The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relationships between educational policy and classroom practice. By employing a sociocultural perspective, we examine formulations inscribed in socio-material artifacts about what students should learn and how they should engage with knowledge. We explore how these formulations are mobilized in…

In recent decades, performance-based accountability (PBA) has become an increasingly popular policy instrument to ensure educational actors are responsive to and assume responsibility for achieving centrally defined learning goals. Nonetheless, studies report mixed results with regard to the impact of PBA on schools' internal affairs and…

The global popularity of test-based accountability appears to signal political trust in standardised assessments as valid and relevant measures of education quality. Nonetheless, research shows that educators' perceptions of standardised testing and test-based accountability can vary significantly, as do their responses to accountability demands.…

The reported study investigates the emergence of teacher evaluation (TE) in Norwegian green papers between 1988 and 2019. We examine how knowledge dissemination and discourses in Norwegian official reports shape suggestions for TE and discuss implications for how teachers are "made by policy". Guided by Bacchi's (2009) approach to…

Objective: Schools are important settings for health promotion. In schools, children and adolescents can be reached regardless of their social background, which represents a unique opportunity for promoting health. Several studies have demonstrated the importance of school leadership in initiating and sustaining health promotion; however, efforts…

In this article, I explore the central characteristics of the "psychosocial" as a field of knowledge in Norwegian education policy and the ways in which these characteristics are conditioned by their constituting social structures and historical contexts. This is achieved through a policy document analysis. Even though the psychosocial…

Reviewing institutional governance arrangements through a European lens has the benefit of broadening the argument away from differences between pre-1992 and post-1992 constitutions or between research-intensive and teaching-led university perspectives. In the last two decades in Europe is a massive increase in student numbers and institutional…

Changing conditions in the realm of teacher professionalism have consequences for teachers' professional values and ethics. To a large degree, the literature concludes that increases in accountability policies seem to result in more restricted space for teachers' professional values and ethical autonomy. Less attention has been given to which…

In the education sector, media outlets have been increasingly active in reporting on standardized testing. The purpose of this paper is to identify the most recurrent discursive frames used by the Norwegian regional and local press when informing their readers about national standardized testing, and to explore whether differences over time and…

In many developed countries over the past two decades, there have been new standards, new monitoring systems, new course and fieldwork requirements for teacher candidates, new accreditation criteria, and/or new auditing procedures for colleges and universities that offer initial teacher preparation programmes. However there has also been enormous…

Teacher autonomy and teacher agency are positively related to teachers' motivation and engagement in teaching. This paper combines the concepts of teacher autonomy and teacher agency to study how Brazilian and Norwegian lower secondary teachers respond to an accountability system marked by a centralised outcomes-based curriculum and testing.…

In this article, we explore how values in education are negotiated and partly redefined by teachers, school leaders and local administrators with data use and accountability. Two dilemmas are prominent for the teachers: 1) Testing and data use are perceived as important to meet the needs of the students and to create transparency and initiating…

Previous research has contributed to the literature on what constitutes school leaders' and teachers' democratic practices in both high- and low-stakes accountability contexts, but less is known about how they interpret, legitimize, and translate the democratic purpose of education in a low-stakes, 'soft-regulation' system. The current study used…

In this study, we explore teachers' professional space as an alternative to, and/or expansion of earlier conceptualizations of teacher autonomy. Professional space is here understood both as an objective space with e.g., physical, juridical, economic features, and as the teachers' subjective negotiation of this objective space, where teachers are…

Norwegian teacher education has been subject to numerous reforms in the last decade; the most recent one, requiring all teacher education programs to be at a master level, took effect from August 2017. The initiatives are policy initiated and heavily influenced by international trends characterized by an increasing demand for accountability. At…