Neoliberal reforms have had a massive impact on formal education, internationally as well as in Sweden, during the last decades with e.g. an enhanced focus on effectiveness, performativity, measurable results, transparency, as well as on the individual pupil’s achievements and responsibilities.
The last Swedish curricula for compulsory school, the ones from 1994, 2011 and 2022, have an increased focus on the individual pupil’s performances, formative and summative assessment of the pupil’s achievements, and on the individual pupil’s willingness to take responsibility for their own learning. With a starting point in Rönn’s (2023) comprehensive study, this paper/presentation aims at analyzing the study’s findings from a new over aiming neoliberal societal perspective.
In line with ethnographic educational research, Rönn’s study emphasized and analysed educational structures imposed upon subordinate groups such as pupils aged 14-15, at a municipal Swedish school. Fieldwork, audiovisual recordings and interviewed explored what happened in the juxtaposition between an enhanced focus on the individual pupil and the phenomenon of informal social networks. The results showed, from a pupils’ perspective, that pupils applied a backstage pedagogy and informally interacted with classmates without the teachers’ awareness, such as writing original texts for peers and reformulating classmates’ texts before handing them in for grading as tokens of individual performances.
Likewise Erlandson et al. (2023) who analyzed two Swedish teachers reforms and their impact on educational and teachers’ social life in upper secondary school from a neoliberal perspective, this paper aims at highlighting curricula changes regarding pupils’ (personal) responsibility for their schoolwork and achievements on the one hand, and how the pupils position themselves in relation to being assessed and graded, comprising their resistance towards individual achievements for assessment, from a neoliberal societal perspective. Erlandson et al. highlight that neoliberal solutions in educational settings currently are regarded as impossible to avoid and that the reforms often are looked upon as a one-sided narrow-minded paved road in line with the society’s ongoing neo-liberalization without focusing on the negative long-term consequences.
Watzlawick et al. (2011) argue, that a narrowminded regard on what a “solution” to an issue is, in particular concerning wider fields of e.g. political and economic changes, can worsen the problem in target. In light of this, the aim of this paper/presentation is to pinpoint never-ending neoliberal educational reforms’ impacts on the everyday life in school settings, and to problematize and discuss the need to actively question to what extent more neo-liberal educational reforms could solve any current educational issues. (How) Is it possible to start breaking the “more of the same” neoliberal “solutions” in education?
References
Erlandson, P., Kjellsdotter, A., & Karlsson, M. R. (2023). Neoliberalisation and educational reforms: impacts on teachers in a single school context. Educational Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2023.2210781
Rönn, C. (2023). Backstage pedagogy: Compulsory school pupils’ informal social strategies when dealing with formal individual writing assignments for assessment. Linnaeus University Press. Växjö. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-125604
Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J. H. and Fisch, R. (2011). Change – Principles of Problem formation and problem resolution. Norton & Company.
2024.
Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference 2024, New College, Oxford, 2-4 September 2024