No particular way to go

This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school (‘non-completers’), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19 who had attended special upper secondary schools catering for young people with mild cognitive disability. Their narratives portray sparse socio-economic resources and difficult family situations, learning problems and marginalisation processes in school. They commonly learned to perceive themselves as failures and ‘different’. Framed by narrow horizons of action, these young people’s careers were mostly characterised by enforced rather than self-initiated turning points. Often leading to unemployment and economic problems, leaving secondary school was less of a turning point than a continuation of failure, even if completing adult education and getting a job were regarded as self-initiated, positive shifts. We conclude that careership theory was useful for analysing and understanding the careers of the young people concerned. However, distinguishing between ‘routines’ and ‘turning points’ became especially difficult when studying lives of these young people hemmed in by sparser resources, fewer choices and less stable career trajectories than their peers.     

Education Governance in Transition: An introduction

The purpose of this article is to present concepts and research problems dealing with education governance and social inclusion and exclusion. Education restructuring, as a recent international movement, is regarded as a combination of transitions in governing and new managerialism. Social inclusion and exclusion is conceived of as a duplet concept, mutually defining each other. The relation between new governance - deregulation, decentralisation, privatisation and steering by goals and results - and social inclusion/exclusion is conceptualised as an equity problematic and a knowledge problematic. It is argued that there is a need to understand the system of reason in order to capture the implications of education governing in transition.     

Shaping strategic research: power,resources, and interests in Swedish research policy

'Strategic research’ has become a goal of government policy throughout the industrial world. This paper follows the emergence of new approaches to the funding of 'strategic research’ in Sweden, by examining three research foundations created in the late 1990s, and considers their ambitions, limitations, and achievements.     

Hating school, loving mathematics: On the ideological function of critique and reform in mathematics education

Students’ engagement with fictions in the form of “word problems” plays an important role in classroom practice as well as in theories of mathematical learning. Drawing on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, I show that this activity can be seen as a form of play or game, where it is pretended that mathematics is useful in real life in a way that it is not. With Pfaller, I argue that play can take hold of the imagination of the players, infusing everyday life with meaning borrowed from the imagery of the play and that these effects are more powerful when the play is forced and takes an institutionalized form. I show that mathematics education does in fact have these characteristics, including sophisticated mechanisms for translating in-game performance (test scores) to real-life goods (grades and examinations). A central theme of the article is the perceived discrepancy between mathematics education as it is, and how it supposedly could and should be in light of the properties of mathematics. The analysis implies that this gap actually is an effect of play and thus an inherent property of mathematics education itself.     

School experiences and teacher socialization: A longitudinal study of pupils who grew up to be teachers

In this paper it is argued that experiences as a pupil are of importance for socialization into the teaching profession. Schooling experiences of pupils that turned to the teaching professions are compared with their school fellows who turned to other careers. Our data are based on a longitudinal study carried out in a Swedish medium-sized community where pupils were followed from the school start (at age 7) into adulthood (to age 23). Out of 671 pupils 34 later turned to teacher careers. During primary school the group of pupils who later became teachers were more well-adjusted and stimulated students compared to the other pupils. And as adults they have specific perspectives of schooling close to those predominant in middle-class positions and distant from those frequent in working-class positions, according to our data. Based on these findings it is argued that teachers and student teachers have to reflect upon and to analyze their own school experiences in order to understand differences in experiences and rationalities among their own students.     

Educational Research: the State of Sweden and the Australian 2.2 world

Current tendencies in educational research in Sweden are presented and compared to Australia. We here refer to; organization of research, research allocation, publication patterns, and assessments of research qualities. Different trajectories of educational research were identified, where Australian research was organized as a field of study, while Swedish research had a disciplinary organization, which now is eroding into a situation more close to the Australian one. In other aspects the Australian and Swedish trajectories seem to harmonize, except for the fact that RAEs in Sweden are initiated and run by the universities themselves. There are also some differences in how research qualities are assessed and the outcomes of these assessments. Given these findings different strategies to deal with the current situation are discussed.