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Parallel lines – tensions in teachers’ enactment of the vision of a newly established school in Sweden
This article concerns the rise of young entrepreneurship education programs in 1980s Sweden, which entered schools surprisingly early and quickly, backed by organized Swedish business. The increased popularity of entrepreneurship education toward the end of the twentieth century in many European welfare states is usually associated with a shift toward neoliberal, market-oriented, policies. It is argued here that an important reason for young entrepreneurship’s success was its ability to connect with the Swedish tradition of cooperation and democratic decision making, in combination with values such as individualism and competition. A case in point is the surprising compatibility between progressive pedagogical ideas and “neoliberal” entrepreneurialism. The article is based on a study of Ung Företagsamhet (Young Entrepreneurship, henceforth UF), the Swedish version of the American organization Junior Achievement, and the ambition of the consumer cooperative movement’s think tank, Koopi, to offer a different kind of entrepreneurship education. In the analysis, the concept of “the entrepreneurial self” is applied to these two different programs, and the results show how they clashed, but also overlapped, in ways that help explain the success of UF. The article is a contribution to our understanding of how entrepreneurship discourse emerged and manifested itself in everyday environments in the late twentieth century, and as such also contributes to the history of Nordic neoliberalism.
This paper provides insight into secondary Physical Education (PE) teachers’ experiences of beginning to re-imagine secondary physical education provision in light of the new Curriculum for Wales, 2022 (CfW). Data were generated through analysis of semi-structured interviews (n = 5) with secondary PE teachers who participated in three workshops which uses a design-thinking methodology. Informed by Ball and colleagues’ conceptualisation of policy work, findings draw attention towards how engagement in the workshops provided a foundation for the participants to begin interpretation and translation of the new CfW and consider re-imagining existing PE provision within the school context. Participants’ interpretations of the new CfW centred around health and physical activity provision which were shaped by a connection with a range of health and physical activity stakeholders. This enabled participants to translate their ideas from the workshops into pedagogical practices within the school context. The paper concludes by suggesting secondary PE teacher’s realisation of the new CfW would be enhanced through opportunities to further integrate disciplinary ideas from health, sport, physical activity, and education across national and global contexts.
Sweden possesses a highly deregulated school system in which students in the compulsory school system are free to choose almost any school they prefer. This study focuses on the long-term difference in educational level twelve years after finishing elementary school for students who made a school choice compared to those who did not. The study uses the Voronoi method of estimating school choice and is based on detailed register-based data for all students that finished elementary school in Sweden in the years 2000-2002. The results confirm previous findings that the most resourceful families more often make active choices. However, those who made an active school choice seem to have lower future educational achievement. The exception are those who have foreign-born parents, and those living in low-resource areas, who made an active school choice. They have a more positive educational achievement compared to those who stayed in the closest school.
The curriculum is often the target of reform and governments use a range of accountability measures to ensure compliance. This paper examines the decisions schools in England make regarding history provision, in a period of curriculum change, and the potential consequences of these decisions. Drawing on a large, longitudinal data set, of primary and secondary material, the study examines the relationship between the number of students entered for public examination in history in England and a range of situated and material factors. The data suggest that particular measures of accountability are effective in shaping school decision-making, but the type of school, socio-economic nature of the school intake, and students’ prior attainment are also important factors in understanding the decisions made. This does result in an inequitable access to history education; this inequity exists between different types of schools and socio-economic areas, and is also evident within schools where students with low prior attainment are less likely to be allowed to study history.
Entrepreneurship viewed as new value creation is a perspective
gaining ground in entrepreneurial education. Educators have found
it to be a helpful approach in order to escape a situation where
the two established ways to infuse entrepreneurship into education
are both quite problematic. A value creation view on entrepreneurship,
however, currently lacks a clear answer to a crucial question: What
is value? Responding to this research gap, the article presents
a value framework consisting of five different kinds of value: economic, enjoyment,
social, harmony and influence value. Each kind of value can be experienced and
created both for oneself and for others, thus constituting a total
of ten different perspectives on value. This value framework has
in practice been useful for teachers working with educational design.
It has also been useful for research on assessment of the impact entrepreneurial
education has on students, leading to new insights that could improve
the effectiveness of entrepreneurial education. The value framework
also casts new light on what entrepreneurship is and why people
engage in entrepreneurship. A limitation of the work presented here
is the inherent difficulty in conducting a systematic literature
review on a term as generic as “value”.
Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to be ‘implemented’ by schools. In response to this, a great deal of attention has been given to evaluating ‘how well’ policies are realised in practice – implemented! Less attention has been paid to understanding how schools actually deal with these multiple, and sometimes contradictory, policy demands; creatively working to interpret policy texts and translate these into practices, in real material conditions and varying resources – how they are enacted! Based on a long-term qualitative study of four ‘ordinary’ secondary schools, and working on the interface of theory with data, this book explores how schools enact, rather than implement, policy. It focuses on
This paper is a reflection on What is policy? Texts, Trajectories and Tool Boxes, which was first published in 1993, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. It looks back to what the 1993 paper was trying to do and at some of the developments of the ideas first sketched there in my later work, in particular in the book How Schools Do Policy (2012). It also considers the continuing tensions between domination and agency, discourse and text, in policy research and the misuse of the concept of discourse in some policy analysis work.
Most policymakers and academics agree that entrepreneurship is indispensable to society’s development and well-being. Fostering entrepreneurship has become a matter of highest priority in public policy worldwide. Given the growing pressures of decentralization and competitiveness that schools have faced over the last 20 years, the role of school principals as entrepreneurs is receiving growing interest in academic and practical contexts. Our study examines school principals from the perspective of their schools’ entrepreneurship. Accordingly, we seek to reveal the meaning of entrepreneurship in school settings and to examine the conditions that are related with school principals' entrepreneurial activities. This study examines 10 school principals of different educational streams in Israel, who have been identified as entrepreneurs by their peers and supervision authorities. We characterize these agents of change as institutional entrepreneurs and present their motives and resources that facilitate their entrepreneurship in school settings. We include several novel parameters that may be applied to characterize school entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on institutional lens. This study contributes to the broader educational literature that addresses school principals' roles within a decentralized system demanding high accountability.
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Marketisation and competition within public schooling systems impact the work of principals in varying ways. Previous work on the marketisation of schooling and school autonomy has drawn attention to the ‘entrepreneurial principal’ as an effect of marketisation. In this paper we explore principals’ engagements with marketisation based on 21 interviews with public school principals across two Australian states. Using the work of Christiaens (2020 Christiaens, Tim. 2020. “The Entrepreneur of the Self beyond Foucault’s Neoliberal Homo Oeconomicus.” European Journal of Social Theory 23 (4): 493–511. doi:10.1177/1368431019857998.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we highlight a difference between entrepreneurialism and utility-maximisation in marketised systems, evident in how principals engage with leadership within these systems. For most principals in our study, engagements with marketisation were entangled with different orientations toward utility maximisation. Evidence of genuine entrepreneurship was far more scarce. We argue that the need to ensure school survival in a saturated market gives rise to a performative veneer of entrepreneurialism that is largely absent of innovation and the ‘leap of faith’ that lies at the heart of true entrepreneurialism.
The education field favors innovations, but innovative schools tend to fade after an initial ‘golden age.’ According to the new institutional theory, this happens due to the innovative school’s need to achieve institutional legitimacy, which encounters several difficulties. This study aims to explore the journey to attaining legitimacy in one entrepreneurial school that gained legitimacy from some actors, but not from other relevant ones, and did not survive. Using a case study method, 30 interviews were conducted, and over 200 documents, including media articles, school protocols, and court protocols, were analyzed. The findings reveal that the concept of legitimacy is not dichotomous, but a continuum ranging from legitimacy to neutral and de-legitimacy, and stakeholders differ in their positions, resources, and type of legitimacy. Additional theoretical and practical implications are presented in the discussion.
This self-study documents two teacher educators’ professional inquiry into the notions of critical friendship. Specifically, we asked: How does our interactive inquiry on the topic of critical friendship lead us to new understandings of critical friends? Three theoretical perspectives framed this study – More Knowledgeable Others, Thought Collective, and reflection. Data sources included (a) artifacts from the self-study scholarship/literature, (b) written and real-time (audio recorded) dialogue, and (c) critical friend response memos. We systematically analyzed our data, linking the initial themes to our theoretical frame. These themes led to three findings about critical friendship: flexible definitions, complex characteristics, and multiple learning phases. Based on these findings, we created two research tools useful for researchers enacting critical friendship – the Critical Friend Definition Continuum and the Critical Friend Guide for Quality Assurance. Ultimately, we assert that we, along with our colleagues, must be responsible brokers of critical friendship by explicitly explaining our purposes, definitions and uses of critical friendship within our work as self-study researchers.
This article describes a study that documents the attempts of administrators of a new school to introduce and sustain inclusive leadership and program arrange-ments over the course of the first 3 years of the school’s life. The data illustrate that while they were able to succeed on a number of levels, they also encountered a number of challenges. Principal among these were the departure of the first principal after the second year, a rapid increase in the school population, as well as the challenges that accompany most schools when they attempt to implement inclusive practices.
An exploration is presented of how urban spaces, polarized by class and ethnicity, structure the basic conditions of emerging local school markets. The authors investigate how the distribution of symbolic capital, or ‘hot knowledge’ of the market, affects schools, the market, and the urban spaces themselves. The study is guided by theoretical notions involving lived local school markets, competitive spaces and symbolic capital. Methodologically, the study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at three compulsory schools in Stockholm. Analytically, the ways in which relations among urban spaces and school choice, and actors’ perceptions of these relations, affect the actors’ subsequent positioning in the local market, are illustrated. The authors’ main conclusion is that despite nationally defining principles mandating fairness, transparency and integration, school choice policy is being implemented on an uneven playing field, aggravating current patterns of segregation in education and even housing. Consequently, a call is made for an urgent reframing of some of the policy’s nationally defining principles.
Entrepreneurship education is widely promoted as an approach to addressing youth unemployment. Contrasting neoliberal and human capabilities frameworks, this article draws attention to the problematic way in which much of the discourse surrounding entrepreneurship conflates programmes designed to spur economic development through business and job creation with those designed to alleviate poverty. Providing examples from the case of one NGO implementing a youth livelihood programme in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors discuss how a capabilities approach illuminates the importance of attending to youth values and addressing the social, material and institutional conditions that mediate how youths' skills and resources are transformed into livelihood opportunities and choices.
Purpose – The paper aims to explore the stages involved in the school establishment phase and detect differences between new and innovative schools startup. Design/methodology/approach – The exploratory study was conducted on the creation phase of two Israeli elementary schools: one new and one innovative. The data were collected through interviews with central figures in each school, school visits, and documentations analysis. Findings – Four stages were found in the establishment phase: building construction and resource achievement, goal prioritization, staff development, and vision formulation, but these stages were found to be in reverse order in the new and innovative schools. Research limitations/implications – Although the study is limited by the specific context from which data were drawn, it offers a useful conceptual framework for the establishment process of new and innovative schools. Practical implications – Implications for practice and policy include useful suggestions for the stages and order necessary in the startup of each kind of school, identification of weak spots in the process and apposite remediation, and directions for policy and decision makers. Originality/value – The study provides a conceptual framework which points to the differences in the startup phase in new and innovative schools, and suggests their different functions for the educational system.
Ethos, the fundamental character of a culture that underlies its beliefs and customs, can create strong emotional attachments if it is thoughtfully conceived and carefully nurtured. Adrianna Kezar describes how several institutions tend this fundamental character, with positive results for student engagement.
Contextual consonance or dissonance refers to the concordance of, or the discrepancy between, the individual's social characteristics and those of the population by which he is surrounded. Although a number of advantageous consequences have been shown to issue from contextual dissonance, self-esteem is not one of them. This article seeks to account for the deleterious effect of contextual dissonance on self-esteem by examining the nature of dissonant communications environments, dissonant cultural environments, and dissonant comparison reference groups.
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