The second paper in the symposium responds to the study of interdependencies between structural conditions and policies that form the backbone of educational transformation. The small Nordic country of Sweden has a remarkable history of social engineering of an entire nation through comprehensive educational reform and mass schooling (Forsberg & Lundgren, 2009) that harnessed the reputation of the nation as the pinnacle of social conscience in the world. This socially advanced and inclusively assembled ‘Swedish model’ that was the institution of an egalitarian, equity oriented, civil rights based society began to crumble in the torrents of globalisation and became entangled in the grips of considerable system reform (Englund, 1994). The internationally enviable Swedish teacher education of highly skilled professionals became the focus of a condemnation game of falling educational standards, increasing attrition rates and a notable teacher exodus from the teaching profession. In this paper, the presenters investigate the feasibility of the rise and fall of the Swedish education model as an upshot of teacher professionalization. The paper interrogates issues in teaching professionalization when subjecting a national schooling system to recurrent wide-ranging reforms. It reports on the Swedish teacher education landscape as it evolves through a series of institutional changes. The study traces the policy and system reforms implemented since the latter half of the 20th century in response to the globalization movement, which profoundly changed the nature of the Swedish teaching profession and its international reputation. In the presentation, the authors provide an analytic appraisal of the institutional configurations imposed upon the national teacher education system by a globally driven policy reform. The key policy developments and their institutional implementation made a distinct influence on the way the teaching profession was shaped as the agency that destabilized the national schooling model. The methodological approach employed in the paper applies discursive policy analysis (Bacchi, 2012) on key national and international policy documents (c.f. European Commission, 2006; Swedish Government, 2010; Ministry of Education, 1991; OECD, 2005) to contrast the intersections between globally driven national policy reform and identities of the teaching profession as an example of the interplay between social structure and agency. The analytic framework draws on the teaching of world society and neo-institutional theory (Krucken & Drori, 2015; Meyer & Benavot, 2013). The presentation concludes in a discussion involving the audience in drawing commentary and conclusions of comparative value in relation to the other cases presented in this symposium.

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