How education policy is made meaningful – a narrative exploration of how teachers show autonomy in the development of teaching and learning

ABSTRACT

This study addresses how the autonomy of teachers in higher education, in relation to education policy and reform, can be understood. By taking a narrative-in-action approach, we studied health profession teachers’ activities and reasoning within their ongoing practice during one year. The findings show how the teachers created their own policies and in what way these policies became meaningful. As teachers in this study continuously made changes, the joint creation of policies contributed to their sense of togetherness and the re-building of a community of practice. In parallel, they increased the evidence-based standards related to their discipline and experienced a shift in perspective concerning teaching and learning. The importance of their jointly made policies can be explained by how they learned a student-learning view together, and built on their own ideas of what educational matters needed to be developed. At the same time, their activities and reasoning mirror ‘a debated but yet prevailing view’ on the discourse of quality and a number of ideals thereof such as transparency and standardisation, effective teaching and increased academisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic development
• community of practice
• narrative
• policy
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the teachers who participated and shared their ongoing negotiations and stories. We also thank colleagues at the Centre for Learning and Knowledge for valuable comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stockholm County Council [grant number SLL 20110191].