This symposium explores the politics and practices of teacher professional learning in initial and continuing settings under current policy conditions in five national contexts – Sweden, Norway, Finland, Netherlands and Australia – to understand how more neoliberal conceptions of educational policies and practices intersect, and are in contest, with more profession-oriented, agentic, contextual approaches to teachers’ work and learning (Connell, 2013; Sahlberg, 2011).  We endeavour to develop nuanced understandings of the relations between policies and practices. 

In particular, and via a selection of cases in different European contexts, and Australia, we flag how discourses and practices in relation to ‘research and development’/‘evidence-based practice’, and ‘quality’ and qualifications, are constituted in particular ways in policy; this includes in legislation, national policies, advisory statements from national educational accreditation authorities, school inspection regimes, statements from politicians and related media, and associated statements from relevant education authorities, and research institutes.

However, how these initiatives play out in practice is unpredictable, and reflective of the complex policy ensembles that make them up, and the circumstances in which they are enacted. In relation to policy foci around research and development, and evidence-based practice, we reveal how an emphasis on the need to ground teachers’ learning on the basis of research has been taken up in problematic and productive ways in policy.  This research is sometimes proffered as a ‘solution’ – ideas that seem to ‘work’ and taken up as a form of ‘fast policy’ (Peck & Theodore, 2015), and which are construed as relevant, regardless of context.  However, and drawing upon cases of action research for continuing professional learning in Sweden, and new modes of initial teacher education in the Norwegian context, we also reveal how actual teacher learning practices are much more nuanced, contextualised, and grounded in the specific contexts/sites within which initial and practising teachers work and learn, and how close analysis of such practices can serve as vehicles for critiquing more scientistic and performative conceptions of research and ‘evidence’.

In Finland, the participatory nature of teacher education provision is an area of considerable interest, and the focus of the third presentation. How this participation has been constituted, involving engagement between different actors, including researchers, teacher union officials and policy makers, is an important part of this process. The final paper draws upon Habermas’ notions of democratic will formation, particularly in his later work (especially as outlined in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy), to better understand the nature of regulatory and developmental processes, as articulated in the key policy Teacher Education Development Programme in Finland and associated texts, associated with this process.

Through our analyses of educational policy and practice in different European contexts, and Australia, our symposium provides important insights into the nature of policy – both problematic and productive of teachers’ initial and continuing learning – and how practice as praxis, and a more value-based approach (Biesta, 2010) can contest more prescriptive, top-down and reductive interpretations of policy.

Biesta, G. (2010). Why ‘what works’ still won’t work: From evidence-based education to value-based education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(5), 491-503. Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2) 99-112. Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2015). Fast policy: Experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? New York: Teachers College Press.