Since 2010, one paragraph of the Swedish Education Act stipulates that Swedish education shall be founded on “scientific foundation and proven experience” (SFS 2010:800) The legal change preceded the new Swedish curricula (Skolverket 2011a, 2011b) brought by the 2011 school reform, and was legitimized by national and international assumptions that science positively affects both schools and society (OECD, 2005, 2015; Nordin, 2014; Levinsson, 2013; Serder, 2015). Due to the fact that Swedish results declined in international knowledge comparisons such as PISA and TIMMS in the early 2000s, a massive national debate activated several political initiatives aiming to improve the results in Swedish schools. Since then, a key concern of Swedish educational policy has been the academization and professionalization of Swedish teachers. Policy initiatives aiming to strengthen the research-base of teachers’ everyday practice is one of the outcomes of these discourses, where a gradual shift in Swedish policy has taken place during the last 25 years from expectations, i.e. indirect ambitions to create good conditions for educational research, to actions, i.e. promoting research directly aimed at improving student learning and achievement through enhanced teaching practices (Adolfsson & Sundberg, 2018). Sweden makes for an interesting case of European education policy, being the first country to include legal stipulations of research-based education to schools and their professionals in the Education Act itself. When it comes to the interpretations of such a stipulation in policy, the concept of ‘scientific foundation’ can be seen as a boundary object – i.e., as a non-definitive and context-dependent concept that at the same time is robust enough to conceal the eventual problems of its own interpretative vagueness (Star & Grieshemer, 1989).

The Swedish school reform of 2011 also came about in response to critiques of school reforms in the early 1990s, e.g. ideals of a decentralized school system that built on confidence in the profession of teachers and its ability to develop good education for local contexts (Nordin, 2014). Leading up to the reforms of 2011 it was claimed that the declining school results (in a decentralized Swedish school system) showed the need for firmer central governance – provided for example by more detailed curricula (Nordin, 2014; SOU 2007:28). It is therefore interesting to consider the policy work of ‘education resting on [a] scientific foundation’ from a governmental perspective. 

This study is part of a Ph.D. project aiming to study policy practices and policy transformations related to the discursive relation between ‘education on a scientific foundation’ and the professionalism of Swedish music teachers. The focus in this particular study, however, is to scrutinize how ’education on a scientific foundation’ is enacted and constructed in policy text presented by the Swedish National Agency of Education on their official web site. The study also investigates how such policy work construct discourses of (ideal) teacher professionalism. The study is based on the following questions:

• How is policy of education on a scientific foundation represented and constructed in the policy texts?
• How is teacher professionalism constructed and regulated in relation to education on a scientific foundation?
• Which representations of problems are described or implied, and what (if anything) is contradicted or neglected in this regard?

The article takes a social constructionist and post-structural point of departure, resting on Ball’s (et al.) conceptualization of policy as both text and discourse as well as his understanding of performativity as a policy technology (Ball, 1993, 2003, 2007; Ball et al., 2012). Concepts from Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem?’ approach (Bacchi, 2009) are also used, to scrutinize (stated or implied) problem formulations in the material. Bacchi’s framework also serves to highlight contradictions in the texts and make visible alternative perspectives which are either invisible or concealed. The data was generated by searching for the term scientific foundation (Swedish: vetenskaplig grund) on the agency’s homepage, resulting in 56 hits. These were categorized and narrowed down to five web pages (including one pdf-publication) according to the research questions. Four videos (embedded on the web pages) were transcribed and added to the empirical data. Repeated readthroughs of the data material followed, aiming to spot recurring patterns in the material. During these readings, the following analytical questions were used: • How are “scientific foundation” and other related concepts described and discursively constructed in the texts (including models and videos)? • How are teachers and their teaching practice described in the texts (including models and videos)? • What is at stake/what is made important for professional practice in the descriptions – and what relevant aspects (if any) are left unmentioned or unproblematized? • Which problems of teacher professionalism are articulated or implicated in the material to legitimize policy of scientific foundation? • Are there any internal contradictions in the analyzed policy texts?

The preliminary result of the study shows how the paragraph of the Swedish Education Act (concerning education on a scientific foundation) is interpreted into policy-as-text by the Swedish National Agency of Education at their official website. In the texts, a policy apparatus materializes in which the terms ‘scientific foundation’ and ‘proven experience’ from the Education Act are supplemented by the policy concepts of ‘research-based way of working’ and ‘evidence’. The preliminary result also shows three emerging discourses in the analyzed policy material, constructing or regulating different aspects of teacher professionality: the selectively critical and accountable teacher, the positive, flexible, responsible, and effective teacher, and the semi-autonomous teacher.

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