Malena Lidar

Teaching for action competence

The focus of this article is to explore preschool children’s possibilities to learn to act for sustainable development. The purpose is to describe and analyze which actions are privileged when children participate in preschool activities. Analyses of video recordings of everyday preschool activities show how children experience activities where they critically discuss and make value judgments about actions. The results of the analyses also show how different actions become relevant in different practices. Furthermore, comparisons are made between the preschool practices and three teaching principles within education for sustainable development (ESD). In ESD, action competence is the ability to critically make value judgments about different alternative ways to act for a sustainable future. The result shows how children make value judgments in situations where facts are not sufficient for solving a problem.

Teaching Traditions in Science Teachers’ Practices and the Introduction of National Testing

ABSTRACT Our main interest in this article is to explore whether Swedish teachers changed their teaching and assessment practices in relation to the new national tests in science education that were introduced 2009. Data was collected using a web-distributed questionnaire, which was answered by 407 teachers. The concept of teaching traditions is used to capture patterns of what is emphasized by teachers in terms of goals and content in teaching and the design of the questionnaire was based on the concept of curriculum emphases. The results show two distinct groups of focus, which are compared with two traditions within science education: the Academic and the Moral tradition. The main content where teaching has been changed is in making science more applied than before, where applied not only means the application of science knowledge to practical technical issues, but also to moral and political issues.

Expressions of agency within complex policy structures: science teachers’ experiences of education policy reforms in Sweden

ABSTRACT We explore the experiences of school science teachers as they enact three linked national curriculum and assessment policy reforms in Sweden. Our goal is to understand teachers’ differing responses to these reforms. A sample of 13 teachers engaged in 2 interviews over a 6–9-month period. Interviews included exploration of professional background and school context, perceptions of the aims of the policy reforms and experiences of working with these reforms in the classroom. Analysis was guided by an individual-oriented sociocultural perspective on professional agency. Here teaching is conceptualised as an ongoing interplay between teachers’ knowledge, skills and personal goals, and the characteristics of the social, institutional and policy settings in which they work. Our analysis shows that navigating the ensuing continuities and contradictions results in many different expressions of teacher agency, e.g. loss of autonomy and trust, pushing back, subversion, transfer of authority, and creative tensions. Typically, an individual teacher’s enactment of these reforms involved several of these expressions of agency. We demonstrate that the sociocultural perspective provides insights into teachers’ responses to education policy reform likely to be missed by studies that focus largely on individual teacher knowledge/beliefs about reform or skills in ‘implementing’ reform practices.