Teacher education and the work of teachers in an age of globalization and cosmopolitization – the case in Sweden

What is the function of teacher education in an age of globalization and cosmopolitization? What should it be? What kind of work do we expect teachers to do in schools under these conditions? The aim of this issue is to discuss and reflect upon global and cosmopolitan challenges to teacher education, and the extent to which these are recognized and responded to in recent reforms of teacher education in Sweden.

Why, then, do we consider such an inquiry to be of importance? First, policymakers in education worldwide seem to imagine themselves forced to respond adequately to a global economy that has made knowledge, competition and lifelong learning essential for economic growth. Teacher education, the work of teachers and the attractiveness of teaching are held to be vital in this global wave of reform. Policy-makers also seem to imagine that the competitive edge of a nation and quality in education largely stand or fall according to the qualifications that teachers have. Moreover, teachers in modern Swedish education have traditionally been imagined to be in the service of the national economy, the national democracy and the unification of a people loyal to a nation and its strivings. However, the nation-centred character of education has been and is being challenged in the global era, together with those aspects of education that are not clearly linked to economic ends and visions. Because the economic aspects of education are stressed to a far greater extent than cosmopolitan aspects – or so it seems – we consider it important to look more deeply into the actual and possible imaginaries in terms of globalization and moral cosmopolitanism that have, or may have, an impact on the work of teachers and their education in the global era.

Second, the character and content of work has largely changed from agriculture and industrial production to knowledge production: modern societies have increasingly become knowledge-based societies. That the character of work has changed is a challenge for nation-states, a challenge that includes the ways in which education can be used to prepare students for this changed character of work. Education in many liberal–democratic societies is now expected, in policy texts, to enable students to be employable, competitive, flexible and mobile in knowledge-based societies, and not merely prepared for work in agriculture and/or industrial production exclusively within a nation. Despite that, people are not expected simply to use or handle knowledge effectively in the job market in order to be or become employable and flexible; they are also expected to cultivate their innovative and/or creative capacities, not only within the borders of a nation but within a worldwide network of meaning and action. Such expectations are, however, or so it appears, strongly motivated by economic interests and not necessarily by interest in or concern for cultivating students as moral cosmopolitan beings and world citizens.

Third, education has been, and perhaps still is, used to foster loyalty and moral commitment to the members of the nation-state, in particular the majority culture within nation-states; but this orientation has been, and continues to be, challenged. In a globalized world, human beings have to work together with each other in order to achieve or pursue certain valued goals, whether chosen by themselves or others, with respect to their different social, cultural, ethnic and religious experiences, within nation-states, and on transnational and global levels. This suggests that we are also challenged to cultivate our moral sensibilities and attitudes to ourselves and others; we would otherwise just accept things as they are. This we could not do without limiting our own freedom, or the freedom of any other individual, to use reason and understanding, not just individually and privately but publicly, and to think anew and differently.

Such sensibilities and attitudes are not just about acknowledging and responding to the values, beliefs and norms of action held by others or ourselves in nation-states, and/or in transnational and global settings. Rather, it is a call for a critical response to the values, beliefs and norms of action expressed by and perhaps also held by others and ourselves: it is a call for a radical openness and willingness to use our reason and understanding publicly in order to create a gap between ourselves and whatever there is that affects us. This means reflecting upon and possibly also challenging and changing not only the values, beliefs and norms of action we embrace and act upon but also our attitudes and sensibilities to these and how we and others respond to them. It is a call for responding to the limitations of our own thinking, and not merely the limitations of the thinking of others, which is hard work; and hence it is a call for a willingness to change the way or ways we understand ourselves, others and the world, and to create new ways of thinking and understanding. In education, it is a call for new ways of understanding education traditionally geared to nationalist aims in a time of increasing global interconnectedness and interdependence. It is a call for institutions that can help us live together in a world society against the background of the nation-building past of education and recent cries for the competitive edge of nations.

As such, moral cosmopolitan education is perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face in an increasingly globalized world having an emphasis on economic interests and the use of reason and understanding in instrumental and strategic terms. It is, for example, a challenge for policy-makers and teachers in teacher-training programmes to create favourable conditions, not merely to make the students efficacious on the job market but in addition to enable them to render themselves autonomous as moral cosmopolitan beings, capable not only of setting and pursuing specific ends but also of distancing themselves from whatever there is that affects them, so that they can reflect upon and possibly also challenge and change them and create new ends, in particular the morally permissible ones. Creating these ends and the pursuit of them should not prevent others from setting and pursuing goals that are compatible with the setting and pursuit of the ends set by any other individual. On the contrary, it should enable them to set and pursue those ends which are compatible with the ends set by any other person.

If this is correct, then a principal role of teacher education is to make it possible for students to render themselves both efficacious and autonomous, not merely as members or citizens within nation-states but as moral cosmopolitan beings as well: that is, as world citizens. Such a pursuit suggests that students are not merely enabled and required to value or confer value on certain ends set by the government, or ends set within certain social, cultural, ethnic and/or religious settings as seen from above. It also suggests that students and others are enabled to and can accept their responsibility to confer value on their capacity to set and pursue new ends, and distance themselves from, reflect upon, challenge and change already known ends when necessary. A moral cosmopolitan attitude or character is cultivated when students are enabled to and take their responsibility to cultivate themselves and their capacities in the sense noted above. If modern education is to continue its moral, civic and democratic character in times of increasing global interconnectedness, then the cultivation of students as moral cosmopolitan beings is thus a challenge to the nation-centred education with its emphasis on rendering students efficacious on the job market.

Fourth, the process of moral cosmopolitan education is open-ended and never-ending. That is, because we are capable not only of setting and pursuing ends but also of distancing ourselves from the ends set either by ourselves or by any other, and of creating new ends, the process of the education outlined above must be open to the possibility of transforming one’s own beliefs, values and norms of action, and an openness to the unborn, the not-yet known, the facelessness of what is yet to come. This suggests that the struggle to cultivate oneself as a moral cosmopolitan being cannot be won through the expected pursuit of any specified or substantial external end in itself, because it requires using our reason and understanding freely and also engaging in the free play between our imagination and understanding. To do otherwise would restrict or limit our humanity – that is, our capacity to distance ourselves from the goals we set, challenge them and change them, and to create new objectives. If we were to limit or restrict the free use of our reason and understanding as well as our engagement in the free play of our imagination and understanding, we would find ourselves accepting things as they stand, instead of transforming society and ourselves continuously. Such a pursuit – that is, the pursuit of enabling students not only to cultivate their capacity to pursue or achieve the goals set by someone else or by themselves, but also to make themselves autonomous – makes it possible for them to transform the way they think of or understand themselves, others and the world.

The process of moral cosmopolitan education must therefore also be open-ended and never-ending; it can do no more than set this more general aim or duty to which we should respond responsibly, but we cannot say or show how we could or should act in every single case in order to strive for this. As already noted, it is rather more a call for a radical openness and willingness to make ourselves intelligible in terms of efficacy and autonomy. We do this when we acknowledge and respond responsibly to ourselves and our humanity; that is, when we are open and willing not only to act upon already known goals but also to change our beliefs, values and norms of action when necessary and create new goals.

How then do recent reforms of teacher education programmes in Sweden relate and respond to global and cosmopolitan challenges, some of which are mentioned above? This is the question that binds together the various contributions in this special issue. The question will be addressed and discussed from various analytical standpoints – such as transnational and national policy-making and debate, the character of teacher education institutions and teacher education programs, and the voices of student teachers in training. It will be addressed using empirical and philosophical approaches, and we hope that in doing so we can contribute to a productive understanding, or different understandings, of the complex social practices and institutional facts of teacher education and the work of teachers in an age of globalization and possibly also cosmopolitization – that is, a process in which those concerned are enabled and accept their responsibility to render themselves not merely efficacious, but also autonomous as world citizens.

In the first article, ‘School and the future: How teachers and teacher education are articulated in the political debate’, Anna Forssell discusses how schools and education are governed in the name of the future, and how the future expectations placed on schools and teachers are expressed in the education policy debate in the Swedish Parliament. Based on a notion of schools and education as future oriented, Forssell’s paper discusses how politicians in the Swedish Parliament talk about schools, teachers and the future. Her article focuses on the ways in which the future society, education and the work expected of teachers are expressed in Swedish policy debates in times of change characterised primarily by the demands of knowledge-based economies and global challenges. However, recent policy debates in the Swedish Parliament have revealed many tensions. Imaginaries of the future are frequently mentioned but hardly elaborated, and even if it is stressed that we live in times of global change which place new demands on schools and teachers, the political talk of the future seems merely to be an extension of the past and the present. Another tension is located in the talk about the importance of knowledge and democratic values in schools and the work expected of teachers in the global era. Knowledge, and the value of knowledge, appears to be globalized and marketized, but the democratic tradition of Swedish schools is still expressed as being highly nation-centred and largely unaffected by globalization, and in particular cosmopolitization.

The tension between the economic and the democratic aspects of education, teacher education and the work expected of teachers in the era of globalization and cosmopolitization is elaborated further in the article ‘Educating competitive teachers for a competitive nation?’. Here, Niclas Rönnström discusses critically recent teacher education investments and reforms in Sweden and the work of teachers in response to imaginaries of globalization within the context of modern social imaginaries. He argues that economic imaginaries are given primacy in several aspects: aims and reforms in education are linked principally to economic imaginaries of a competitive nation; economic norms are given primacy in the governance of schools and education; globalized and economic standards of quality and success are increasing in importance; and concern about how to make teaching an attractive career investment for those groups the state would like to attract to teaching is held to be vital for the future quality and outcomes of education. Rönnström discusses critically the underlying globalist imaginary he believes is underpinning Swedish education reform in the global era, aimed at transforming the teacher into a scientifically grounded economic agent for market integration and the competitive edge of the Swedish nation. He addresses the question of whether the modern social imaginary of democracy and democratic citizenship should be restored and cosmopolitized in education, in relation to the expected work of teachers. What is striking is that education and teacher education seem both to be keeping their strongly nation-centered character more or less intact at the same time as current investments and reforms in education can be seen as responses to imaginaries of global forces putting the Swedish nation and teachers at risk. However, the recent economization of education gives rise to paradoxes rooted in an original tension between a ‘private or economic’ versus a ‘public or democratic’ view of education. This tension is, or so Rönnström argues, sharpened by a globalist imaginary exercising influence in education.

Nation-building seems to be essential to modern education and it has meant, and in many respects still means, efforts to shift people’s loyalties from the bonds they have established in their local communities to the nation as the centre of economic, moral, cultural, political and social gravity. Thus the main function of education was and remains the rationalization of an increasingly knowledge-based society made up of free and equal members. Education was and still is also geared to the nationalization of society and its constituent members. In this light, the work of teachers is imagined to be in the service of the economy, the democracy and the unification of a people loyal to a nation and its strivings. It is this nationalizing, nation-centred or even nationalist strand in modern Swedish education that is considered in the third article: ‘Cultivating Swedishness? Examples of imagined kinship during the first half of the 20th Century’. Adrian Thomasson discusses different representations of ‘Swedishness’ as expressions of altered versions of imagined kinship in the Swedish educational system during the first half of the 20th century. The power of the nation-centred orientation or nationalist imaginaries at work in education is reflected in the fact that even though the curriculum has changed from a more religious to a scientific one – the first focusing on fostering loyalty and moral commitment to God, the King and the nation-state and the second emphasizing the cultivation of critical rational thinking – the framework was (and still is) the nation-state. Thomasson argues that such a framework is not value neutral; rather, it is invested with a belief in the superiority of and an exclusive concern for one’s own country.

However, in the era of globalization and cosmopolitization, school actors and citizens in general have reason to understand themselves at least partly as citizens of the world, thereby accepting responsibilities and obligations to global others living nearby or far away. It is this moral dimension of education and cosmopolitanism that Klas Roth discusses in the fourth contribution: ‘The role of examples, current designs and ideas for a cosmopolitan design of education’. Roth discusses the value and importance of examples in education in Kantian terms, and how students can cultivate their moral disposition through the use of examples in education. He argues, within a Kantian framework, that students should neither simply copy or imitate examples automatically, nor appraise them unreflectively and uncritically. They should instead be encouraged to think for themselves in the position of the other and do so consistently, through the use of examples. Against this Kantian background, Roth analyses the extent to which students in teacher education programmes in Sweden are enabled to cultivate a moral cosmopolitan disposition through the use of literature which unveils a design of education in national, European and cosmopolitan terms. This analysis is carried out by studying the literature used in Swedish teacher education programmes. Roth concludes that most student teachers lack opportunities to cultivate their moral disposition through the use of literature which can serve as examples of cosmopolitan and not merely national and/or European concerns and interests.

Even if policymakers, teacher programme institutions, courses and mandatory literature rarely address a cosmopolitan view or design of education, there might still be a potential for cosmopolitan learning in teacher education. The fifth article, ‘Exploring potentialities for cosmopolitan learning in Swedish teacher education’, by Max Scheja, explores the experiences of student teachers of learning in teacher education, with a focus on how students describe their ways of thinking about their own learning in relation to their future professional role as teachers, and how these descriptions relate to emerging cosmopolitan visions for student learning in teacher education. Data were collected using qualitative interviews with a sample of 14 student teachers at two Swedish universities, and the analysis drew on a framework developed in research on students’ approaches to studying and learning. The student teachers were encouraged to reflect on their own understandings of knowledge that they believed were central to the process of becoming a professional teacher. While the student teachers did not explicitly link their own understandings of what is involved in becoming a teacher to any cosmopolitan views raised in their teacher education, their ways of thinking about their own emergent professional understanding of teaching revealed a certain reflexive potential that can be linked to ideas of cosmopolitan learning in teacher education. Teacher education, Scheja argues, can – potentially at least – promote the criticality, historicity, relationality, dialogicity and reflexivity that may lead to the openness needed to cope successfully with cosmopolitan challenges in education.

In this light of the potentialities of cosmopolitan learning in teacher education, Anki Bengtsson’s article, and the sixth paper in this special issue, ‘Educating European citizenship: Elucidating assumptions about teaching civic competence’, is of interest. Even if the economy and the needs of education about knowledge economies are given primacy in education policy, there has been a reinitiating of citizenship education in recent years. Bengtsson investigated constructions of citizenship as they are articulated in European policy documents on teacher education. She argues that the normative form of active citizenship is brought into play through the individual and their actions which are centered on learning. Drawing on Foucault’s analytic approach to problematization and Foucauldian methods of analyzing policy problematizations of a chosen problem, Bengtsson’s article draws attention to the discourse of active citizenship and technologies of accountability that are used to shape the teaching of civic learning. It is suggested that citizenship is constructed as a learning problem, which motivates young people in school to reflect on their skills and competences. It is also from these capacities that their attitudes towards cultural diversity are assumed to be developed. Thus in the formation of citizenship emphasis is placed on the individual’s capacity for learning, which is also mobilized in narratives of the construction of Europe.

Teacher education and the work of teachers have both been and remain enterprises largely tied to a nation. In current times, this is about to change because global actors are exercising influence on education policy, teacher education and the work of teachers. In the final article, ‘Transnational policy discourses on teacher education: A cosmopolitan perspective’, Ninni Wahlström argues that it is of great importance that researchers point out not only the risks but also what she labels ‘hidden possibilities’ in the dominating neo-neoliberal or economic view of teachers and teaching in education policy. Educational researchers run the risk of overlooking alternative, vitalizing interpretations of the relationship between global forces and local contexts, and of reiterating a neoliberal view instead of taking a critical stance by using the vocabulary of ethics. This insight motivated Wahlström: first, to analyze the characteristics of teacher education and the role of the teacher in transnational, authoritative texts from a cosmopolitan perspective; and, second, to explore the field of tension between an economic (or neoliberal) cosmopolitan approach that mostly champions global market integration, and a moral cosmopolitan approach to justice, rights and global responsibility in the transnational policy arena of teacher education. Wahlström regards the former as a human capital approach and the latter as a capabilities approach: she defines and discusses the difference between the two perspectives of an economic cosmopolitan approach and a moral cosmopolitan approach to teacher education policy without simply reiterating and negatively affirming the highly influential, neoliberal agenda in education.

Thus it seems, from the papers in this issue, that the function of teacher education in an age of globalization is characterized to a large extent by a response to globalization in economic and nationalistic terms, but less so in terms of moral cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitization. It seems, moreover, that the kind of work that teachers are expected to do in schools is strongly influenced by a response of the first but not necessarily the second kind, even though it could be argued that students should not be affected merely by the particular circumstances in which they happen to be and stimulated to cultivate certain practical identities cherished within those circumstances. We would argue that it is reasonable to expect that they should be not only enabled but also to accept their responsibility to cultivate their humanity – that is, their capacity for self-awareness, reflection and critique, and openness for the not-yet known, as well as their capacity to set and pursue new goals, continuously, or so we argue.