Policy work in educational leadership courses: university teachers’ interpretations, translations and engagements

ABSTRACT

This study investigates policy work in educational leadership courses at universities. It analyses the types of engagement present in university teachers’ policy work and in their interpretations and translations of policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. The study illustrates policy work as a phenomenon and draws on the theory of policy work; it examines one case from Norway and one from California. The data has been analysed through discourse analysis. Observational data and materials from teaching practices constituted the supporting data, while contextual interviews with university teachers formed the main data. In both cases, various types of engagement were identified, which reflected academic freedom and different policy contexts. The analysis also revealed that university lecturers use their professional discretion and experience when interpreting and translating policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. This has implications for higher education administration, especially for the achievement of coherence across programmes and courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• the education of school leaders
• educational leadership
• policy-making
• policy work
• policy actor engagement
• teaching practices

Introduction

Accountability, educator evaluation, testing and competitive markets constitute the political and economic contexts of schooling (Carpenter, Paredes Scribner, and Lindle 2017; Verger, Parcerisa, and Fontdevila 2019). The education of school leaders¹ is a global phenomenon and can positively affect academic development, students’ results and other outcomes (Bush and Jackson 2002; Crow, Lumby, and Pashiardis 2008; Eacott 2011). That being said, the education of school leaders sustains rather than transforms education (Lumby 2014). There is an international consensus that the professionalisation of school leaders² through education is necessary due to the increased complexity of governance expectations from leading schools (Blase 1987; Goldring and Greenfield 2002; Spillane et al. 2002). Aspiring and practising school leaders around the world are offered several opportunities to study and learn about school leadership in various settings (Huber 2010; Lumby, Crow, and Pashiardis 2008; Taylor, Cordeiro, and Chrispeels 2009; Young et al. 2009; Young and Crow 2017). For example, they can learn about school leadership (Jensen 2016) at higher education institutions (HEIs) – the current study’s context – but they can also learn in teams, networks and partnerships at their workplaces. Nerland and Prøitz (2018) distinguished among policy-, institutional- and course-level research. The present study focused on the course level while also considering the institutional level as well as contemporary national and international policy trends.

In the education of school leaders at HEIs, many actors, such as programme administrators³ and programme leaders,⁴ course leaders,⁵ and university teachers,⁶ participate in operationalising the purposes and goals of programmes and courses (hereafter called ‘policy texts’) into rubrics, syllabi and semester plans. However, one cannot take for granted that policy texts implemented at the institutional level are automatically applied at the course level because the actors involved may have contradictory interpretations and translations and may even argue about the implementation of the texts in terms of teaching designs and practices.⁷ Thus, in line with Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012), we see the interpretation and translation of policy texts as processes of enactment rather than implementation of policy. In the present study, we conceptualise various modes of engagement with interpretation and translation as ‘policy work’ (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012, 49). As Ball, Maguire, and Braun explained, ‘Policy is complexly encoded in texts and artifacts, and it is decoded (and recoded) in equally complex ways’ (2012, 3).

The purpose of the current study is to provide insights into policy work in teaching practices and identify the implications for administration and leadership at universities. The following research questions guided our analysis of policy work:

RQ1: What engagements emerge in university teachers’ policy work at HEIs?

RQ2: How do university teachers interpret and translate policy texts into teaching designs and practices?

The present study selected two empirical cases of school leaders’ education programmes and courses at universities in Norway and California.⁸ These cases were chosen for their similarities, such as university location, student numbers and scope, as well as for the programmes’ economic, cultural and policy differences, which made the cases relevant as illustrations of the phenomenon.

In Section 2, international research on the education of school leaders is reviewed; this literature is complemented by some relevant studies from HEIs. In Section 3, the analytical framework is presented, which considers the typology of engagements in policy work discussed by Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012, 49). Then, in Section 4, we explain the study design, case selection, and data collection and analysis methods, as well as the strategies applied to achieve high credibility. Finally, Section 5 presents the analysis and the results of RQ1, which is followed by a discussion of RQ1 and RQ2 in Section 6. The conclusions are found in Section 7.

Literature review

The first studies on the education of school leaders date back to the 1960s. Since the 1980s, this research has expanded globally. It consists of handbooks on the development and education of school leadership (e.g. Lumby, Crow, and Pashiardis 2008; Young et al. 2009; Young and Crow 2017). There are also edited books that adopt international perspectives, including information about the education of school leaders across countries (e.g. Ärlestig, Day, and Johansson 2016; Huber 2010; Townsend and MacBeath 2011; Ylimaki and Jacobson 2011).

To live up to the responsibilities and expectations of school leaders, education for school leadership has become vital. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the tradition of providing school leadership programmes has existed for longer than in Nordic countries, where principal preparation is still an under-researched area (Baldursdóttir and Sigurðardótti 2016). Through school leadership programmes, authorities can target specific areas that align with national policies and political priorities (Aas and Skedsmo 2014; Ärlestig and Johansson 2020).

Transnational organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), may influence national intentions concerning programmes for school leadership via the recommendations they make in country reports and research. This determines what kind of knowledge is recognised and what needs to be taught in professional development courses (Baldursdóttir and Sigurðardótti 2016). These transnational influences create a space for international research on school leadership programmes.

Despite extensive literature on the education of school leaders, there is limited research on the policy work of university teachers. However, we found some relevant studies in the HEI literature on teacher education and university lecturers’ work. One study focused on the planning and implementation of teaching (Prøitz, Wittek, and de Lange 2020). Based on interviews with programme coordinators, teachers and students in Norway, this study revealed that coordinators and teachers intentionally tried to break away from the monotony of traditional teaching – that is, the established ways of organising teaching based on separate fields and lectures. Instead, they increased their reliance on assignments and the use of realistic cases. When interviewing the students, the authors found gaps between the teachers’ intentions and the students’ experiences. Hermansen (2020) studied how 20 programme leaders in four HEIs discursively positioned disciplinary knowledge in relation to the mandates of teacher education. Based on logs and interviews, she found that educators participated in constructive and creative work to forge or disprove specific relations between certain knowledge domains and professional teaching mandates. Goodyear (2015) conceptualised teaching as multidimensional work in HEIs that has a temporal dimension. This work includes ‘interactive forms of teaching that involve real-time exposition and other kinds of direct instruction, as well as facilitation of students’ learning activities’ (32). It involves pre-active forms of teaching (e.g. planning) and designated post-active forms of teaching, such as reflection, evaluation and assessment (32).

Goodyear also referred to teaching as ‘design for learning,’ which is part of pre-active teaching (32).

When designing for learning within and across programmes and courses, the concept of coherence becomes relevant. Grossman et al. (2008, 274) understood coherence as the sharing of ‘central ideas regarding teaching and learning’ and as the organisation of ‘learning opportunities’ toward such ideas, ‘both conceptually and logistically.’ Coherence is not to be reduced to ‘mere consistency,’ but should be understood as an ‘alignment of ideas and learning opportunities’ (see also Vestøl 2016).

The aforementioned studies are relevant because they illuminate how course leaders can, in various ways, break away from existing teaching practices (Prøitz, Wittek, and de Lange 2020), how programme leaders engage in changing the relationships between certain knowledge domains and the professional mandates of teaching (Hermansen 2020), and how teaching can be conceptualised as design work (Goodyear 2015) with the aim of developing coherence.

The present study addresses the gap in the literature concerning the education of school leaders by illustrating university teachers’ engagement with policy work in HEIs that educate practising and aspiring school leaders. The study is based on video observations, textual materials (policy texts and teaching texts) and interviews.

Analytical framework

The analytical framework used here is grounded in theory on policy work, as outlined by Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012). The concept of policy work refers to the processes of interpreting and translating policies into practice. The challenge is that practices are not stable or fixed, but sophisticated, contingent and complex; they are also unstable. Putting policies into practice requires a complicated process of interpretation and translation, which, in the present study, regards converting policies (e.g. programme intentions) into teaching designs and practices.

The concept of interpretation refers to ‘an initial reading a making sense of policy – what does this text mean to us? What do we have to do? Do we have to do anything? It is a political process of substantive reading – a “decoding” which is both retrospective and prospective’ (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012, 43). Ball, Maguire, and Braun further explained that ‘this decoding is done in relation to the culture and history of the institution and the policy biographies of key actors. It is a process of meaning-making which relates the smaller to the bigger picture’ (43–44). It also involves processes of ‘recoding’ (43). According to the authors, translation is ‘a sort of third space between policy and practice. It is an iterative process of making institutional texts and putting those texts into action’ (45).

When interpreting institutional intentions and translating them into teaching designs and practices, professionals in HEIs and schools not only respond to policies from higher levels but also engage in policy-making. Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012) described policy-making as individuals’ and groups’ use of power and discretion to influence the interests of organisations and citizens. The argument is that, by utilising the available resources, all the actors in an organisation can attempt to influence the other actors and the programmes through their engagement when they attempt to enact policies, initiatives and expectations in the design and practice of teaching (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012; Gunnulfsen 2020; Gunnulfsen and Møller 2017; Gunnulfsen and Roe 2018). In the context of school leaders’ education, university lecturers and other actors may use their power and discretion to influence the interests of their faculties/departments when designing courses and teaching practices; doing so implies making decisions and using their professional expertise when planning.

In our analysis, we employed Ball, Maguire, and Braun’s typology of ‘policy actors/positions/engagements’ (2012, 49–67). We use the term ‘engagements’ as an overarching term. The authors distinguished between engaging as narrators, entrepreneurs, transactors, enthusiasts, critics and receivers in policy work. Engaging as narrators refers to actors interpreting policies; filtering out what needs attention; selecting what can, must and cannot be done; and enforcing meanings that are ‘sold’ to others through storytelling. Engaging as entrepreneurs refers to policy-making, whereby actors create narratives by advocating for specific changes to support certain ideas and visions before integrating them into their existing work. Engaging as transactors refers to actors ensuring that the organisation considers and reports what needs to be done, as well as monitors, supports and facilitates efforts to enact policies. Actors may also engage in policy work as enthusiasts – by being creative and influential – and as translators – by translating and enacting policies through their practices (e.g. by producing institutional texts, artefacts and events to promote the engagement of others). Finally, when engaging as critics, actors express discomfort with certain policies; they provide counter-discourses about policies and/or act as reviewers looking for guidance and direction.

The two cases and the study’s methodology

This article builds on a larger study (Jensen 2019; Jensen and Ottesen 2022) that explored how the education of school leaders at universities is situated, experienced and legitimised. The study, which included two cases, is based on video observations of teaching practices, contextual interviews, and policy texts and teaching tools from the teaching practices. In previously published research from the larger study, specific attention was paid to the tasks and artefacts (Jensen 2019) in the context of cultural-historical activity theory as well as to the unfolding teaching practices in the context of activity network theory (Jensen and Ottesen 2022). The present article draws on policy work theory.

The two cases were part of master’s programmes in educational leadership in Norway (Case 1) and California (Case 2). In Case 1, the programme was offered by the university and financed by the Ministry of Education and Research in Norway, while the programme in Case 2 was financed by various external funders, the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and the university. The two cases were chosen through purposeful selection (Maxwell 2008) due to the need to access the course activities by using video recordings for an extended period and because of the similarities and differences between them. The cases had comparable student numbers (22 students in Case 1 and 25 students in Case 2). The scope and origins of the programmes were partly similar. The programme in Case 1 has existed as an experience-based master’s degree⁹ since 2003. The programme in Case 2 began in 2000. Both were part-time master’s degrees. The courses were taught by faculty members, who also held positions as programme leaders and university lecturers. Both university teachers had been engaged in designing the programmes and the courses some years back. They were both responsible for administrative and pedagogical work, such as developing plans for the semester, plans for each course day, providing supervision and information about the course on the learning platform, and so forth. Both teachers had several years of experience as programme and course leaders and lecturers of the programmes. They had doctoral degrees and were frequently engaged in research projects and international publishing. In Case 1, there were also other university teachers who lectured on the course.

Most of the students were aspiring school leaders, while a few were practising school leaders. The economic, cultural, economic and policy backgrounds of the programmes were somewhat different.

What we conceptualise as ‘policy documents’ consisted of various texts, such as rubrics, course descriptions, syllabi, semester plans, reading lists and assignments, which the lecturers introduced and used when describing the content, the intentions and the structures of the programme and the specific course being offered. We use the term ‘teaching tools’ when referring to tools being used for teaching the subject area (e.g. PowerPoint presentations, handouts, chapters and articles). The policy documents and the teaching tools were partly visible in the video observations and were included in the data corpus to obtain insights that would not have been available through the analysis of the video data alone. This study used a video-based ethnographic approach (Hindmarsh and Heath 2007). The equipment consisted of two cameras (one placed at the front of the classroom and the other at the back) synchronised with a body-pack transmitter, a microphone attached to the teacher, and another one placed among the students.¹⁰

The main data consisted of audio recordings of contextual interviews (Hultman 2001) with the two university teachers who were observed. These interviews asked about the origins of the programmes, the teaching designs and the elements of the observed programme designs, as well as about the teachers’ justifications for their programme designs and practices. The data were collected between 2015 and 2017.

The data sources for Cases 1 and 2 can be found in Tables 1 and 2, respectively.

Table 1. Overview of the data used in Case 1.

Data	Subject	Scope
Policy texts	Programme description	On the web
	Course description	4 pages
	Semester plan	5 pages
Interview recordings	University teacher/course leader Kate^12	90 min
Video recordings	Videos of the teaching practices	17 h
Teaching materials	PowerPoint presentations (PPPs)	9 PPPs, each with 11–95 slides

Table 2. Overview of the data used in Case 2.

Data	Subject	Scope
Policy texts	Rubric	90 pages
	Programme description	On the web
	Course description	On the web
	Syllabus	5 pages
Interview recordings	University teacher/course leader Susan^13	70 min
Video recordings	Videos of the teaching practices	18 h
Teaching materials	Chapters or articles	2–4 per course day
	Handouts	7 handouts

The interview data were analysed in the context of the video observation data and the textual materials, which had been previously examined through content analysis. The first step of the interview analysis consisted of holistically reading the transcripts; the second step involved identifying how the university teachers interpreted and translated policy texts into teaching designs and practices. The third step was to identify policy actor engagements in the teachers’ policy work in HEIs by using a discourse analytic perspective (Fairclough 2013). The analysis was supported by the application of the typology of policy work and policy actors developed by Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012, 49) to illustrate the different types of policy actor engagements in the programmes’ teaching practices (RQ2). The data were examined to reveal sensitive viewpoints in what Fairclough defined as ‘intertextuality’ (1992, 270). These viewpoints were expressed via the teachers’ choices of words (especially the use or changes in the use of subjects and verbs, such as ‘I think,’ ‘they should,’ ‘I will’ and ‘I mean’) and the intertextuality of the talk (Fairclough 1992, 272). For example, one teacher offered the following general suggestion for practice: ‘I always ask the students to reflect with me because I want them to have their own opinions.’ The way in which the teacher promoted reflection simultaneously made possible intertextuality, where viewpoints can cross each other, such as quotations and allusions from a variety of discourses. The latter may include the complexity of governance expectations and disciplinary knowledge in relation to the mandates of school leadership preparation. This is how we employed discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992).

Several strategies, specifically those related to theoretical stances, data collection methods, and analysis, were used to ensure the study’s credibility in terms of reliability, validity and analytical generalisations. Regarding ‘the fit between what the research records as data and what occurred in the natural research settings’ (Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2018, 149), the analysis was grounded in video data from the empirical setting and the artefacts, as well as the audio recordings of the interviews (Silverman 2010). To prove that the strategies and methods chosen for the analysis were appropriate and that the conclusions were convincing (Brinkman and Kvale 2012; Silverman 2010), a theoretical approach meant to illuminate policy engagements was employed. The study cannot be generalised in a classic way, but it does allow analytical generalisations in terms of being relevant to similar situations (Brinkman and Kvale 2012) – that is, to teaching circumstances in other HEIs.

The current study was initiated, owned and funded by a university in Norway. The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research approved the overall study (project number 48550). The research project was approved by the programme leaders at both universities. did not involve research collaboration between Norway and the United States (US), but it had cases from the two countries. Relevant ethical guidelines were followed, including written informed consent from all the participants in both cases (i.e. programme leaders, teachers and students). The consent form met the criteria of being voluntary, specific and informed, unambiguous and given through active action, documentable, and equally easy to opt-in as to opt-out.

Analysis and Results

In this section, we present the findings related to RQ1 in order to illustrate university teachers’ engagement with policy work.

Policy work engagements in case 1 (Norway)

The content analysis of the programme description and the PPP in Case 1 revealed that the students were supposed to learn about national and international educational research and different research traditions. They were expected to undertake a critical review of various sources and analyse data in the context of theory, as well as to be able to explore and discuss their own practices. In the course programme, the unit was about governance. In terms of goals, the students were supposed to learn more about educational policy, school leadership, legal issues and organisational features, as well as be capable of reading and interpreting documents and understanding the structures and cultures of organisations. We observed Kate when she was presenting the goals, content, study literature, assignments and approaches on the first day of the unit.

In the interview, Kate explained that, when she became responsible for the course as a course leader, she had to follow what was already planned for that year’s class (i.e. the course description, semester plan and literature list). She also explained in the interview that in the course being observed she had removed parts of the previous years’ content that she did not want to keep according to what she thought the students needed to know about. She explained, ‘We have several university teachers with important expertise [in the programme], but we must put the pieces together in a way that works well for the students (…). It [the course] worked better when I was responsible for the whole course from the beginning.’ This quotation shows that Kate acknowledged both the expertise of her colleagues and the need to take responsibility for the course. In her narrative about her programme leadership, she engaged as an entrepreneur when advocating for the specific changes needed for a coherent course. Her words also indicate that there were underlying tensions between Kate’s and her colleagues’ perceptions of what content should be included. The choice to revise the literature list and semester plan was part of her engagement as a translator working to translate these elements into her teaching practice.

The video recordings revealed that, on day three, Kate said to the students that she was going to explain how national education is influenced by global trends. Though she underpinned that global trends are not necessarily negative. She urged the students to be critical: ‘Please adopt a critical meta-perspective to justify what it [global trends] are good for and what it is not good for. What should we be concerned about? What should we be aware of?’ She encouraged the students to start by thinking about how international, large-scale investigations establish the premises for our understanding of quality in education. In this situation, Kate engaged as a narrator, urging the students to be critical.

The video recording of the teaching practice and the analysis of the semester plan and syllabus revealed that considerable time was devoted to national and international policy trends in governance. Kate explained the following:

Midway through last year, I was able to adjust [the content], which perhaps was more in line with current trends in how municipalities and counties are governed. A new report on this issue was launched, and we created a new seminar day [in the programme] about knowledge of various kinds of tests and what to be aware of.

This quotation reveals that Kate engaged as a translator to clarify the policy situation. She also engaged as a transactor, ensuring that the programme paid attention to new policy trends.

The video data showed that significant time was invested in contextualising national trends as part of international trends in governance. In the interview, Kate discussed the importance of introducing the students to how international trends and institutions influence national changes in educational policies: ‘We had a four-hour introduction to the topic of governance: what governance is about, what kind of instruments are available [and] what are the important changes in governance in Norway nationally (…).’ Kate continued, ‘Many school leaders do not have no idea why there is a national quality assurance system in Norway.’ Thus, she decided to focus more on the history of the national quality assurance system.

The video recordings also revealed that Kate concentrated on transnational institutions, such as the OECD. She explained the following:

We were also more attentive to how we are influenced by the OECD (…), why this has come about, and what were the arguments, not least about the educational policy guidelines and initiatives (…). We discussed the problematic aspects and dilemmas (…). It is important that they [the students] understand the system they are a part of so that they can act strategically and comprehend the trends and signals if they disagree with it and want to argue against it.

The logic of Kate’s reasoning was that knowing the role of international institutions, such as the OECD, would allow school leaders to understand how international educational policies affect their practices. Hence, she engaged as an entrepreneur, advocating for specific changes to the course content regarding the influence that national and international governance trends have on students and how students can also impact these trends. She expressed her discomfort with certain policies and shared her counter-discourses concerning them. Therefore, she also engaged as a critic.

The analysis of the videos showed that Kate introduced several analytical models during the course. She challenged the students to use a specific model to examine how they were governed in their daily practices. This model took the form of a stereo equaliser. It allowed the investigation of various modes and degrees of governance in the students’ practices. When asked about her experience of introducing the model, Kate made her goal explicit: to be critical of models in general. She explained that, although models can be used to consider whether various modes of governance are justifiable, they cannot be employed to analyse the interplay of different governance forms. In this case, Kate engaged as a critic of models and practice analyses.

Policy work engagements in case 2 (California)

In this case, the structure and content of the programme were visible in a detailed rubric totalling 90 pages. This document was based on previous evaluations. The content was directed at the development of effective leadership through the fostering of self-awareness and the engagement with processes of change and assessment that included attention to race, class, equity and students’ learning. Concepts such as ‘transformations,’ ‘agency,’ ‘attitudes,’ ‘values,’ ‘visions’ and ‘resiliency’ were recurrent in the document. Furthermore, the syllabus addressed the issue of how accountability policies can advance or hinder the work of creating socially just schools by facilitating teachers to think like leaders.

In the interview, Susan stated that she had not been involved in the development of the 90-page rubric; however, she had written her own syllabus of nine pages. The video recordings showed that Susan presented the syllabus to her students. In it, she referred to the programme’s rubric and listed some bullet points that were relevant to her course. The syllabus also provided information about the purpose, objectives and content of the course, the literature to be read in advance, and the content of each seminar, as well as information about attendance and assignments. Susan described the relationship between the syllabus and the rubric as follows:

I don’t want [the students] to reduce their work to an extremely detailed rubric. [The syllabus] can be the document that really articulates the purpose of this collective learning activity that we are sharing for weeks – whatever that is – and I tried to state this in a simple way in [my] syllabus.

Susan thought that the detailed rubric for the programme was not valuable for her teaching. The quotation above indicates that she engaged as a critic in relation to this matter by expressing discomfort with the policy of using rubrics. Thus, she made the decision to simplify the syllabus. The situation also reflects her engagement as an entrepreneur who advocated against reducing students’ work to the demands of a detailed rubric.

The syllabus written by Susan revealed that the title¹¹ of the US programme was general, but the subtitle was more specific. In the interview, Susan explained that ‘certain classes are labelled in certain ways because there are certain types of courses that need to exist.’ She further stated that ‘faculty members, now more than ever, are expected and required to generate revenue to support their departments and programmes.’ In other words, Susan engaged as a transactor to secure funds for the education of school leaders. She used the noun ‘mission creep’ with regard to this matter: ‘[Mission creep is] where you slowly move away from your original goals. I can see us doing that very quickly because we are chasing philanthropic dollars to keep our doors open and generate enough revenue for other parts of the department.’ She also engaged as a critic of the situation by stating that faculty members had to ‘[chase] philanthropic dollars,’ which, according to her, changed the goals and the intended outcome of the teaching practice. Susan also explained that she translated (as a translator) these expectations into her teaching practice by introducing alternative literature:

I just go to the literature on school or foreign policy and less to the school literature on leadership. What is important for my class is to help the students be exposed to the larger trends in education right now, specifically around policies that are not always apparent when you are inside a classroom, which a lot of the leadership literature is lacking (…). I want [the students] to think about these other issues and how they are going to work as leaders amid these other trends. To me, understanding the other trends is much more important than sitting down and saying what leaders should do and, through that, how they should practise leadership according to the literature. I do not find that useful at all.

The quotation above shows that Susan negotiated and interpreted trends in (external) policy demands when designing her local teaching practice. She legitimised her involvement with teaching practices in her course and argued for prioritising specific issues through engagement as an entrepreneur. She created a narrative that advocated for specific changes to support her ideas of exposing the students to greater trends and linking these to their practices while engaging as a critic of what was useful for the students. By engaging as a critic, Susan also took the opportunity to omit parts of the syllabus that she did not approve of.

In this case, the university teacher systematically introduced contrasting sources (two or three pieces of literature), which was not observed in Case 1. The students were challenged to unpack and compare the authors’ positions, views and arguments, as well as the sources backing them up. Susan appeared to engage as a translator when translating and enacting policies through her practice; she did so by providing material tools (handouts and contrasting sources) to promote the students’ critical involvement in various activities. She stated, ‘The longer the students are in certain positions, the more they hear the same perspectives. What I think is important for them at university is the opportunity to explore other views.’ This excerpt suggests that university teachers engage as critics who involve students in broader and more critical conceptualisations of school leadership, policy intentions and governance at the micro-policy level.

Discussion

In both Case 1 and Case 2, the university teachers engaged as entrepreneurs, translators, transactors and critics when interpreting and translating policy intentions into teaching designs and practices. This overall finding demonstrates that there were similarities regarding the teachers’ engagement with policy work. The fact that we did not identify engagements as narrators, enthusiasts and receivers may be because we did not observe the teachers in collegial settings.

In both cases, the university teachers were responsible for and engaged in developing concrete plans for the courses they led. This may be conceptualised as design for learning, which Goodyear (2015) connected to pre-active teaching. As Tables 1 and 2 show, the programmes’ policies were rendered into several policy texts that were available in physical and digital forms. The plans that guided the teaching were short – the plan for the semester (Case 1) and the syllabus (Case 2). These elements were only five pages long each and had been developed by the teachers. However, the semester plan in Case 1 was an operationalisation of a course description of four pages approved by the programme’s committee; in contrast, the syllabus in Case 2 was an operationalisation of a highly detailed rubric of 90 pages. In the interviews, the university teachers, who were also course leaders, referred to several changes they had made as entrepreneurs in accordance with professional discretion. In Case 1, Kate focused on obtaining a coherent course and changing the content of the course to better relate to the international context. In Case 2, Susan engaged as an entrepreneur to advocate for specific changes in order to avoid reducing the students’ work to the demands of a very precise rubric.

Both teachers engaged as translators. In Case 1, Kate rendered policy texts (i.e. programme and course descriptions) into a semester plan; in Case 2, Susan translated a detailed rubric into a syllabus. They also modified teaching practices to increase student involvement in the courses. These processes reveal micro-political decisions by which the university teachers took specific actions to influence the programme content, knowledge basis (Ottesen 2016) and structure. They did so to build a stronger connection between theory and practice (Blase and Anderson 1995; Taylor, Cordeiro, and Chrispeels 2009) and to maintain the consistency (Prøitz, Wittek, and de Lange 2020) as well as the coherence (Grossman et al. 2008) of the programmes, thus including ideas for learning. This reflects the university lecturers’ professional autonomy in relation to the design of teaching; indeed, the participants translated and interpreted the overall goals of the courses into teaching practices while trying to break away from traditional instruction (see Prøitz, Wittek, and de Lange 2020). For many years, ‘academic autonomy’ has been a watchword in academia. The teachers’ determination of the students’ needs and their translations of said needs into teaching practices indicate that policy work (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012) was taking place because the instructors made efforts to achieve and enact the internal purposes of the programmes. The translations also extended the specificity of the policy context. As the analysis of the policy texts and teaching tools revealed, in Case 1, the students were supposed to gain insights into national and international educational research; this was apparent in the teacher’s focus on international trends in governance and the national implications that such trends may have (see Altrichter and Salzgeber 2000; Ball 1994). The international dimension was not equally clear in Case 2. One explanation for this is the extensive body of research on educational leadership in the US, which contrasts with the situation in Norway, where this literature is very limited. The evidence for this claim can be found in Hallinger and Kovačević’s (2019) bibliometric review, which found that, between 1960 and 2018, the geographical distribution of this kind of research was dominated by the US, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Both university teachers engaged as critics. In Case 2, Susan’s explanation of the way courses are named indicates that the programme was influenced by economic forces and that there was a need to generate revenue for it. This is not a new phenomenon. Programme leaders may serve in influential academic leadership roles (Milburn 2010) because they have a significant impact on the quality of student learning and the innovation aspects of the courses. Since the 1980s, in the US, many university providers have been offering programmes to educate school leaders (Jensen 2016), which has led scholars to focus on the economic contexts that influence schooling in general and the programmes educating school leaders in particular (Carpenter, Paredes Scribner, and Lindle 2017). Therefore, US university teachers must serve both the university and other stakeholders; when it comes to their role, doing so may be demanding and may generate conflicts. The data from Norway do not indicate similar trends. In this country, education has been perceived as a public good (Møller 2016), which makes it possible to focus on the design and implementation of teaching practices rather than on ‘chasing philanthropic dollars.’ However, this approach has been under pressure since the 2000s, when HEIs started to be expected to compete in order to attract contracts with external funders (Møller 2016).

Conclusion

The present article examined policy work in teaching practices in HEIs and identified the implications of this work for practice and research. We selected cases from a low-stakes testing context (Norway, Case 1) and a high-stakes testing context (the US, Case 2). Textual materials and video observations from teaching practices constituted the supporting data, while contextual interviews with university teachers who were also course leaders constituted the main data. We analysed and illustrated said teachers’ engagements with policy work in HEIs, as well as their interpretations and translations of policy intentions into teaching designs and practices.

Our findings suggested that the two university teachers we studied engaged as entrepreneurs, translators, transactors and critics. They used their professional discretion and experiences when interpreting and translating policy intentions into teaching designs and practices.

With regard to the study’s strengths, the university lecturers’ and their students’ self-reports were contextualised with video observations and the diverse textual materials that were used in the teaching practices. This is important because what people say may differ from what they do. As there are no linear relationships between policy initiatives and enactments, more contextualised interviews based on observations are needed in the future. The limitation of our study was the use of only two cases.

Policy work occurs in a university as an institution and in lecturers’ interactions with the external environment, where new forms of governance have emerged in recent years. It is not surprising that highly educated university teachers enact education policy demands differently compared to policy-makers. Educational practices will always be permeated by policies. However, individual interpretations and translations into teaching designs and practices should be discussed across programmes and courses by staff members and students, not least to obtain coherence across courses and cohorts. There is also a need to pay more attention to engagements in local policy work in higher education courses in the context of national and global trends, as such engagements may influence situated teaching practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ruth Jensen

Ruth Jensen is Professor (PhD) at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo. Jensen’s main research interests are within educational leadership, school leadership development, processes of policy and change, school-university partnerships, qualitative methodology.

Ann Elisabeth Gunnulfsen

Ann Elisabeth Gunnulfsen (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo. Gunnulfsen's main interests are within the perspectives of educational leadership, educational policy and change, governance and accountability and curriculum studies.

Notes

1 ‘The education of school leaders’ refers to the qualification of students who are aspiring to be or are practising school leaders.

2 ‘School leader’ refers to the position of head teacher/principal or assistant head teacher/principal.

3 ‘Administrative leaders’ refers to administrative staff at the department level who may follow the administrative regulations of the programs.

4 ‘Program leaders’ refers to those responsible for pedagogical issues, such as course content, curricula, assignments and exams.

5 ‘Course leaders’ refers to leaders who are responsible for a specific course on offer.

6 ‘University teachers’ refers to those who teach courses. These individuals may simultaneously be course leaders and/or program leaders.

7 The term ‘teaching practices’ is used in the plural here. It refers to the practice of teaching, i.e. how it unfolds in the cases under examination and how it is experienced. We do not distinguish between the here-and-now praxis and recurring practices.

8 Because the sizes of the two contexts differed, we refer to California when referring to the United States case.

9 To enrol in the program, the students needed to have at least two years of experience in educational institutions.

10 This equipment was lent out by the Teaching Learning Video lab

11 The title and subtitle are not provided to maintain anonymity.

12 Kate is a pseudonym.

13 Susan is a pseudonym.