Exploring teaching as an upper secondary school teacher through lived experience offers pedagogical insights that have been challenged over a period of 25 years, when neoliberal educational policies gradually transformed the conditions for teaching in Swedish schools. The article is grounded in the assumption that the teaching profession is complex and there are multiple tacit dimensions inherent in being and becoming a teacher. Several of these dimensions are captured by the notion of pedagogical tact and have to be learned through (...) practice. However, over the past few decades, the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Swedish education sector have changed the conditions for teaching, and created an area of tension between the teacher’s pedagogical alignment and the educational practices influenced by neoliberal values. The aim of the study is to describe how the author experienced these tensions, and what they meant for her becoming and being a teacher in three different pedagogical sites: a higher education preparatory program, a vocational preparatory program, and in adult education. The description is grounded in the lifeworld phenomenological approach and carried out through personal narrative. (shrink)

In an age of nationalisation of international educational policy, or vice versa, the politics and conflicts behind such policies often take centre stage to the detriment of professional expertise. In response, this article develops a nuanced critical realism to propose a practice-based development and implementation of educational policy reforms. Based on empirical reports of head teachers’ subversive practice, the article concludes by highlighting that professional expertise is a central component, dubbed ‘formless capability’, that all stakeholders use to turn policy intentions (...) into policy actions. Actuality consists of the three traditional domains of critical realism – the real, the actual and the empirical – whose importance is derived from whether it is a means to or an end in itself. It is argued here that empirical experiences of leading schools are the stage of actuality that is directly... (shrink)

Professional higher education is expected to educate large numbers of students to become innovative professionals within a time frame of three or four years. A mission impossible? Not necessarily, according to Henriëtta Joosten who is a philosopher as well as a teacher. She uses the experimental, liberating, but also dangerous ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche to rethink contemporary higher professional education. What does it mean to teach students to strive for better in a professional world where horizons tend to disperse and (...) the possibility of long-term orientation is disappearing? Following Nietzsche, five key elements of striving for better are explored: uncertainty, excellence, critical thinking, truth seeking friendship, and learning through ups and downs. From these five perspectives, Joosten scrutinises existing educational discourses on professional higher education in search for openings to transform these discourses into new, more appropriate ones. Understanding excellence as rising above oneself, she argues for a learning environment in which all students are encouraged to excel. Such an environment allows for uncertainty and learning through ups and downs. Furthermore, teachers are prepared to risk their certainties in order to let a joined quest - that is, a quest of students and teacher - for better truths arise. Using the Nietzschean-inspired notions which have been developed in the study, Joosten describes two factual cases. One case relates to a course in close reading: first-year students jointly read philosophical and scientific texts. The second case involves a group of eleven senior students developing a course in project management. These descriptions and the recommendations serve as a catalyst for constructive debate on the question of how all students can be equipped for a dynamic professional world. (shrink)