During the last decades, a neo-liberal governing of public education has emerged and been enhanced throughout the school- systems in nations (Au, 2016). Following from this, the vehicle of development in the nordic education systems are anchored in a corporate-logic in which economic competition and technological change have taken central places (Antikainen, 2006). An orientation towards goal-management and a marketisation of the school has been displayed in reforms especially from the 1990s and forward, encompassing choice, efficiency and accountability (Rönnberg, 2011).
Two examples of this is the very predominant practices of the increased use of ICT in teaching and learning and also, increased emphasis on national assessment (Verger, Lubienski & Steiner-Kamsi, 2017). Both of these practices are in the core of making education more efficient and holding higher quality, which is ultimately the teachers responsibility and something that the schools is held accountable for. Enhancement of knowledge and quality is assumed to be an engine for progress and are at the same time means for the state to govern a system that is imprinted by globalisation, decentrantralisation, privatization and local self-governing (Carlbaum, Hult, Lindgren, Novak, Rönnberg, Segerholm, 2014). Data-use in education have then become important tools for producing evidence, as quality indicators and for the settings of goals (Prøitz, Mausethagen & Skedsmo, 2017), which is seen both in the collection of results from the tests and in the use of ICT in the classroom.
This contribution explores two of the most prominent reforms made in the Swedish school system the last decade, and that have connections to the above depicted global and neo-liberal logic of governing education. 1: Increased emphasis on the use of ICT in teaching and learning and 2: Increased and earlier national assessment and grading. The Swedish context in particular provides a large number of ICT initiatives, so called one-to-one computing, with both laptops and tablets for each student reported in almost all of the 290 Swedish municipalities (Becker & Taawo, 2018). In addition, national testing has been advanced and is now administered to preschool class, third grade, sixth grade and ninth grade in compulsory school.
They are both very dominant as institutionalised practices in the Swedish school and we state that they carries with them disparate routines, rules and roles for how to be a teacher. At the same time, the nordic school model is characterized by “providing schooling of high and equal quality, regardless of children’s and young people’s resources, origin and location“ (Lundahl, 2016, p. 3). These elements of equity and quality is also a point of departure and argument for implementing changes in school policy. Although equity is not very well demarcated, and heavily weighted with the neo-liberal logic and in addition, depicted as something the schools and teachers are held accountable for (Bagger, Norén, Boistrup & Lundahl, 2019). Therefore, the teachers role become in the core of these changes and how their space of action within the dominant practices of national testing and use of ICT in teaching and learning, important to explore further.
The purpose of this article is to contribute with knowledge on the teacher role in the practice of using ICT in education and the practice of giving national tests. Three research questions have guided the investigation: RQ1: What does the teachers role include in the practice of giving tests appear. RQ2: What does the teachers’ role include in the practice of using ICT in teaching and learning? RQ3: What differences and similarities are there in the two settings regarding demands, expectations, norms and routines - what “is” it to be a teacher and go between these contexts.