Session Information
23 SES 14 C JS, Education Leadership for Curriculum Change
Joint Symposium NW 23 and NW 26
Contribution
Educational leadership within the public sector means constantly ongoing discussions about how the school should be developed. Active citizens, politicians, parents and administrative officials contribute to these discussions with their expertise in order to create a school that is appropriate for the current society. Discursive institutionalism treats institutions both as the context for actors thinking, speaking and acting and as contingent, as a result of the thoughts, sayings and doings of thse actors. The inner institutions of the actors serve both as structures and as constructions created and changed by the actors. Actions within an institution are not primarily seen as a product of rational activity within appropriate norms and rules but as a process where the actors create and maintain institutions based on their ideational background-abilities (Schmidt, 2008). Ideas matter for the discourses that create the institutions. Power is a central concept in the political sciences and ideas are related to power-actions. Ideational power within the discursive institutionalism is defined as the capacity of the actors to affect the normative and cognitive perceptions of the actors by using elements of ideas (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016). However, whereas DI provides a stimulating approach for understanding policy discourse, it appears lacking a foundation in education theory. Given this non-affirmative education theory and discursive institutionalism are used as complementary approaches for an empirical study. An openness for the future that the school prepares for based on a non-affirmative, democratic and reflective citizenship is important and the non-affirmative approach needs to permeate not only the pedagogical activities but also the processes around it to be credible. The aim of this paper is to reflect on discourse analysis given the theoretical points of departure. Approaches to empirical discourse analysis are evaluated in the light of the theoretical framing. The empirical case consist of a school closure in Helsinki, Finland. Finland has closed several thousand of schools the past three decades and there have often been difficult debates leaving negative footprints in the local societies. Data consist of texts from local newspaper, social media and municipal strategical documents and protocols. The study aims at identifying and describing the processes that are in operation around school-reforms in a local context.
References
Schmidt, V.A. (2010). Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ”new institutionalism”. European Political Science Review, 2, pp.1-25. Doi:10.1017/S175577390999021X. Schmidt, V.A. (2016). Conceptualizing Europe as a ”Region-State”. In: T. Spanakos & F. Panizza (eds.), Conceptualizing Comparative Politics (pp. 17-45). New York: Routledge. Uljens, M. & Ylimaki, R. (2015). Towards a discursive and non-affirmative framework for curriculum studies, Didaktik and educational leadership. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy 1(3). http://nordstep.net/index.php/nstep/article/view/30177
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