Reforming Education in Norway (RENO)

In a series of discursive and semantic analyses of core reform policy documents, DIRC investigates the introduction and reception of 21^st century skills, the construction of student identities and how the purpose of education – focusing especially on Bildung – is portrayed in the reform.

Publications:

Hilt, L., Riese, H. and Søreide, G. (2018) “Narrow identity resources for future students: the 21st century skills movement encounters the Norwegian education policy context” Journal of Curriculum Studies  https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2018.1502356

Riese, H., Hilt, L. og Søreide, G. (In Press). Selvregulering som pedagogisk formål: Diskursive fornyelser i Fremtidens skole. Nordic Journal of Pedagogy and Critique (special issue on the teaching of life-skills and public health)

Riese, H. og Hilt, L. (forthcoming). The purpose of education and the future of Bildung. In Paulsen et al. (eds.) Global challenges – rethinking welfare-state education. New York: Routledge

Hilt, Line and Riese, H. (Accepted with revisions) Hybrid forms of education in Norwegian curriculum: A systems theoretical approach to understanding the morphologies of “new curriculum. European Educational Research Journal

Søreide, G., Hilt, L. and Riese, H. (forthcoming) 21st century skills and current Nordic educational reforms. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education.

Interview study with teachers and students in Norwegian lower secondary schools, interrogating into how students’ roles, expectations to students and the role and purpose of education is conceived by school actors. Interviews conducted in 2020.

International cooperation with 12 colleagues from Greece, Italy, Denmark, Australia, and Switzerland  on a joint volume on standardization in education: “Educational standardization in a complex world”. Expected on EMERALD publishing in 2021.

Introduction to the joint volume:

Modern societies including and their education systems are increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risks that they themselves have produced (Beck, 1992; Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983; Giddens, 1991; Luhmann, 2000). Education policy makers deal with future risks by increasing the standardization of national educational systems, a process supported by global educational policy ideas, quality assurance mechanisms and governing instruments and practices (L. T. Hilt, Riese, & Søreide, 2018; Landri, 2018; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009; Steiner-Khamsi, 2014).

At the same time, an increasingly culturally, linguistically, ethnically, and/or socially diverse student population face both the intended, and unintended consequences of the policy makers’ decisions to standardize. Furthermore, when global educational initiatives encounter, and are translated into, local educational semantics and contexts, diverse and heterogeneous patterns emerge (Ball, 2016; Dale, 1999; L. T. Hilt et al., 2018; Steiner-Khamsi, 2014).

Thus, standardizing work (Higgins and Larner 2010) seemingly co-exists with processes of heterogenization. Standards can thus be regarded as subject to interpretation and thus unpredictable as to their application and effects. The contributions included in this edited volume explore the phenomenon of standards in education through theoretical lenses as well as empirical research, posing questions such as: Why do we think about education through the lenses of standards? What are the assumed conditions underpinning the idea of standards? How have the conceptions of standards changed through history? How do different standards influence educational professionals’ and educational stakeholders’ ways of working ways of working? To what extent do standards matter to educational quality? How standardized are standards when moving across different levels of the educational system and at the level of practice?

Activites in the subproject:

• 2018 ECER, Bolzano (2018-09-03 - 2018-09-07). Paper presentation: Søreide, Gunn Elisabeth; Hilt, Line; Riese, Hanne (2018) Inclusion and exclusion in educational reforms that aim for inclusion: The case of Norway.

• 2019 ECER, Hamburg (02.09.-06.09). Arranging and chairing (Riese) international symposium: "The encounter between homogenization and heterogeneity: Increased standardization in a diverse world?" including 7 paper presentations by researchers from five countries. We also contributed to the symposium with the following two papers:
         • Hilt, L. "Paradoxes of Curriculum Change: Global educational forms in the Norwegian 2020 Reform"
         • Søreide, G. “Public narratives and narrative control in The Norwegian 2020 educational reform”

• STANDED (digital) Workshop, 22. May 2020. Meeting and peer reviewing contributions to the collected volume “Educational standardization in a complex world”