The background of this project is the formation of the European Higher Education Area - including the Bologna Process – and the European Qualification Frameworks for lifelong learning. One of the corner stone’s in both these Common European projects is learning outcomes, thus what the successful student/learner is expected to be able to do at the end of the module/course unit, or qualification level. The purpose of this contribution is to analyze how the constructions of European as well as national qualification frameworks and learning outcomes function as political technologies. The focus is mainly contemporary policies of lifelong learning and contemporary curriculums of teacher education in the Nordic countries. Our interest is not, for instance, how the learning outcomes are conducive to student learning and educational achievement. The focus is instead how, qualification frameworks and learning outcomes as political technologies, contribute to the construction of contemporary Europe as an imagined community and to the fabrication of contemporary European identities. The interest is focused on processes of political governance thought to be internal rather than external to the field of education. Our contribution is thus about learning and discourses of learning as policy practices. We study and compare contemporary European as well as national (Nordic) stories, ideas and rationalities about society, future, teacher and citizenship. Thus, we investigate the principles organizing how European teachers as well as the European citizens are expected to think, reason, and act to be included in the European project. What is problematized is not knowledge and learning as epistemological issues but as relationships between power - knowledge - learning. The paper is a part of a research project financed by the Swedish research council: The formation of a nation's teachers in the context of European educational policy - A comparative study of the governance of teacher education and training in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

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