In recent years a flood of interrelated reform-ideas with the main intention to reorient educational systems has been spread across the globe (Ball, 2003). These reform ideas are according to Ball (2003) embedded in three interrelated policy technologies or discoursers; the market, managerialism and performativity (p215), that has become an important part in aligning the educational system organisation with systems that traditionally belongs to the private sector. In this process the educational system and teacher education have become a political battleground geared to ideological transformations of society (Apple, 2001, 2009) which has had many consequences not at least for teaching and learning in education institutions.  

The Swedish school system and teacher education has, as in many other countries, undergone major political and policy-related changes in the last decades. In Sweden this has meant that knowledge of facts in subjects and knowledge about how to make these facts relevant to learn and reproduce by pupils was given a key position and an increased demand on examinations and tests in these subjects (Bender, 2013; SOU 2008:109, 2008). In this chapter the Swedish Teacher education will be taken as a critical case and the focus will be on the performative discourse in terms of tests and evaluations.

The aim with this paper is to make visible how the on-going process of education within teacher education and its performative demands affect student teachers learning strategies and professional development. The intention is to analyse, make visible and try to understand how the examination tasks control what counts as legitimate knowledge for student teachers for their future work as teachers in compulsory school. 

The following questions will be given special attention:

What meanings and understanding are generated through these examinations?

How do the students handle examinations tasks?

What consequences might this have on student teacher professional knowledge development?

The foundation for the paper is a ethnographical meta-analysis of  two  studies (Eriksson, 2009; Player-Koro, 2012) within teacher education carried out between 2004-2009. The reanalysis involving comparisons across our  projects in an attempt to identify and synthesise key elements from these investigations (Beach, Eriksson, & Player-Koro, 2013). These key elements are then used as ‘data’ together with extracts aimed at illustrate arguments and question emerging claims. In the present case it is mainly extracts of and summaries from educational arrangements and educational effects but also extracts of and summaries from official policy that figure in data. Most material is from observations of natural occurring conversations in or close to actual class/lecture-room contexts.  

The reanalysis was characterised as an interactive process between researchers, the data and theory (Jeffrey & Troman, 2004). In this process Bernstein´s (2003) concept of the pedagogic device has been used. The pedagogical device refers to a concept and set of rules, distributive rules, recontextualizingrules and evaluative rules, describing how the regulation of consciousness takes place through communication in a pedagogical practice. The pedagogic device refers in this sense to the process where knowledge is transformed into pedagogic communication through the embedding of two discourses, the instructional discourse within the regulative discourse that together forms the pedagogic discourse that constitute the rules by or through which pedagogical subjects (in this case student teachers) are created.

The whole purpose and meaning of the device is, according to Bernstein, condensed in the continuous evaluation going on in pedagogical practices. This means that examinations structure the form and content and the social interactions within the pedagogical practice. Bernstein´s (2003, p 156) distinction between two fundamental forms of knowledge discourses; vertical and horizontal discourse that reflects a dichotomy between scientific- and common-sense knowledge was also important for the analysis.

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