Theory-based evaluation of the curriculum Lgr 11

Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik

The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between curriculum and leadership research with examples of three recently completed mixed methods studies of assessment cultures and leadership as interlinked activities of governance and school management. We employ curriculum theoretical concepts like e.g. codes and arenas to illustrate their usefulness as a point of departure to further theorize a changing educational landscape. In our study, we illustrate how curriculum and leadership research are historically linked. We put forward some concepts to address the increased complexity of the governance system, and we stress the need to strengthen how different ways of forming the steering system interplay with key curriculum questions. Leadership researchers have, to a large extent, studied school development on a municipality-and organizational level asking questions on how to manage and guide school development. In contrast, curriculum researchers have studied school development from a reform-and governmental perspective more asking questions on how to steer educational development through law, curricula and evaluation. We suggest that these research traditions ought to be further united in order to develop both traditions in less normative, and more, critical ways, and to answer crucial educational questions in glocal times (Marginson and Rhoades. Conceptualising global relations at the glonacal levels. Paper presented at the annual international forum of the Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Richmond, VA, November 15-18, 2001). This chapter concludes with an argument for a new comparative curriculum code due to major shifts including curriculum practices, message systems, levels, arenas and number of curriculummakers engaged.

1996

This essay outlines the major changes in Swedish educational policy that occurred during the 20-year period from 1976 to 1996, with a focus on key issues in the development of the comprehensive school. Effects of the policy changes on Swedish curriculum research over the last 20 years are examined. Educational researchers neglected or were slow to respond to changes in the educational system that resulted from the breakdown of the Swedish model and dismantling of the welfare state. Other conclusions are that the feminist perspective is absent in curriculum research in Sweden; there is a conflict between decentralization and educational goals; the "subject didactical" studies represented a new way to study the relations between curriculum and teaching/learning; and there is a need to develop educational theory in general and curriculum theory in particular. (Contains 26 endnotes and 109 references.) (LMI)

In this article, we present a comparative research project on municipal school policy in Sweden 1950Á2010 which in our view contributes to the research fields of education policy and curriculum theory. Our project which started in 2014 links to a line of international research on education policy concerned with the tensions between decentralisation and globalisation and comparative research investigating transnational transfers of education policy ideas. In this article, we provide some preliminary findings which display municipal school policy dealing with national and transnational school initiatives and affecting local school actions. Most of the findings in this article concern the time period 1950Á1975, during which the present two Swedish school forms, Grundskolan (a 9-year comprehensive school) and Gymnasieskolan (upper secondary school), were introduced and established. We compare local policy, through six interrelated indicators, in two municipalities with different structures and origins. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that municipal school policy research in a comparative and historical perspective is an important field of research as it reveals the complexity of school governance. Historical studies of municipal school policy and practice are crucial for exploring different dimensions of curriculum theory, including the transnational dimension.

Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 2015

In this article, we present a comparative research project on municipal school policy in Sweden 1950Á2010 which in our view contributes to the research fields of education policy and curriculum theory. Our project which started in 2014 links to a line of international research on education policy concerned with the tensions between decentralisation and globalisation and comparative research investigating transnational transfers of education policy ideas. In this article, we provide some preliminary findings which display municipal school policy dealing with national and transnational school initiatives and affecting local school actions. Most of the findings in this article concern the time period 1950Á1975, during which the present two Swedish school forms, Grundskolan (a 9-year comprehensive school) and Gymnasieskolan (upper secondary school), were introduced and established. We compare local policy, through six interrelated indicators, in two municipalities with different structures and origins. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that municipal school policy research in a comparative and historical perspective is an important field of research as it reveals the complexity of school governance. Historical studies of municipal school policy and practice are crucial for exploring different dimensions of curriculum theory, including the transnational dimension.

A comparative research project is being implemented to describe how curriculum guidelines are developed and applied in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, and to compare the underlying structures and strategies that influence and determine curriculum work and curriculum-making at different levels of decision making and enactment. This paper describes the project as it is unfolding in Norway. The expectation is that political, programmatic, and practical levels of decision making will be examined. The extensive education reform effort in Norway at this time is characterized as a systemic reform, and as a curriculum-driven systemic reform that implies coherence among school types nationally. This implies a nationally mandated curriculum developed in a political context. At the programmatic level, the reform involves the construction of a core curriculum, principles and guidelines for compulsory schooling, and syllabuses for the subjects taught in elementary and lower se...

Journal of Curriculum Studies

This article focuses on a new form of governing that targets a selected group of teachers. Specifically, it analyses how the Swedish so-called advanced teacher reform is enacted at the local level and discusses its implications for teachers' professionalism. The methodological approach enables a local analysis in a broader international policy context. Using characteristic elements from curriculum theory to analyse the relationship between different levels and elaborating on the linguistic turn of curriculum theory, three concepts are central in the analysis: enactment, linguistic criteria and professionalism. Empirically, the study draws on material from a two-year application process in a medium-sized municipality. The result demonstrates that the local enactment process is clearly influenced by transnational policy trends and that less allowance is made for teachers' own experience-based knowledge in the second studied year. The linguistic analysis shows how the applicants using the 'right concepts' were selected to become 'advanced teachers'. As complex and qualitative aspects disappeared from the agenda, this type of governing, with its standardized use of language, may reduce schools' educational potential. Changes like this raise new questions about how schools can maintain and develop democratic and professional values whilst being exposed to new policy trends.

European Journal of Education, 2010

European Educational Research Journal, 2012

In this article, the authors examine the development of the Swedish educational reform of 1991 from an international and European perspective, and from the perspective of what counts as knowledge in a recently implemented Swedish curriculum reform. With effect from 2011, the Swedish Government has significantly reshaped the curricula for preschool , compulsory school and upper secondary school education, but in terms of governing principles for schools, these curriculum reforms can be regarded as a continuation of the 1991 reform. The authors argue that this latest reform, as part of an international policy discourse, can be said to represent a denationalised and instrumental conception of education, and that the implications for the formation of knowledge within this conception can be understood as a standards-based curriculum shaped by two powerful international influences: a technical-instrumental discourse of curriculum, emphasising the form, structure and function of the curriculum; and a neo-conservative discourse of curriculum, with an emphasis on curriculum content as a given and uncontested body of knowledge.

Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2016

This case study of the development of the Norwegian compulsory school curriculum of 1997, Laereplanverket 1997, parallels a study of the development of the Illinois Learning Standards of 1997. The pair of case studies is designed to explore the administration of state-based curriculum-making and, in particular, the use in curriculum-making of the administrative tools of compartmentalization, segmentation and licencing. Often the use of these tools serves to make the curriculum as a guiding instrument largely symbolic and/or ideological. A shared knowledge base is the core in a national network of communication between the members of a democratic community … Education [plays] the principal part in passing on this shared background information-the education everybody has to be familiar with to remain a democratic society and the members of the society empowered.

European Educational Research Journal, 2016

The aim of this article is to examine how transnational concepts within educational policies influence national curricula in the reconceptualisation of educational policy into concrete curriculum texts. Based on a critical discourse analysis and the concepts of recontextualisation, convergence and divergence, a third wave of European policy discourse has been identified, emphasising an increasing interest in compulsory school and curriculum. Analyses of policies and pedagogical texts show a convergence between a European and a Swedish knowledge discourse concerning standards, basic skills and a performance-based curriculum; however, there is a divergence in terms of transversal skills in transnational policy documents compared to an emphasis on school subjects in the Swedish curriculum. In the transnational arena, the concept of knowledge is mainly interpreted in terms of competencies, while in the Swedish curriculum – the Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and th...