In times of global instability because of climate change, international conflicts, war, and increased migration, the interest in adult education has become global. Adult education is seen as the potential driving force for paving the way for human rights, emancipation, citizenship, multiculturalism, equality, and sustainable societies, and brings hope for a peaceful world (UNESCO, 2022). For this reason, UNESCO emphasizes the need for enabling participation in adult education for more individuals over the world. Swedish municipal adult education, MAE, is the largest in the world per capita (Fejes & Henning Loeb, 2021), and therefore, may seem successful. However, viewing participation in itself as a measure of quality in education is questionable, as the educational mission is often complex and related to the national educational system context, which sets the conditions for practice. While UNESCO concludes that most countries have reported progression in quality in adult education, the trends within Swedish MAE are contrasting. Swedish MAE is facing severe challenges in terms of quality, such as many students leaving MAE without passing (65% of all registered students in 2022, according to the Swedish National Agency for Education, 2023), increased detection of grade fabrications (Fejes, Runesdotter & Wärvik, 2015), and mass exodus of professional practitioners (Portfelt, 2021). While the reasons for this condition have mostly been studied from a critical policy analysis perspective, there is a lack of school improvement research. There is consequently a call for such research studies (Fejes & Henning Loeb, 2021).

This study reports on the research project Leadership and school improvement within Swedish MAE that started in 2019 in collaboration between a researcher (author) and two practitioners working within MAE. The collaborative practice was set up as an action research approach, and the multimethod project evolved over time. The research set-up contrasts with the dominating trends in international research on adult education, and responds to a lack of studies using multimethod and/or quantitative methods (Boeren, 2019; Fejes & Nylander, 2019). We eventually came to study eight local MAE institutions in terms of internal quality work and indirectly, their surrounding practices. Analytically, we defined quality work as the practitioners’ systematic work with supporting each student in their learning and progression, based on the students’ individual pre-conditions, learning capacity, and needs, as far as possible to succeed in their studies.

The aim of this study is to explore the preliminary findings from the research project and shed light on how practices emerge in the local MAE institutions in terms of quality work, and what prefigures practice. Research questions are;

-        How is the quality work of the local MAE institutions carried out in practice?

-        What aspects enable as well as constrain the systematic quality work of the local MAE institutions?

The study uses the theory of practice architecture, TPA, as an analytical framework (Kemmis et al., 2014). Here, practice is defined as social processes that emerge in the interplay between individuals, cultures, and structures, as a result of historical as well as ongoing processes. The focus is on practices and how they are brought into the site. Kemmis et al. (2014) emphasize that practices are constituted by the sayings, doings, and relatings that interplay in relation to the studied phenomena in a specific practice. The sayings, doings, and relatings are prefigured by practice architectures that are present or emerging into the site; sayings by cultural-discursive arrangements, doings by material-economic arrangements, and relatings by social-political arrangements.

Data is generated by multimethod, such as qualitative policy analysis, a survey completed by teachers in eight local MAE institutions analyzed by factor analysis, multivariate analysis, descriptive statistics, and qualitative content analysis of free text options, and interviews with principals in the eight local MAE institutions. The research project has been approved by the local university’s ethical committee. No personal data have been collected from the respondents. The participants were fully informed about the research project and their rights in accordance with research ethics, and have given their consent to participate in recordings, survey analyses, and reports of the findings. The research project has followed all the ethical guidelines and recommendations of the Swedish Research Council (“Good Research Practice” from 2017, a new edition forthcoming in 2024). All preliminary findings will be integrated and meta-analyzed through the framework theory of practice architecture. Due to the variety of data and findings, the meaning of findings from each study in the research project will be coded into sayings, doings, and relatings in accordance with the theoretical framework. These codes will then be analyzed to identify the surrounding arrangements. Finally, the interrelations between the arrangements will be analyzed to reveal the practice architecture of the local MAE institutions in terms of quality work, and its constraining and enabling traits (Kemmis et al., 2014).

How the quality work of the local MAE institutions is carried out in practice Participating practitioners in the study seem to have big interest in and compassion for MAE students. However, the quality work of local MAE institutions emerges as unsystematic, sporadic, optional, and coincidental. Principals are mostly described as absent as pedagogical leaders. Professionals emerge as loosely coupled, and there are no systems or routines in place to support professionals in quality work. Individuals, or small sub-groups of professionals with a particular interest in working systematically with quality work, invent their own systems. As a consequence, several parallel systems sometimes exist and compete with one another within one and the same local MAE, which fragments the efforts to work with quality even more. This tends to produce radical introvertism among some of the professionals within MAE, promote the emergence of informal leaders, and create a type of professional autonomy that make practitioners refuse to be led by a formal leader. Aspects that enable as well as constrain the systematic quality work of the local MAE institutions On the one hand, social-political arrangements enable quality work, as the content in policy focuses systematically on supporting students in their learning. On the other hand, social-political arrangements constrain such quality work by putting MAE into an educational market, forcing local MAE institutions to compete by reducing efforts and costs, not requiring special education teachers or student health, and allowing municipalities to organize MAE under school boards with no knowledge of the educational assignment of MAE. Local quality work is enabled by principals that prioritize their pedagogical leadership, educate their local school board about the mission of MAE, arrange their local MAE to focus on students’ learning and progression, and use scientific approaches to professionalize local MAE professions.

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