In this paper, we explore possibilities and challenges for deliberative academic development. Deliberative academic development refers to a practice that engages members of the university in dialogue about its purposes, ways of organizing and leading higher education, as well as teaching and learning. The paper critically analyses data from focus group interviews with academic developers from four universities within two national contexts. Combining sociological conceptualizations of agency and the framework of ‘epistemic living spaces’, the paper offers insights into challenges and opportunities for deliberative academic development, as well as a framework for studying agency in other contexts.

This article focuses on a new form of governing that targets a selected group of teachers. Specifically, it analyses how the Swedish so-called advanced teacher reform is enacted at the local level and discusses its implications for teachers’ professionalism. The methodological approach enables a local analysis in a broader international policy context. Using characteristic elements from curriculum theory to analyse the relationship between different levels and elaborating on the linguistic turn of curriculum theory, three concepts are central in the analysis: enactment, linguistic criteria and professionalism. Empirically, the study draws on material from a two-year application process in a medium-sized municipality. The result demonstrates that the local enactment process is clearly influenced by transnational policy trends and that less allowance is made for teachers’ own experience-based knowledge in the second studied year. The linguistic analysis shows how the applicants using the ‘right concepts’ were selected to become ‘advanced teachers’. As complex and qualitative aspects disappeared from the agenda, this type of governing, with its standardized use of language, may reduce schools’ educational potential. Changes like this raise new questions about how schools can maintain and develop democratic and professional values whilst being exposed to new policy trends.

How does juridification condition the teaching profession’s work with educational knowledge and values? Over the last twenty years the governance of Swedish education has radically changed. As a specific part of this transformation, the aim of this article is to investigate how juridification conditions the teaching profession’s work with educational knowledge and values as formulated in the national curriculum. The article makes use of two governing logics – the management of placement and the management of expectation – that position teachers’ assignments and possible actions in different ways. The empirical material consists of national policy texts. The analysis points to different dilemmas that result from juridification, namely that teachers are expected to shoulder a decentralized moral responsibility and at the same time be controlled against nationally formulated rights and obligations.

There are increasing external pressures on 21st-century universities to be engines of economic recovery and growth. In this rapidly altering landscape, how university senior leaders articulate the purpose of university education and the contribution of academic developers to fulfil these education purposes is a matter of empirical interest. Senior leaders and academic developers have particular responsibilities since they impact educational quality at an institutional level. Senior leaders are responsible for orienting their institutions, giving direction to colleagues in the process, while their implicit leadership theories animate effort and interactions. Academic developers are employed to provide educational programmes for academics to develop their pedagogical competence, and are increasingly deployed by university leaders to implement new quality assurance systems. Such responsibilities strongly suggest agency and relative autonomy to forge new alliances and collaborative networks where these did not previously exist; they are simultaneously required to be leaders and followers. Consequently, the portfolios of academic developers have expanded exponentially, strategically walking a tightrope between the potentially coercive message of strategic missions and the relative autonomy of academic staff, brokering new horizons of university education in a collegial, collaborative and horizontal manner. The paper captures the dynamics of leading education in four universities: the brokering responsibilities of academic developers.

This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relate their situational agency and professional assignment to the national curriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds theoretically on transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviews with teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during the enactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dual perspective of teachers’ relation to the curriculum as both collectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal and realistic–practical relation, we term the future as ‘projective experiences’, the presence as ‘practical-evaluative experiences’ and the past ‘iterational experiences’ in relation to agency. Especially, we are interested in the ‘what’ in the curriculum – what the teachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affects how they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensional structures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that the crucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse on knowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity of assessment and its pedagogical consequences.