Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison

The project seeks to examine how policy makers use evidence and expertise when setting reform agendas, developing new or modified policy options, or issuing reforms. In an era of international comparison, they are expected to learn from experiences from elsewhere and review "best practices" and international standards, propelled by international organizations. The research questions therefore become: Do they do so? What counts for them as evidence and expertise? And how do they stabilize, change and renew school reforms by building policy coalitions and learning from best practices? Concretely, the study examines whether and how policy makers and policy experts in Norway have learnt from experiences in other countries and how they have translated that knowledge into their own country with the intention of improving their national educational system. Notions of policy learning, borrowing or reception on one hand, and translation, local adaptation, or re-contextualization on the other, represent key concepts for the interpretive framework of the study. The project is situated in comparative policy studies and therefore pays special attention to the policy process, in particular to the nexus of national, regional and international policy actors, and their knowledge, and experiences. The study applies comparative network analysis and content analysis in order to compare the reception and translations of international, regional, and national policy knowledge across three distinct school reform periods in Norway (school reforms of 1994/97, 2006, 2020) as well as across current reforms in five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden). After the first year the research group has developed a shared data-base consisting of bibliometric references from the five countries. The project is directed by Associate Professor Kirsten Sivesind (PI) in collaboration with Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi (Teachers College, Columbia University and R2 professor at UiO with UTNAM grant) and Professor Berit Karseth (University of Oslo).

The project seeks to examine how policy makers use evidence and expertise when setting reform agendas, developing new or modified policy options, or issuing reforms for basic education (1–10). In an era of international comparison, policy makers are expected to learn from experiences elsewhere and review “best practices” and international standards propelled by international organizations. The research questions therefore are: how do they draw on regional and/or international knowledge in agenda setting or policy formulation (R1); what counts for them as evidence and expertise (R2), and how do they stabilize and change national school reform by building policy coalitions and learning from best practices? (R3) The project is situated in comparative policy studies and therefore pays special attention to policy processes, in particular to the nexus of national, regional, and international policy brokers, their knowledge and experiences, and how they allude to both systems and outcomes. Notions of policy learning, borrowing, or reception on one hand and translation, adaptation, and re-contextualization on the other represent key concepts for the interpretive framework of the study.

The study applies bibliographical, text-based network analysis to compare the reception and translations of international, regional, and national policy knowledge across three distinct school reform periods in Norway (school reforms of 1997, 2006, and 2020) as well as in the four other Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden). In addition, a qualitative content analysis of policy documents will reveal new insights into the ways national school reform policy is being changed as an outcome of knowledge transfer within and across the selected countries.