Principles of legitimation in educational discourses in Iceland and the production of progress

On the one hand this paper is an exploration of how suitable the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault are to explain educational reform. At another level, the paper tells a story of educational reform in Iceland in the last 25 years ‐ through the Bourdieuean and Foucauldian lenses.

The paper identifies legitimating principles in the discourse on educational reform in Iceland and focuses on the tensions over what counts as capital in teacher education. In short, pedagogy, curriculum theory, educational psychology and other educational sciences signify a discursive pole that is gaining currency at the cost of the capital of the traditional academic disciplines, such as Icelandic, history and biology, which signify the other pole in this spectrum. The paper argues that an epistemology of progress underlying reform often prevents reformers from taking a reflective stance on the historical foundations of their beliefs in educational science; they take for granted that progress and evolution are possible and call for better methods to produce progress.