Jakob Ditlev Bøje

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.

Modernization of upper secondary school in Denmark Headmasters’ reform interpretations and constructions of students

The Danish upper secondary school is currently undergoing a hyper complex process of modernization where new organizational forms, teacher-student roles and principles of management are introduced. The process is set-off most directly by a new reform. This article explores the implementation of that reform by focusing on how it is interpreted locally and put into practice by the headmasters of two different schools. On the basis of that analysis the article discusses the consequences that different ways of interpreting and managing the reform might have for the students — how do they understand, recognize and execute the new pedagogical discourses and constructions of students that the headmasters are launching? The theoretical and methodological approach of the article is based on Basil Bernsteins sociology of education. Empirically the article draws on qualitative interviews with the headmasters under analysis.