This paper analyzes and discusses possibilities and challenges for teachers to use collegial mutual deliberation as a way to counteract racism. A starting point is taken from research on teacher collaboration that has emphasized the importance to locally create conditions for critical discussions that exceed coherence and simple solutions. To do this, we turn to the idea on deliberative communication, which in the paper fills two purposes: First, as a means for a teacher who, supported by us as researchers, leads a discussion about racism with colleagues, and secondly, as a theoretical lens to analyze that same discussion. The study provides theoretical and empirical knowledge about how collegial deliberation potentially can contribute to the development of a communicative teacher community.

This paper sheds light on how teachers act and reflect on their actions in response to expressions of racism among colleagues. The empirical data consists of qualitative interviews with 27 high school teachers in Sweden, but, in order to dig deeper into the experiences of teachers, this paper focuses on three teachers (Tove, Fatima and Hannah). The result points at a professional ambivalence on how to act, since there is no common ground among teachers for how to act when colleagues express racism. To act against racism comes at high costs and very much depends on each teacher’s previous experiences of life and work. Consequently, each teacher is provided a unique space and resource base for reflection and action.

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.

In recent years, there has been an increased societal and political debate about how the governing of welfare institutions can be best organized in order to serve the public and uphold democracy. In education, positively loaded key concepts such as equivalence, quality and legal security have dominated the debate. Simultaneously, governance ideas implied in NPM-policies, in particular the increased development of quality assurance systems and accountability regimes, have been criticized for its unintended consequences and possible narrowing of the societal mandate for education. Concerns have been raised about a need for revitalizing trust in professionals, at the same time as ensuring a certain amount of control. But how can such a balance be found?

By introducing and raising critical questions on dominant governance discourses in education, including issues about professionalism and quality, this seminar invites deliberations among policy makers, researchers and practitioners on how we may seek new ways of making welfare institutions sustainable in democratic societies. A core issue is how education constructively can contribute to the promotion and upholding of democracy.

The four presenters will provide brief introductions with different, yet related, perspectives on the theme “Governing and Professionalism”. Thereafter all participants are invited to a shared discussion on the opportunities and challenges for collaboration among policy makers, researchers and practitioners to ensure education that serve the public good in a democratically troublesome time.

In this chapter, we take interest in a specific part of the extensive changes that have been made in the governance of Swedish education during the last two decades: the increase of legal regulations. This increase is a sign of what in earlier research is called juridification, which may lead to a variety of tensions that we currently know too little about. More specifically, the aim of this chapter is to study how juridification of education conditions teachers’ work on the knowledge and values expressed in national policy documents. The empirical material consists of Swedish national education policy texts produced from the early 1990s and onwards. Methodologically, we make use of two theoretical concepts that position teachers’ assignments and possible actions in different ways: management of placement and management of expectation. The results demonstrate that the increase of a juridical language clearly condition teachers’ professional work. In the worst case, the legal concepts may result in more instrumental relationships where teachers focus on their role as assessors and monitors. At the same time, it depends on how the legal concepts are interpreted and enacted by school staff. Here, there is a need of further studies on how different emphasises and combinations of a juridical vocabulary and a pedagogical vocabulary condition the relationships that are formed in local school practices.

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.

This study takes its departure from two teachers’ descriptions of challenges and possibilities that they have experienced as conditioning their professional anti-racist actions. The two descriptions are excerpts from qualitative interviews, conducted within a larger research project about teachers’ work to counteract racism, of which this study is a part. The aim of this part study is to contribute with insights about what teachers experience as conditioning their anti-racist actions. This knowledge is of importance for teachers’ didactic choices in their anti-racist work, as well as for school leadership facilitating such work. In the study, racism and anti-racism are understood as enacted practices. Agency, as something achieved and situated, constitutes a central theoretical lens. Therefore, ecological teacher agency conceptions are put to work in the analysis. Tentative findings are presented in the form of teachers’ experiences of conditions for anti-racist action in terms of: 1. Personal experiences over time, 2. Professional experiences over time, 3. National contextual issues, and 4. Local context issues.

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.