Session Information
23 SES 03 B, Market Ideas and Practices (Part 1)
Paper Session
Contribution
Education governance in Sweden has been radically changed during the last two decades in terms of deregulation, marketization and a voucher system as in a number of welfare states (Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2004). In parallel, Swedish school governance has followed the international trend of increased focus on school performances and accountability (Lindblad, 2011) or on student prerequisites and biases in school choice (e.g. Gewirtz et al, 1995).
The present study concerns the students’ situation in performance based systems of governance. More specifically we are interested in the relation between students’ educational identities and the performative context. We are working within a curriculum theory approach based on dynamic nominalism (Hacking, 2004) where categorizations are assumed to interact with the categorized individuals in a process of looping. From this perspective, institutional categorizations are assumed to develop into individual self-categorization during the making of school careers and lived curricula. Our approach is to capture the school choice in terms of a communication system (Luhmann, 1995) where we are getting access to the information selected and the meanings acquired, by turning to students in the process of leaving the compulsory school and their choices to upper secondary education.
We ask the following research questions based on theories of self-categorization, school choice and differentiation within an institutional framework:
a. How do students categorize themselves in relation to institutional organization in lower secondary education?
b. How are the school choice information systems presenting alternatives in upper secondary education and how are different student categories being interpelled by categorizations in this information?
c. What kind of information sources do different student categories in lower secondary school make use of in the context of choosing upper secondary education?
d. What rationalities do different student categories in lower secondary school apply when decisions are to be made among alternative schools and programmes in upper secondary school?
Given answers on these questions we will be able to analyze looping in the interaction between student characteristics and institutional classifications in a marketized education system built on self-selection.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Gewirtz, S., Ball, S., & Bowe, R. (1995). Markets, choice and equity in education. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hacking, I. (2004). 'Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: Between Discourse in the Abstract and Face-to-Face Interaction. Economy and Society 33, no. 3: pp.277- 302. Lindblad, S. (2010). Turn taking in large-scale reforms: re-modelling welfare state education in Sweden. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft. 14 (Special Issue) Lindblad, S. & Popkewitz, T. (2004) (Eds): Educational Restructuring: International perspectives on travelling policies. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publ. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Simons, M & Masschelein, J. (2006) ‘The learning society and governmentality: an introduction, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(4): 417-30.
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