Abstract
ABSTRACTGlobal reforming driven by neoliberal ideas is today reshaping educational systems. This study explores how a national policy incentive, aimed at changing teacher education in Sweden, is transformed and realized into educational practice and how pedagogic discourses are operating in and through the primary teachers’ examination practice in Sweden. The aim is also to explore which competencies are legitimized and thus form the knowledge base for primary teachers. The study is conducted through a qualitative and quantitative, theoretically based, analysis of all examination tasks (n = 322) in the primary teacher education at a teacher education department located at one of Sweden’s largest universities. The qualitative software package Nvivo was used for the qualitative analysis and the statistical software SPSS was used for the quantitative analysis. The result shows that most examinations involve the examination of methodological/didactical knowledge related to teachers work in the classroom (out of horizontal knowledge structures) and that students lack opportunities to practice and show analytical skills, with vertical knowledge structures, in their examinations.
Highlights
Neo-liberal notions and discourses such as marketbased leadership principles drive national educational systems, in what has been described as a conservative ‘modernization’ of schooling and instruction
The aim of the study was to identify how the legitimate, professional knowledge base and professional identity are constructed in the most recent primary teacher education program, by analyzing what pedagogic discourses operate in the examination practice and what skills and competences are legitimized through these discourses
Our study shows that certain examination practices are considerably more frequent than others, something that gives an increased legitimacy to the type of pedagogic discourse that those practices represent
Summary
Neo-liberal notions and discourses such as marketbased leadership principles drive national educational systems, in what has been described as a conservative ‘modernization’ of schooling and instruction. Teacher education has been involved in the neoliberal reforming in two ways: firstly, in terms of itself being subject to far reaching conservative modernization, or what Beach and Bagley (2012, 2013) refer to as re-traditionalizing, and secondly in terms of its role in preparing future teachers for future professional work in the decentralized, flexible, competitive and quasi-market national educational context (Börjesson, 2016; Nilsson Lindström & Beach, 2015). This is as it seems an international tendency. Changes have been made to the organization of teacher education, to the rhetoric that describes the way teachers and pupils are expected to behave, and to the kind of knowledge that is considered legitimate and valuable for both the individual and society, with huge consequences for the people who work in educational institutions and the societies in which we live (Singh, Thomas, & Harris, 2013)
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