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Kompetensutveckling som styrning: Om statliga insatser för lärares kompetensutveckling och hur de förhandlas i lärares lokala praktik
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Department of Education.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0218-3854
2020 (Swedish)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)Alternative title
Professional development as a policy instrument : State initiatives for teachers’ professional development and how they are negotiated in teachers’ local practice (English)
Abstract [en]

Teachers’ professional development (PD) is currently promoted as an important element of the pursuit of improved school results by researchers, politicians, and international organizations. Policy actors argue that the quality of teaching is the factor within school systems with the greatest significance for students’ learning outcomes, and that PD is an important instrument for enhancing such quality. Teachers’ PD has also become a higher priority among policy makers due to decentralization reforms that have deprived states of many of the policy measures previously available to them. However, teachers’ PD has rarely been investigated as a policy instrument. This is unfortunate for several reasons, including that surrounding governance structures are important for the effects of PD, and that most of the PD in which teachers partake is initiated by actors such as states, municipalities, or school leadership. Based on these arguments, the aim of this thesis is to develop knowledge about how teachers’ PD functions as an instrument for governing teachers’ work. The dissertation explores this issue through a comparative investigation of state initiatives for teachers’ PD in Sweden during the period 1991-2015. The dissertation devotes special attention to one intervention, the Literacy Boost (in Swedish Läslyftet), by also investigating its enactment at six schools during the 2015/16 academic year. The thesis shows that the Swedish state’s spending for teachers’ PD and school development increased significantly during the investigated period, especially after 2007, and, likewise, that teachers’ participation in PD increased. Moreover, article I shows that school agencies, since 1991, increased their engagement in teachers’ PD, that PD prescriptions became more detailed, and that evaluations of local enactment were used in more comprehensive ways. Based on the local enactment of the Literacy Boost, articles II and III illuminated the difficulty of translating external and cross-curricular messages to teachers’ local practice. While the PD model’s form of governance effectively induced teachers to discuss and enact instructions in the PD material, enactments took the form of additional activities rather than being made coherent with teachers’ present subject teaching. Thus, articles II and III indicated that, in order for PD messages to contribute to teaching, governance should be more specific to teachers’ present practice. Lastly, the dissertation illuminates a paradox regarding state-initiated PD in decentralized school systems. Although decentralization increases the state’s incentives to engage in teachers’ PD, the state’s ability to adapt PD initiatives to local needs is limited by the principles of decentralization.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2020. , p. 154
Series
Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Educational Sciences ; 19
Keywords [en]
teachers’ professional development, collaborative professional development, educational governance, policy instrument, work of governing, disciplinary literacy, content-area literacy, decentralization, teacher professionalism
National Category
Pedagogy
Research subject
Education
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-406594ISBN: 978-91-513-0898-2 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-406594DiVA, id: diva2:1413363
Public defence
2020-05-15, Gunnar Johanssonsalen, Blåsenhus, von Kraemers Allé 1, Uppsala, 13:15 (Swedish)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2020-04-23 Created: 2020-03-10 Last updated: 2020-05-19
List of papers
1. Governing teachers by professional development: State programmes for continuing professional development in Sweden since 1991
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Governing teachers by professional development: State programmes for continuing professional development in Sweden since 1991
2017 (English)In: Journal of Curriculum Studies, ISSN 0022-0272, E-ISSN 1366-5839, Vol. 49, no 3, p. 391-411Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

The purpose of this article is to analyse how teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) contributes to the government of the teaching profession. This is done by examining the CPD initiatives organised by two Swedish national educational agencies since 1991 involving the school subjects of Swedish (standard language education) and mathematics. Four programmes of professional development are identified in the investigated material, each motivated by specific conceptions of teachers and professional development. One important trend is that agency engagement in teachers’ CPD and school development has increased over time and that CPD programmes have become more prescriptive and elaborate in their use of evaluations. While this may result in a more standardised and centrally governed teaching profession, centrally governed initiatives could also provide teachers with professional arenas for developing ideas without being influenced by local school management. 

Keywords
teachers’ continuing professional development, teacher professionalism, teaching profession, school governance, school development
National Category
Didactics Pedagogy
Research subject
Curriculum Studies; Education
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-275509 (URN)10.1080/00220272.2016.1151082 (DOI)000396819300008 ()
Available from: 2016-03-03 Created: 2016-02-04 Last updated: 2020-03-10Bibliographically approved
2. Improving literacy and content learning across the curriculum?: How teachers relate literacy teaching to school subjects in cross-curricular professional development
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Improving literacy and content learning across the curriculum?: How teachers relate literacy teaching to school subjects in cross-curricular professional development
2019 (English)In: Education Inquiry, E-ISSN 2000-4508, Vol. 10, no 4, p. 368-384Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This study examined how teachers relate literacy teaching to their ordinary subject teaching in professional development settings. The study is conducted within the large Swedish professional development program the Literacy Boost (in Swedish “Läslyftet”), which can be viewed as an example of an international focus on reading ability beyond early and beginning reading. Such a focus may be well-grounded, but it also raises concerns of how teachers of different school subjects are addressed in such programs. The findings of this study show that participating teachers express four approaches of relating literacy teaching to subject teaching, indicating different types and degrees of coherence between professional development content and teachers’ teaching practice. While all teaching activities described by teachers aimed at improving students’ general literacy, this was mostly done in the form of additional activities rather than being embedded in the ordinary teaching concerning curricular objectives of school subjects. These results suggest that differences in how texts are used and interpreted in different school subjects should be given higher priority in the design of both content and form of professional development programs to better support subject teaching.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Informa UK Limited, 2019
Keywords
Teachers’ professional development, disciplinary literacy, content-area literacy
National Category
Didactics Pedagogy
Research subject
Education
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-377930 (URN)10.1080/20004508.2019.1580983 (DOI)000648589400005 ()
Available from: 2019-02-28 Created: 2019-02-28 Last updated: 2022-06-22Bibliographically approved
3. Persuasion and resistance: Large-scale collaborative professional development as a policy instrument
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Persuasion and resistance: Large-scale collaborative professional development as a policy instrument
2020 (English)In: Journal of Curriculum Studies, ISSN 0022-0272, E-ISSN 1366-5839, Vol. 52, no 3, p. 395-412Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

This study examined collaborative professional development (PD) as a policy instrument for relating external ideas to present teaching practices. The study interprets the global emphasis policymakers place on collaborative PD as a response to the devolution of responsibility in many school systems, accompanied or followed by increased external guidance to local actors. In relation to these tendencies, collaborative PD may function either as a support for professional self-governance or enable increased top-down control. Thus, by analysing collaborative PD as a policy instrument, the study contributes to the understanding of the contemporary governing of public education. The analysed empirical material derived from a large-scale PD program organized by the Swedish National Agency for Education. The results show that the investigated PD model appears as an instrument for persuading teachers to follow external ideas rather than for strengthening local self-governance. Collegial dialogue focused on the potential of enacting PD guidelines, and made teachers’ stances to external ideas visible, including expressions of resistance. Such visibility of resistance enabled suggestions for stronger adherence to guidelines. This focus on adherence may come at the cost of a meaningful adaptation of external ideas to local settings and decrease the sustainability of changes.

Keywords
Collaborative professional development, educational governance, work of governing, collegial dialogue, legitimation
National Category
Pedagogy
Research subject
Education
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-400384 (URN)10.1080/00220272.2019.1702721 (DOI)000503530000001 ()
Available from: 2019-12-20 Created: 2019-12-20 Last updated: 2021-03-22Bibliographically approved

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