Research topic/aim

The fixation around documentation, evaluation, measurability, and efficiency characterizes our time where neoliberalism and new public management is a self-evident condition, a social and political order that affects all forms of education. As actors within the educational system, teacher educators and students are facing various dilemmas as a result of this prevailing order which affect the professional freedom of action and the ability to influence the content and form of the education which has consequences for which kind of education that is possible. A critically informed starting point is used to stress the need for understanding the culture within higher education and the educators’ and students’ conditions. This paper is part of a doctoral project aiming to describe, understand, and problematize preschool teacher educators' collegial constructions of the student, and the paper aims to understand how student constructions are made and what they relate to using Habermas’ concepts of instrumental, strategic and communicative action.

Theoretical framework

Understanding the subjects as actors within the system of education is self-evident when using Habermas’ theoretical perspective. Habermas' (1984;1987) theoretical concepts of the three types of action, instrumental, strategic, and communicative action, is used to understand how the educators are constructing the student and what these constructions are related to. Instrumental action refers to a subject-object-focused action while strategic action refers to a social (subjectsubject), goal-oriented action to achieve success and benefit. Communicative action, in turn, relates to a mutual, intersubjective understanding and deliberation without any utility-oriented bias. In the analysis the types of action are used trying to understand how and in relation to what educators construct the student, and the characteristics of the different student constructions related to the three types of action.

Methodological design

The analysis is based on material from a five-month-long critical ethnographic fieldwork containing observations of collegial contexts, including various program-related meetings, offices and staffroom, formal and informal conversations with educators, as well as notes from group discussions among educators.

Expected conclusions/findings

Preliminary results suggest that the formation of various student constructions occurs predominantly through strategic action rather than communicative action. An illustrative example is the construction of the student as non-academic, often arising from the participants’ own constrained working conditions. Acceptable working conditions are expressed to be of greater importance to protect than the possible pedagogical ideals, ideals which, in practice, seem challenging to uphold given the educators assigned, course-specific hours. The educators are however reflecting on the fact that this construction may be too destructive, and they express a desire to act differently and construct alternative images of the student. However, the current circumstances where deadlines, learning objectives and working conditions play a significant role for their actions, lead them to believe that they lack sufficient room for action and resources to act in a manner they consider more ideal and pedagogically motivated. These results points at interesting tensions within the professional work of academic educators.

Relevance to Nordic educational research

This presentation contributes to the comprehension and discussion of educators within teacher education in Sweden, serving as a crucial part of the Nordic higher education landscape.