John B. Krejsler

Successful principals: telling or selling? On the importance of context for school leadership

This article will argue that diverse national, regional and local contexts leave different rooms for manoeuvre for school principals. The social technologies applied by the authorities (like accountability systems) can be ‘tight’ or ‘loose’ and so leave little or much room for principals’ interpretations of what a good school is and what successful school principalship is. Thus it is important for their choice of forms of influence in exercising leadership. We will outline the relations between the state, local authorities and schools in each of eight countries participating in the International Successful School Principal Project (ISSPP): the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, China, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, based on previosly published case studies. We want to obtain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the social technologies used and the room for interpretation of the purposes and objectives left to the schools. Principals choose the forms of influence they can exercise when setting directions for the school. The arguments on which principals base their decisions are also diverse, but heavily flavoured by the contexts in which the schools function. Comparing education and educational leadership and the values and practices of school principals is a contested enterprise because the contexts in which the values are constructed and practice developed is often forgotten. In posing the questions from above and below the level of principal, we try to take account of the findings from many leadership studies, which indicate that educational leadership and its successes are highly contextually dependent even within educational systems.

What Works in Education and Social Welfare? A Mapping of the Evidence Discourse and Reflections upon Consequences for Professionals

Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy, the article maps major sources and trajectories of the evidence discourse. This enables scrutiny of the current struggle about evidence for What Works in education and social welfare. Evidence discourse is identified as emerging from the medical field as a bottom-up professional strategy. It is subsequently reworked and launched into education and social welfare in moves that largely bypass professionals to serve policy-maker and market needs to enable evidence-based choices among public services. From this perspective, the author argues that education and social welfare professions may profit from adopting evidence as a floating signifier. An analytical distinction between external and internal forms of evidence is introduced to facilitate alternative strategies to dealing with the evidence discourse.

How reforms morph as they move. Performative approaches to education reforms and their un/intended effects

The purpose of the special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education is to contribute with conceptualization on how reforms change educational organizations and subjectivities, and how educational organizations change reforms (Cuban, 1998). Thereby we aim at giving an account of the power of conceptual endeavors with close readings of empirical material. Our intention is to elaborate this basic idea through empirical investigations of the intertwinement of different educational reforms, of policies, standards and everyday educational lives across the globe. As well as telling stories of reforms and how they transform and are transformed by the educational organizations and subjects they engage, we highlight how a careful enactment of methodologies and critiques might assist us in tracing not only intended but also unintended effects of reforms and the ‘worlding’ they shape (Brøgger, 2014). In other words, engaging with performative research approaches allow us to follow and scrutinize what happens when reforms are borrowed, translated and taken up in a range of ways. Or as Robert Cowen (Cowen, 2009) poetically and with a jazz vibe in mind so beautifully has formulated it; how reforms morph as they move. This theme issue takes on the task of demonstrating how a wide range of performative effects are at stake at many different levels according to various dynamics in different countries and regions.

Capturing the ‘Evidence’ and ‘What Works’ Agenda in Education: A Truth Regime and the Art of Manoeuvring Floating Signifiers

Education has moved higher up on the policy agenda and serving the public good has acquired new meanings. This entails demands to provide policy and market with instruments to enable evidence-based or at least evidence-informed choices in a so-called competitive global knowledge economy. This has, not surprisingly, led to a struggle about ‘evidence’ and the right to decide how ‘what works’ can be defined in education, which has consequences for school, professionals and educational research.

Becoming Fit for Transnational Comparability

This chapter traces how national teacher education policy discourse in Denmark and Sweden is being transformed by opaque, albeit often inclusive, processes in transnational policy forums, such as the Bologna Process, OECD, and EU. This is facilitated by “soft law” surrounding the imagined needs of modern nations, if they are to succeed in “an increasingly competitive global race among knowledge economies.” In the case of the Bologna Process, the transformative effects are often rather direct. More often, however, effects touch upon national educational agendas in indirect ways, in terms of an emerging, overarching logic and governance technologies like comparisons, stocktaking, standards, performance indicators, benchmarking, and best practice. These transnational templates make national teacher education programs comparable. They are fueled by mutual peer pressure among competing nations. Consequently, Danish teacher education discourse has emerged from a distinctly national vocational seminary (teacher training) tradition, into a modernized university college discourse that increasingly fits the transnational templates of comparability, albeit at a slower pace than her Swedish neighbor. It is often difficult to notice the pervasive impact of transnational policy, as reforms of culturally sensitive school and teacher education areas are often discursively reinscribed in heated national debates. The EU and OECD are not popular figures to pull out in public political debate, in either Denmark or Sweden. The Bologna Process is largely unknown to the broader public. Theoretically, this chapter draws on post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. Empirically, it draws on discourse analysis of European (EU), Danish and Swedish national documents, and literature on policy reform.

Student Centredness and Learning from a Perspective of History of the Present

The overall aim of this chapter is to problematise the contemporary transnational discourse about learning and pupil-centred learning which during recent decades have become givens or, perhaps it could be said, have become established as dogmas in the conversations, writings and thinking about ourselves, others, education, work and society. The purpose of this approach is to shake up what is to a greater or lesser extent taken for granted at the present. We do this by showing that ideas such as student centredness can be seen in other ways than is the case in contemporary narratives. Theoretically, we draw on Foucault’s concepts of genealogy and history of the present. This means that we reflect contemporary conceptions, in this case the ideas of student centredness, in relation to how similar phenomena have been practiced within other narratives about education/training. Empirically, we use different types of education texts such as policy documents, investigations, textbooks and scientific reports. We start with contemporary documents from transnational as well as Swedish sources, followed by documents from three different historical periods: (1) the 1940/1950s, (2) the 1970s and (3) the narrative of the French teacher, Joseph Jacotot, from the beginning of the nineteenth century about teaching for intellectual liberation as retold by Jacques Ranciere. The genealogical analysis shows that contemporary narrative about learning is neither more nor less pupil or student centred than that of yesteryear. It is rather that this phenomenon is given different meanings within the framework of different historical discourses about education. In the present time, the concepts are given meaning in the context of educational policy work and reforms in an era of transnational governance.

Engaging in Foucault's Governmentality and Styles of Reasoning: A Short Summery.

In our introduction to the previous issue of this special double issue, we sought to situate the contributions by exploring and playing with Foucault’s notion of governmentality as it worked through the corpus of work in this guest-edited collection. Let us briefly refer back to those arguments in framing this second issue. The background to the contributions is a research seminar held in April 2011 at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison organized around the notion of governmentality. Our focus is to reverse the concern with the “author” as the origin of reflection and the actions for change. In contrast, it is to use governmentality as a style of reasoning about the complex movements of practices about what is “seen,” thought about, and recognized for illumining our own predicaments. Governmentality in this double issue, then, enters into a conversation with other readings as epistemological principles are translated and assembled in different cultural spaces. The contributions offer an intervention in thinking about the problematics of research in at least two dimensions. The first is to offer questions and insights into the educational practices that are alternative to those