This study investigates policy work in educational leadership courses at universities. It analyses the types of engagement present in university teachers' policy work and in their interpretations and translations of policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. The study illustrates policy work as a phenomenon and draws on the theory of…

International trends promoting school diversity and choice have reshaped education across Europe, leading towards a multiplicity in ownership structures and varied governance configurations. More recently, this can also be seen in European countries with a long history of state-owned and governed public schools, such as in the Nordic states. The…

Grouping by attainment is a relatively new and contested practice in Norway, where strong historical discourses of heterogeneous education are under pressure from international test comparisons, particularly in mathematics. At the same time, research indicates that Norwegian teachers have a high degree of autonomy in education policy enactment.…

Over the past decades, emerging focus has been on how teachers in Norway can foster citizenship in their classrooms to strengthen democracy. Yet, in conjunction with rising concerns of homegrown terrorism, a new curriculum in Norway draws on democratic education as a bulwark against terrorism. This paper explores the securitisation of the…

Increasingly, school leaders and teachers are being expected to use digital technologies to collect data to analyze, plan and organize teaching and learning. Such expectations can be traced to a number of policy initiatives over the last decade. This study is concerned with how educational policy puts forward ambitions of digital school leadership…

The L1 subject is a central meeting place for all students regardless of their linguistic backgrounds. Thus explorations of multilingualism in the L1 subject provide the potential for enhancing all students' multilinguality. In Norway, several policy papers have emphasised the important role of the L1 Norwegian subject in promoting students'…

'The knowledge question', addressing what students need to know and learn, becomes particularly relevant during the process of a new school reform. This paper examines the political messages and the role of knowledge in the current curriculum reform initiative for primary and secondary education in Norway (2020). The study is based on a document…

In 1997, Norway became the first country to make statutory provision for schools of music and arts requiring every municipality to run such a school. Based on an explicit vision of "schools of music and arts for everyone," the aim is to provide music education for all children, regardless of social and economic background. Despite their…

Today's schools are faced with increasingly complex demands of juggling their core educational tasks alongside multi-dimensional policy bids for reform, development and change. In this paper, we conceptualize our own RCT research on small-group tuition in mathematics in Norwegian lower elementary schools as a policy-relevant measure and part of a…

In Scandinavia, plurilingualism has been embraced as an important goal in language curricula. However, research shows that teachers struggle to understand what plurilingualism is and how it can be implemented. To address this lack of clarity, we analysed the curricula for the three main language subjects of schooling in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden…

This article presents an in-depth case analysis of Norwegian teacher training, exploring the intricate dynamics between global blueprints, national problem constructions and local realities. As Norwegian educational policy has aligned itself with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's recommendations, the study uncovers a…

This article explores how current legislation addresses adolescents' need for support in upper secondary school through school-home collaboration and introduces the framework of collaborative autonomy-support as the pivotal approach for analyses. Self-determination theory is used to describe adolescents' need for competence, relatedness and…

The aim of this article is to analyze discourse from historically pertinent policy and strategic documents of the Norwegian Schools of Music and Performing Arts, in order to explore the nature of the intractable discrepancy between curriculum, policy, and practice. Popular music has long been part of Norwegian compulsory-school and higher music…

Proliferating claims have been made for Learning Outcomes (LOs) potential to re-shape higher education: as forces for transparency and harmonisation, new forms for measurement or a format that fundamentally challenges traditional teaching and learning. Evidence of their actual influence remains sparse, however. This analysis of 45 interviews with…

This paper examines the role of digital technology in national guidelines and regulations in Norwegian and Danish teacher education over the course of 28 years (1992-2020). These policy documents are used to examine policy perspectives on digital technology through an analytical framework based on Wartofsky's artifact categories. The analytical…