Facilitators in ambivalence

ABSTRACT

This is part of a larger ethnographical study concerning how school development in a local educational context sets cultural and social life in motion. The main data in this article consists of semi-structural interviews with teachers (facilitators) who have the responsibility of carrying out a project about formative assessment in upper secondary schools in the south of Sweden. The focus of the study is how the teachers make meaning of their position as facilitators and leaders, how they handle their fellow teachers’ criticism and resistance, how power transforms professional and human relationships, and how complex and weakly articulated power results in conflicting and ambivalent possibilities for action. From our perspective, the resistance the facilitators meet, although the project makes use of a concept that has proved to be successful, reveals an ambivalent structure where the facilitators have to face contradictory demands from different stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational change
• critical analysis
• facilitators
• ambivalence
• teacher resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mikael R Karlsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3356-9880

Peter Erlandson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0428-0233

Notes

1. It may be worth noting that we use the project only as a backdrop and do not deepen the discussion of whether students benefit from formative assessment or not. This is also the reason why we do not discuss how formative assessment became fairly widespread in countries like Sweden, the UK and the US. Our main focus is how school development puts cultural and social (professional) life in motion.

2. For a more nuanced and critical definition and analysis of formative assessment: see also Taras (2005) and Taras and Davies (2013).

3. In a recently published article, Jönsson, Lundahl, and Holmgren (2015) evaluated the city’s implementation of formative assessment. Besides the fact that this is the same school development our article concerns, our studies are independent. While Jönsson, Lundahl, and Holmgren have a comprehensive and evaluating approach we want to spotlight how this local project affected the teachers who had the responsibility of carrying out its narrative. Whether the project in hand is effective or not, whether the results benefit the students’ learning and whether the project should be considered successful or not, are addressed in Jönsson, Lundahl, and Holmgren’s article.