Becoming Fit for Transnational Comparability: Exploring Challenges in Danish and Swedish Teacher Education Reforms

Abstract

This chapter traces how national teacher education policy discourse in Denmark and Sweden is being transformed by opaque, albeit often inclusive, processes in transnational policy forums, such as the Bologna Process, OECD, and EU. This is facilitated by “soft law” surrounding the imagined needs of modern nations, if they are to succeed in “an increasingly competitive global race among knowledge economies.” In the case of the Bologna Process, the transformative effects are often rather direct. More often, however, effects touch upon national educational agendas in indirect ways, in terms of an emerging, overarching logic and governance technologies like comparisons, stocktaking, standards, performance indicators, benchmarking, and best practice. These transnational templates make national teacher education programs comparable. They are fueled by mutual peer pressure among competing nations. Consequently, Danish teacher education discourse has emerged from a distinctly national vocational seminary (teacher training) tradition, into a modernized university college discourse that increasingly fits the transnational templates of comparability, albeit at a slower pace than her Swedish neighbor. It is often difficult to notice the pervasive impact of transnational policy, as reforms of culturally sensitive school and teacher education areas are often discursively reinscribed in heated national debates. The EU and OECD are not popular figures to pull out in public political debate, in either Denmark or Sweden. The Bologna Process is largely unknown to the broader public. Theoretically, this chapter draws on post-Foucauldian governmentality studies. Empirically, it draws on discourse analysis of European (EU), Danish and Swedish national documents, and literature on policy reform.