In this issue of NordSTEP, we are proud to present five research articles and one discussion article for the invited articles section. In 2017, NordSTEP published an interview with John Hattie by Hanne Knudsen. The interview raised a lot of interest, as well as some critical reactions. One of the pillars of NordSTEP is to encourage researchers to engage in scientific debate, to question educational trends and developments and to scrutinize high impact concepts and issues within the field of education. As such the editorial board of NordSTEP invited one on the respondents, Lars Qvortrup to write a discussion article. Consequently, in this issue we are pleased to present such a discussion article by Qvortrup. In the article, he discusses the use of Hattie´s work in a Danish context leading towards what he considers to be a misreading of Hattie, and whether a common misunderstanding developed among Danish education researchers can explain this reading. Qvortrup highligts that a particular, sometimes incorrect, interpretation gains momentum, e.g. because it supports political or ideological interests, and gradually it emerges from being an opinion to becoming a broadly accepted fact. In the article, Qvortrup describes the aim of Visible Learning to be to support teachers’ professional judgement. Further, he emphasizes that one of the contributions of educational research is, as accurate as possible, to identify, which interventions and conditions with the greatest probability will lead to learning and personal development. Among the readings of Hattie is to provide teachers with what works best recipes, but Qvortrup underlines that the aim is to provide teachers with hypotheses for intelligent problem-solving.
The selection of research articles is from a variety of countries (Germany, Sweden, Denmark, China and Finland) and covers educational levels from early childhood education to higher education. In his study, Jakob Billmayer has observed and compared aspects of space and time in German and Swedish classrooms to characterize differences and similarities in classrooms and lessons in different contexts. The type of classroom found in Germany is characterized by fixed boundaries and frameworks, while boundaries are less clear in the type of classroom found in the Swedish material. Søren Hornskov, Camilla Nørgaard and Pernille Hansen have studied the new forms of knowledge available to school leadership, such as performance data and survey-based data, and how they raise expectations for leaders to make relevant use of these knowledge resources. The article presents a study of how school leadership practices can be researched as an interplay between quality standards emerging from abstracted knowledge resources such as theory and strategy, and local knowledge work. They find that the task of making sense of the flow of knowledge and new standards becomes a complex, comprehensive and time-consuming part of practical leadership. In her article, Barbara Schulte takes stock of the constraints and the potential for innovation in Chinese higher education in terms of the underlying school system, exam and recruitment policies, the (re-)organization of universities, as well as the universities’ and science system’s performance according to indicators of innovation. The article identifies four ‘Chinese innovation dilemmas’ of: educational policies and developments that are to spur innovation but run counter to existing structures and practices of educational, social and political governance: ideological control versus creativity; state planning versus grassroots innovation; old-boy networks versus anti-corruption; and exam-based student recruitment versus flexible recruitment. Jonathan Lilliedahl and Stephan Rapp reports on a study of the recent curriculum reform of the Swedish upper-secondary school, Gy11 and how aesthetics that were not made compulsory subjects by this reform, all students have a statutory entitlement to be offered a minimum of one course in an aesthetics subject. The findings indicate that while principals have generally organized aesthetics courses, students seldom choose this kind of educational content. Instead, students’ selection is ruled by indirect methods of manipulation. In their article on local early childhood education and care (ECEC), Maiju Paananen, Katja Repo, Petteri Eerola and Maarit Alasuutari analyse the equality discourses of policymakers in Finland. They find that the way in which equality and social justice is conceptualized depends on whether the subjects of equality are adults, children at the border of an institutional setting or children within the ECEC institution.
The articles of this issue are a good illustration of the variety and complexity of the educational policy field and by that it also highlights the importance of scientific and scholarly debate for a sound development of education policy within a contested terrain.