic. As a consequence, teachers’ professionalism is ‘hijacked’ by a new form of organizational professionalism.