Transnational policy discourses shape teacher professionalism through discursive patterns in policy initiatives from the global policy actor, OECD. The policy idea of 'the teacher assistant' has emerged through discourses on teacher professionalism, spurring ambiguities regarding what the policy idea is and ought to be in Sweden. The aim of this…

More than 20 years after the first round of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it has become one of the most important large-scale international assessments, at a global level and in particular in Europe. Thus, a growing number of scholars have examined or discussed its research design. Nonetheless, a key feature of…

The trend towards seeing education as a commodity and part of a global industry has transformed the field of education. We argue that these transformations are reducing the autonomy of the field of education as it has incorporated business rhetoric, logic and practice. We examine this through an analysis of discursive formations manifested in two…

The aim of this study is to examine how a particular object for consumption, professional development for teachers and principals, is marketed to schools, and what propositions and understandings are embedded in such offers. Adopting a conceptualization of marketing as a "perpetual questioning machine," the study deploys and develops a…

Based on Honneth's recognition theory, this study aimed at investigating whether students with a migration background reported receiving less recognition from teachers than students without a migration background. Also, we explored whether such a difference contributed to explaining the disparity between the groups in reading achievement. To…

International trends promoting school diversity and choice have reshaped education across Europe, leading towards a multiplicity in ownership structures and varied governance configurations. More recently, this can also be seen in European countries with a long history of state-owned and governed public schools, such as in the Nordic states. The…

The article synthesizes ideas from the capability approach, the embeddedness approach, and Nancy Fraser's three-dimensional scale of justice and develops a theoretical framework for understanding subjective well-being (SWB) as a positive functioning. It also proposes an instrument for measuring SWB and its relationship with participation in…

Narratives on innovation in education are spreading fast and both national and local educational administrations have been recently promoting innovation policies and programmes in many different European contexts. Academic literature analysing the potential benefits of innovation in education has expanded accordingly, with some international…

We examined practices and experiences of leadership during the COVID-19 school closures in 2020 by analyzing Estonian (N = 219) and Finnish (N = 775) school leaders' responses to open-ended questions in an electronic survey. In the analysis we used five categories drawn from the data: Making decisions, Re-organizing schoolwork, Communication,…

Several authors have underlined that processes of Europeanisation of education emerge despite the European Union's lack of formal power in this area. This article argues on the contrary that its lack of power precisely enables the EU to open up a range of possibilities for its involvement in this sector, among which the ET2020 Working Groups (WG)…

This paper discusses the workings of the European Semester (ES) in relation to the policy field of education. My study shows how the ES enables the steering of education policy through encouraging specific economic and employment-related actions by European Union (EU) member states. With a focus on the relationship between the EU institutions and…

This study examines Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) as a global assemblage that instrumentalizes colonial governmentality. CAIE is a department of the University of Cambridge that has governed schools in British colonies and former colonies since the mid-19th century. These schools constitute a Cambridge School system with…

Applying qualitative methods, this paper examines the burgeoning of quality assurance databases, processes and networks of actors in the field of higher education in Europe. Our main argument is that there has been a move from the Bologna Process being the near singular focus for European-level coordination and harmonisation of higher education,…

Concerned with European Union (EU) governance of teachers since the mid-2000s, this paper makes an empirical as well as theoretical contribution to education policy studies in the context of EU governance. Drawing on neo-institutional field theory and an empirical material of policy documents and interviews, the paper analyses the consolidation…

It is often assumed that the simple presence of international students and ubiquitous use of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) are the main agents of internationalisation of higher education (HE), whereby English equals international education and inbound student mobility equals increased internationalisation. While there are perceived…