Abstract
In the European neo-liberal policy context, there has been an increase in pressure on teachers to exercise a type of professional responsibility that contributes to the development of a competitive knowledge-based economy. From a communication theory perspective, this paper examines if it is at all possible to talk of professional responsibility in a policy context characterised by individualisation, standardisation and accountability. Methodologically, this text joins a critical tradition of educational policy research, which emphasises the need to combine critical examination with empirical analysis. Critical discourse analysis has been used for the systematic analysis portion of this text. Central official policy texts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European Union and the 2011 school reforms in Sweden have been analysed. The results show that while demands for increased professional responsibility among teachers have been made by policy actors at different levels, the neo-liberal policy context offers limited opportunities for teachers to actually exercise this type of professional responsibility, if seen as a communicative practice based on the idea of relative autonomy. The paper concludes with a prospective discussion in which teacher professionalism is linked to the creation and maintenance of ‘spaces of communication’, as well as a look at the challenges faced by policy makers at all levels if they are to facilitate such spaces.
Introduction
In his book Democracy and Education, John Dewey (1916) explores the relationship between democracy and education, demonstrating the communicative potential of education in developing democracy as a way of life. His radical ideas placed interaction and communication at the heart of education and society as a whole. It is not just that social life is the same as communication, all communication is also cultivating, Dewey argued. It is through communication, and thus interaction with others, that humans develop knowledge about themselves and the world. Over half a century later, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1984,1988) developed his theory of communicative action. After a long period in which philosophy of consciousness had permeated the philosophical inquiry, Habermas began to elaborate on a radical philosophy of language and communication. He positioned himself against the postmodern movement by saying that modernity was still an unfinished project and that a normative rationalisation is possible through communicative action. In this respect, his theory of communication could be described as a theory of social integration through communicative action. Although they were from different periods and had different styles of writing, both Dewey and Habermas emphasised ‘the socially integrative force and constitutive power of communication’ (Englund, 2006: 500). It is through a practice of communication in which different perspectives are represented and respected that mutual understanding can be obtained and common ground established for future activities. In a democratic society, such communicative skills are crucial in order for individuals to participate in communicative practices, which take place at different levels of society. The challenge for the educational system is therefore to create an environment that encourages and provides room for such discussion. Gutmann and Thompson (1996: 359) write: In any effort to make democracy more deliberative, the single most important institution outside government is the educational system. To prepare their students for citizenship, schools must go beyond teaching literacy and numeracy, though both are of course prerequisites for deliberating about public problems. Schools should aim to develop their students’ capacities to understand different perspectives, communicate their understanding to other people, and engage in the give-and-take of moral argument with a view to making mutually acceptable decisions.
From this communicative point of departure, it is the responsibility of the teacher to facilitate communication and allow differing viewpoints to be presented. He or she becomes a conductor of communication while at the same time managing a specific subject’s content and a communicative process towards a deepened understanding of that content. Englund (2011) discusses the school’s potential to create a space of mutual trust, since the school has a unique position when it comes to bringing together people from different parts of the world with different socio-economic backgrounds, beliefs, and traditions. He states that it is through extensive interaction with others that trust is developed between people, especially when ‘the others’ come from different societal categories to one’s own. In addition to their fundamental purpose of transferring knowledge from one generation to another, schools, as sites of mutual trust, have a transformative potential when ideas and arguments are being made and remade in a continuous and respectful process of communication (see Benade, 2011; Waghid, 2005).
In a world characterised by global transformation and increased diversity, a pedagogical ideal that builds on a broad, respectful and critical communication process seems reasonable. Teachers’ responsibility is then related to the creation and management of what I, based on the discussion above, would like to call ‘spaces of communication’; i.e. spaces characterised by intersubjectivity, trust and an internal logic. Intersubjectivity is used in the sense that communication always takes place between two or more persons and that this communication is fundamental to our understanding of the world. Trust, according to the reasoning above, is both a prerequisite for communicative participation and a result of that same communication, since individuals engaged in communication gain a better understanding of each other’s perspectives and arguments. Finally, the internal logic dictates that a pedagogical ideal as discussed here has no immediate goal outside itself. It sets its own agenda according to its own interests based on an idea of a relative autonomy (see Fritzell, 1987)
Teacher professionalism in a neo-liberal policy context
During the twentieth century, education and teacher professionalism in Sweden were, to a large extent, embedded in a wider nation-building project. The idea of education and teacher professionalism was developed in a policy context concerned with the formation of public service and a commitment to people’s rights. The democracy that developed was seen to require spaces of communication for public deliberation and an inclusive education system which recognised diversity (Seddon et al., 2013). As an instrument of public service, the education system was held accountable to the very public it was set to serve in what Biesta (2004) has called a political relationship. This was also a salient theme in early EU policy documents from the 1950s through to the 1980s, which emphasised cultural co-operation and the creation of a shared European identity (Grek, 2008). These initiatives in many ways supported the idea of participation through communicative practices, as advocated by Dewey (1916) and Habermas (1984, 1988).
At the end of the twentieth century, a different rationale began to permeate European education policy (see Grek, 2008; Holford, 2008). The traditional welfare state was heavily questioned and challenged by an emerging neo-liberal project centred on developing ‘human capital’ within a ‘knowledge-based economy’. The idea of education as a public good which emphasised social integration was replaced in the neo-liberal project by the idea of education as an individual investment, a private good, which secured future employability as well as national competitiveness in an emerging global market (Biesta, 2004; Jessop et al., 2008; Nordin, 2011; Seddon et al., 2013). The neo-liberal project, which sought to reinvent the public sector according to managerial principles, simultaneously contributed to a reconfiguration of the understanding of education and of teachers as professionals (Biesta, 2004; Seddon et al., 2013; Solbrekke and Englund, 2011). The neo-liberal project meant a redistribution of state power from governments to non-governmental actors at different policy levels. At a transnational policy level, it meant that new actors entered the educational stage; these actors included United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the OECD, the EU and the World Bank. Due to the lack of legal power over national education systems, parallel systems were developed to coordinate national education reforms. These reforms included international knowledge assessment systems like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and coordinative structures such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the EU, which promoted mutual learning and sharing of best practice. Different kinds of ‘soft governance practices’ were developed in order to overcome obstacles of subsidiarity and a lack of legal power to govern at a distance (see Power, 1997). In Sweden, teachers were given more freedom to select and organise the content of their classes (Carlgren and Klette, 2008
From the mid-2000s, the characteristics of the neo-liberal project became even more evident due to an emerging crisis discourse that began to permeate educational discourse in Europe (Nordin, 2011, 2014a; Robertson, 2008). The redistribution of state power in the decentralised, neo-liberal system had not lead to the hoped-for rationality and efficiency in education. In this emerging crisis discourse, the role and responsibility of teachers was heavily emphasised 1 . It was argued that the ability to attract the most competent candidates for teacher positions would not only improve school performances but also ensure a better response to high social and economic expectations (see OECD, 2005). Education was described as a key policy area in order to resolve the wider societal and economic crises, with teachers as key policy actors in the local arena (Robertson, 2013).
Regardless of political or professional intentions, teachers and teaching always exist in relation to the situational framing of a given context (Bernstein, 2000; Ingersoll, 2012). The type of professional responsibility practised by teachers is always affected by the kind of professional responsibility the contextual premises make possible and/or impossible at a certain time. Therefore, in order to fully understand teacher professionalism, one is required to examine the contextual framing of a teacher’s experience, rather than simply analyse what teachers actually do (Ingersoll, 2012).
Against this background, this paper aims to critically examine the discursive premises set up in the neo-liberal project, premises within which teachers are intended to take professional responsibility. This responsibility is seen as a matter of creating and managing ‘spaces of communication’ which are characterised by intersubjectivity, trust, and an internal logic. 2 The focus is on the discursive framing as it appears in a limited number of central official policy documents produced by the OECD, the EU, and the Swedish government from the year 2000 onward. 3
The text is structured around individualisation, standardisation, and accountability 4 as major characteristics of the neo-liberal discourse, which is seen as framing an idea of teacher professionalism that is radically different from the communicative ideal advocated above and, to some extent, supported in European and Swedish education policy up until the late 1990s. Individualisation, standardisation, and accountability are thus discussed as discursive themes contrasted with intersubjectivity, trust, and internal logic. In line with the critical ambition of the paper, it ends with a prospective discussion which argues for the need to (re)introduce a communicative ideal.
Methodological approach
Methodologically speaking, this text joins a critical tradition of educational policy research which emphasises the need to combine critical examination with empirical analysis (Taylor, 1997). Global policy trends need to be contextualised and related to the actual spaces in which these policies are being recontextualised and subjected to local translations (Nordin, 2014b; Seddon et al., 2013). The intersecting effects of territorialising and boundarying practices cannot be assumed on the basis of generic commentaries about globalization, accounts of travelling education reforms or commentaries on teacher professionalism. Rather, understanding these globalizing effects requires analysis of particular spaces to reveal how the disaggregated effects of travelling reform, historical context and patterns of boundarying play out in specific places (Seddon et al., 2013: 14).
In order to examine the discursive conditions in which teachers are expected to act professionally within the neo-liberal project, the analysis is inspired by critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Wodak, 2001). While the introductory text on education as a communicative practice and teachers as communicative actors whose professional responsibility is related to facilitating communicative spaces represents a broad theoretical framework for the critical examination in this paper, CDA enables a more systematic analysis of policy texts as parts of social practices which continuously make and remake our understanding of the world. Understanding discourse as part of social practice thus makes discourse constitutive, not just of human thinking, but also of human action. However, unlike a more poststructuralist discourse analysis, CDA maintains a dialectic understanding of the relationship between discourse and the subject, each of which is capable of altering the other. Furthermore, it emphasises the need to analyse how policy plays out in specific places (as requested by Seddon et al., 2013) and the importance of anchoring the policy analysis in actual texts and not just in an intuitive understanding of general trends.
CDA, which was originally developed in a sociolinguistic tradition, distinguishes text, discourse practice and sociocultural practice as three analytical levels. Since this study has an educational interest rather than a linguistic interest, its analytical focus is specifically directed at the discursive and sociocultural levels. Fundamental to the analysis is the ability to see discursive interaction as ‘sites of struggle’ in which different actors, ideologies and/or positions struggle for dominance, and texts as materialised expressions of such struggles (Wodak, 2002). In order to capture this discursive interaction around education in general and teacher professionalism in particular, I have used Reisigl’s (2008) four categories of discursive strategies to identify how discursive themes are being constructed and legitimised. The first category is ‘nomination’ and refers to how different phenomena are described; the second is ‘predication’ and refers to which positive and/or negative attributes are given to these phenomena; ‘argumentation’ refers to the arguments that are used to legitimise and/or delegitimise different positions; and finally, ‘perspectivation’ refers to an analysis of the basic positions upon which the three above strategies are based. In line with the critical tradition, CDA also has a prospective focus. Seeing discourse as part of social practice directs the analytical focus towards aspects that in any way hinder people from participating in such discursive practices. Put another way, CDA wants to advocate critical awareness in a way that enables democratic participation (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999).
An epistemic shift towards individual constructivism
After the Second World War, there was a strong focus among transnational policy actors on supporting the development and modernisation of nation-states. During this period, international organisations such as UNESCO contributed to the development of an educational agenda centred on democracy and human rights (Robertson, 2013). In Europe, lifelong education was advocated as a means of empowering less privileged groups in order to develop a more equal society. During the 1990s, this initial European educational agenda was replaced by an agenda focussed on economic growth and competitiveness in an emerging global market (Nordin, 2011). Within the European context, the launch of the Lisbon Strategy and the overall goal to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world marked a milestone in governing the European educational policy space in this new direction (Lawn and Lingard, 2002; Nordin, 2014b). The concept of ‘lifelong education’ was replaced by the more individualistic concept of ‘lifelong learning’ and education became a personal project rather than a public matter. The responsibility for education and training thus became individualised, reducing the role of the state to that of a facilitator of learning opportunities (see Biesta, 2004).
Introducing a competence-based knowledge discourse
In the EU documents, lifelong learning is described as a semantic bridge which creates a common language for the labour market and the educational sector. The argumentative strategy is that lifelong learning
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enables governments to secure a flexible and employable workforce that is capable of adapting to a rapidly changing environment. In 1998, the OECD launched a project called Definition and Selection of Key Competences (DeSeCo) led by the Swiss researcher Dominique Rychen. The task for the group was to define a set of competences that could be important to future generations. Their work resulted in nine competences that were divided into the categories of ‘Using tools interactively’, ‘Interacting in heterogeneous groups’ and ‘Acting autonomously’. These general competences were suggested as a uniform reference system for monitoring progress throughout the entire lifespan of lifelong learners. The work done by the OECD also began to play an important role for the EU, who launched eight ‘key competences’ in 2006 as a way of enhancing and concretising the work on lifelong learning and investments in ‘human capital’. The overall priority of the Lifelong Learning Programme is to reinforce the contribution made by education and training to achieve the Lisbon goal of making the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy, with sustainable economic development, more and better jobs, and greater social cohesion. Every part of the programme will give priority to action supporting development of national lifelong learning strategies by the countries participating and reinforcing collaboration between different parts of the education and training system, strengthening the lifelong learning continuum, and supporting the acquisition of key competences (European Commission, 2006: 2). There is a clear trend across the EU towards competence-based teaching and learning, and a learning outcomes approach. The European Framework of Key Competences has contributed considerably to this. In some countries, it has been key in policy reform (Council of the European Union, 2010: 6).
A psychologised understanding of knowledge
As mentioned above, not much guidance is given when it comes to interpreting the key competences launched by the EU. In the final report by the working group developing the competences, the following description is given: Key competences represent a transferable, multifunctional package of knowledge, skills and attitudes that all individuals need for personal fulfilment and development, inclusion and employment. These should be developed by the end of the compulsory schooling or training, and should act as a foundation for further learning (European Commission, 2004: 6).
Regarding the national Swedish policy arena and the preparatory work that was completed for the launch of a new national teacher education programme in 2011, psychological orientation was also apparent when speaking about the scientific foundation for the programme. In the Swedish Government Official Report (SOU 2008:19), which formed the basis for the new teacher education programme, seven disciplinary subjects are listed as vital contributors to what the programme recommends as ‘the scientific core’: modern brain science, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, differential psychology, social psychology, sociology and pedagogical psychology. Although other scientific branches are mentioned elsewhere in the document, it is the psychological discipline that is seen as the scientific guarantor, while areas that have traditionally been central to Swedish teacher education, such as pedagogy (pedagogik) and didactics (didaktik), are assigned to the more philosophical aspects of the programme. This can be seen as a discursive shift away from a continental didactical tradition, which, historically, has been strong in Sweden and the Nordic countries, towards a tradition that emphasises the interplay between the teacher, the student and the content to be learned. Reducing this intersubjective interplay is seen as vital among Swedish policy actors in order to strengthen national teacher education. Instead, the individual learner is placed in the centre and knowledge content is replaced by general competences, with the role of the teacher being reduced to a facilitator for individuals constructing knowledge on their own.
Managing a growing mistrust through standardisation
Since the Lisbon Strategy made education a central part of the EU’s push to become the leading knowledge-based economy in the world, governance and coordination have become increasingly vital. In the neo-liberal project, competition becomes a major driver for developing different forms of governance. Due to the lack of legal power over national education systems, the EU must rely on what has been called ‘soft power’ or ‘soft governance’ and the use of ‘persuasive power’ (Lawn, 2011). Techniques such as recommendations, rankings, reports and joint communications from the Commission make it possible to govern without government and to get around the principles of subsidiarity. In the EU context, the OMC was developed as such a governance tool. It was developed to coordinate education policy between member states and to enhance mutual policy learning by sharing best practice. As shown by Grek (2008), Lange and Alexiadou (2007) and Lawn (2013), for example, these ‘soft governance techniques’ have increasingly become centred on the production and use of numbers and statistics. In this policy trend towards statistical governance of the education sector, Lawn (2013) sees two potential capabilities: first, measurements will enable a redesign of the education system; and second, making education systems ‘visible’ through data will also make them governable. Lawn also shows how these new techniques have changed the practices of education from within.
Looking at the public as well as the political education debates in Sweden over the last decade, it becomes obvious that they have been permeated by a crisis discourse due to falling numbers in the PISA measurements performed by the OECD (Nordin, 2014a). In these debates, teachers were depicted as not being able to secure an equivalent school, and their professional interpretations of the steering documents and grading were suggested as major causes of the Swedish education crisis. In the Swedish Government Official Report (SOU 2007:28) that formed the basis for a new national curriculum for Swedish comprehensive schools, 6 this critique was explicit. Due to what was described in the report as a ‘fuzzy’ school, a whole range of initiatives aimed at simplifying and standardising teachers’ work was proposed (see Nordin, 2014a; Ringarp, 2013) (e.g. national tests should be performed in grades three, six, and nine instead of in grades five and nine). The curricula should use simple language with an economy of words in order to avoid misunderstandings and differing interpretations. Standardised material helping teachers to plan and organise their lessons was also to be developed by the Swedish National Agency for Education in order to standardise the steering documents and assessments of learning outcomes, and to standardise the actual teaching taking place within the classroom. Altogether, a growing and widespread mistrust was directed towards Swedish teachers; this mistrust delegitimised their professional capability.
In the European arena in 2004, Wim Kok (2004), the former prime minister of the Netherlands, argued that simplification and rationalisation were vital in order to streamline the European project and make it more governable and thereby more competitive. Nordin (2014a) argued that the sense of crisis that had come to permeate education policy in the EU from the mid-2000s onward called for a strengthened coordination of national policy. As a result, the OMC was simplified and the number of indicators reduced. ‘The European Semester’ was legitimised as a new policy cycle, strengthening the role of the European Commission in the development of national policy. If the member states did not follow the recommendations made by the Commission, it could proceed with sanctions. In cases where recommendations are not followed up sufficiently within the time frame provided, the Commission may issue policy warnings and ensure effective enforcement through appropriate incentives and sanctions in the context of excessive imbalances procedures (European Commission, 2010b: 6).
Teacher accountability in the wake of the crisis discourse
As the analysis has shown thus far, in order to monitor progress towards external goals, education in the neo-liberal context has come to emphasise individualisation and standardisation rather than intersubjectivity and trust. As Grek (2008), Lawn (2011, 2013) and others have shown, monitoring progress within the neo-liberal project has increasingly become a question of producing and managing numbers. As mentioned briefly above, the EU has developed indicators to measure its progress towards the common goal of becoming the leading knowledge-based economy in the world. The indicators developed and used by the EU form a complex matrix of external checkpoints at the structural, policy, thematic and individual levels, covering areas such as overall societal progress, thematic progress within the OMC and individual student achievements. In this pursuit of external control, the OECD has also become a central policy actor in the European education policy space, affecting policy-making at the national, regional and school levels, as a result of the recurrent PISA assessments. Together, these statistical practices form what Lawn (2011) calls a ‘systemless system’ that moulds the education sector and its practitioners in certain ways.
Since early 2000, the OECD has also become increasingly interested in the teaching profession and the role that teachers play in building the strong knowledge-based economy (Robertson, 2013). In the 2005 OECD report Teachers Matter, several problems, such as teacher shortage, teachers with no or low qualifications, and poor teacher professional development, were reported. In response to this awakening to teacher issues, the OECD launched a project in 2007 called the ‘Teaching and Learning International Survey” (TALIS), which was a governance project that promoted a reframing of national teacher policy. In the survey, the OECD collects data from teachers and head teachers on issues such as their learning environment, opportunities for professional development and school leadership. The TALIS initiative is intended to promote a learning culture among teachers that focuses on individual careers and the idea of promoting the good teacher as a competent and continuous learner (Robertson, 2013).
Several transnational policy actors focus on ‘teacher quality’ and how to develop governing systems that promote such quality. The influential report by McKinsey & Company (Barber and Mourshed, 2007: 16) argues that ‘the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers’ and that ‘the only way to improve learning outcomes is to improve instruction’ (34). This argument is elaborated upon in the publications of the TALIS project as well as those of the EU, where teacher quality is related to the overall achievement of the European education and training goals (Rinne and Ozga, 2013). Driven by transnational actors such as the OECD, the EU, McKinsey & Company and others, indicators have been developed to make teachers’ work and professional development transparent and thereby governable. Biesta (2004: 235) puts it like this: ‘Transparent organizations are auditable, and auditable organizations are manageable – and vice versa. Therefore, organization must be made auditable – at any price.’ Through the use of statistical governance techniques to improve teacher quality, the notion of teacher professionalism is being reimagined in accordance with the neo-liberal principles of marketisation, competition and effectiveness. Put another way, the moral aspects of teacher professionalism diminish in significance when trust is replaced by external control, and situated judgements are replaced by standardised procedures in a reactive practice (Solbrekke and Englund, 2011).
From relative autonomy to total transparency
Turning to the Swedish education policy arena, the neo-liberal project could rightly be described as a double-faceted phenomenon. When decentralising the Swedish school system in 1991, 290 Swedish municipalities took over responsibility for organising the system from the state. On the one hand, the reform was political in nature and was intended to strengthen the local democratic influence over the school. On the other hand, it was a management reform that strove for efficiency and better use of resources. The management aspect also emphasised the importance of professionals being free to organise their own teaching practice. This meant a radical change for teachers, whose practice had previously been governed through centrally prescribed subject content. Now teachers themselves were assigned responsibility for the selection and organisation of subject content (Carlgren and Klette, 2008). In 1994, the Swedish compulsory school received a new curriculum (Lpo 94), which was organised in accordance with these new principles. Instead of prescribing specific content, a new goal-oriented system was launched. This system focussed on learning outcomes rather than on the process of reaching said goals. In this new context, teachers were given relative autonomy in the selection and organisation of school content out of professional consideration. When the crisis discourse emerged in Sweden from the mid-2000s onward, this ‘space of trust’ for professionals, created in the decentralised system, was subject to major criticism (Nordin, 2014a). Teachers were accused of not being able to maintain an equivalent school in terms of equal distribution of high quality education, the maintenance of which is a fundamental goal of the Swedish compulsory school.
This national school crisis discourse resulted in major reforms, which were aimed at making the school system more measurable and thus also more governable (Nordin, 2014a). The former goal system was replaced by more specific knowledge demands and a more differentiated grading system. The national tests were extended from grades five and nine to grades three, six and nine and should, according to the Swedish Government Official Report SOU 2007:28, have a greater impact on teachers’ grading practices. The same argumentative strategy is thus used in Swedish and European education policy, thereby making teacher quality a question of external control built on the use of statistical data, rather than a question of trusting in teachers’ professional judgements, which are formed in accordance with an internal logic that is based on subject knowledge and teaching experience.
Conclusions
As shown in this paper, the role of teachers in developing and maintaining a competitive knowledge-based economy has become an increasingly important issue among policy actors at both the national and transnational levels, using the EU and Sweden as empirical references. Different solutions to enhance teacher quality and thus also school results have been proposed. What is often missed in the analysis of teachers exerting professional responsibility is the role of contextual framing with its specific premises. Through extensive studies, Ingersoll (2012) has shown the importance of the contextual framing set up by schools, both in terms of organisational premises and the character of the teaching occupation. He states that ‘poorly run schools can make otherwise excellent teachers not so excellent’ (Ingersoll, 2012: 98). In this paper, I have tried to widen Ingersoll’s critical examination of the contextual factors that affect teachers’ ability to act professionally by looking at three of the core elements of the neo-liberal policy project as a whole. 7 Together, these elements constitute the discursive policy setting within which demands for professional responsibility and teacher quality are now being made.
Following a communicative rationale inspired by Dewey and Habermas, the results of this paper show that contemporary demands for teachers to take professional responsibility are problematic. If teacher professionalism is seen as a responsibility to develop and uphold ‘spaces of communication’, the results show that contemporary neo-liberal education policy in many ways counteracts such professional responsibility, in terms of ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘trust’ and ‘internal logic’. Regarding ‘intersubjectivity’, the development of lifelong learning as an overall educational ideal orients the basic understanding of education in an individualised direction (Nordin, 2011). Education and learning opportunities become personal projects decoupled from larger societal ambitions (Biesta, 2004). Education is seen as a private good rather than a public good (Solbrekke and Englund, 2011). Accompanied by the launch of key competences as an individualised and decontextualised knowledge conception and a revived psychological self-understanding, lifelong learning contributes to a discursive development, rather different from the intersubjective ideal advocated by Dewey and Habermas, reducing the teacher from an equal communicative partner to a facilitator of individual learning projects. When it comes to ‘trust’, the results show that despite neo-liberal ambitions to decentralise power, a lack of progress and an emerging crisis discourse have led to the contrary. New forms of central control have been developed within the neo-liberal context of decentralisation as a sign of mistrust rather than trust (Nordin, 2014a). The results show that this mistrust has led to a striving among policy actors at both the transnational and national levels to reduce communicative spaces in order to make education governable. Through simplified steering documents and a greater element of standardised tests, power is relocated from teachers to standardised instruments. Thus, teachers are asked to take professional responsibility by those who are deliberately relocating power, making it impossible for teachers to do so. Put another way, one might say that the power to make decisions is removed from the contextually-informed teacher and given instead to central and decontextualised governing tools, while still holding the teacher accountable in the end. Finally, as for the ‘internal logic’ that characterises ‘spaces of communication’, the results likewise show a diametrically different approach. The relative autonomy which characterises the communicative space and makes room for an internal logic to be developed is, in the neo-liberal policy context, replaced by hypersensitivity towards any external stimuli. In order to be competitive, adaptability is suggested as the key to success.
Given that teacher professionalism has something to do with creating and maintaining ‘spaces of communication’, the results of this examination show that the neo-liberal policy context offers limited possibilities for teachers to actually exercise such responsibility. The expressed desire to improve school performances through reduced human influence over the selection, organisation and assessment of what is to be learned reduces the idea of teacher professionalism to the management of pre-designed materials and instruments, thus making it hard for teachers to act professionally in a more profound way.
Teacher professionalism beyond numbers: a communicative reframing
In order to enhance teacher professionalism in a globalised and diversified society, new visions and discourses must be developed that move beyond the narrow and technical interpretations offered by the neo-liberal policy context. The communicative approach proposed by Dewey and Habermas represents a possible starting point for such a widened discussion. Dewey presents a radical view of education as communication and communication as a democratic form of life: he argues that through communication, people can develop deliberative capabilities that enhance democracy (Englund, 2011). For him, the school was the primary societal institution within which such communication could be taught and deliberative capabilities developed.
Inspired by Dewey and Habermas, this paper has linked the notion of teacher professionalism to such a communicative ideal. From this point of departure, the responsibility of the teacher is first and foremost a communicative responsibility. At the same time, the teacher is a communicative participant among others and a facilitator of deliberative communication among his or her students. The communicative ideal proposed by Dewey and Habermas is free and open within and between groups. People of different experiences are encouraged to meet in symmetrical communication that deepens their self-understanding, understanding of others and understanding of the world in which they live and act. Open and free, however, does not mean uncritical: according to Habermas, each participant has a responsibility towards the others to continuously question his or her own position in light of the arguments of the others. It is thus the power of the better argument rather than economical resources or social class that drives deliberative communication forward towards a better and more informed common base.
Focusing on joint efforts to achieve a deeper understanding of oneself and others can gradually replace individualised competition and mistrust with trust. Although teachers must always be sensitive to external demands, their primary attention must be internal. In order to take professional responsibility, teachers need two ears: one picking up the signals from the outside world and one directed towards the inner communicative life of the classroom in which professional responsibility is acted out. In the globalised world, where encounters with the different and unfamiliar have become a natural part of everyday life, the need to develop and maintain ‘spaces of communication’ has become even more important. Without such spaces, there is a risk that teachers will be silenced and thus unable to assume the professional responsibility assigned to them by policy makers. Being professional thus means inviting more people of different values, traditions and ways of looking at the world into the process of deliberative communication. Differences can then become an asset rather than the problem they are often characterised as in the efficient and standardised neo-liberal policy context. Deliberative communication, when it is open to the complexities of the world and facilitated and directed by responsible teachers, goes beyond the professional responsibility asked for within the neo-liberal policy context: it follows an internal logic that prepares students for a life in a world that is seldom simple, standardised or homogeneous.
In a world where everything must be translated into measurable units, the communicative rationale offers a radical counter discourse. Although somewhat idealistic, it offers a necessary platform if education and teacher professionalism are to be taken seriously and not just become a pale reflection of external demands and expectations.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.