The chapters of this book study documentation and assessment from three perspectives: considering them as issues of curricula and pedagogy and as tasks of an educator; studying them as negotiations on and about the child; and examining them as actions on and of parents. The book is divided into different sections according to these perspectives. The first section ‘A view on curricula, didaktik and teachers’ includes three chapters. Chapter 2, ‘Assessment and documentation in the ECE curriculum - focus on the Nordic tradition’ discusses the basis of documentation and assessment in early education, the curriculum. Since it focuses on the Nordic curricula, it also illuminates the broader frame that the examinations of the following chapters are embedded in. The Nordic tradition of curriculum design emphasizes children’s performance and defines goals to strive for without specifying the objects of achievement. The other tradition to curricula design presented in the chapter, the Anglo-Saxon tradition, is characterized by the focus on the individual and by detailed formulations of goals to achieve for different age categories. The chapter discusses the contradictory tendencies of de- and re-centralization in the Nordic curricula, evident for example in the regulations and directions concerning documentation and assessment. It also argues that we can recognize a movement towards the Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum design in the Nordic countries. Chapter 3 ‘Different Forms of Documentation and Assessment in ECE’ familiarizes the reader with the documentation practices of Nordic early education at the grass root level. Drawing on a case study of three Swedish preschools, it illuminates the types of documentation tools that are applied in ECE. It proposes that the documentation practices can best be characterized by the term multi-documentation. The examination of the multi-documentation shows how the documentation tools comprise different forms of assessment, ranging from developmental-psychological, narrative and activity oriented assessments to self- and personality assessments. Finally, the chapter raises questions about in what sense the documentation and assessment practices are about empowering, supporting, and strengthening children, parents and professionals and in what sense they can weaken, mislead, and constrain the different actors. The fourth chapter, which ends the first part of the book, ‘Teachers in intensified assessment and documentation practices - a didaktik approach’ builds on the previous chapter and considers documentation and assessment practices and teachers’ role in them from the view of the reflective, Continental approach of didaktik. It approaches documents as co-actors in educational processes on focuses on the following questions regarding it: why (the function), who (subjects/actors), what (the content) and how (the form). The chapter introduces the concept of transformative assessment as a boundary object between different forms and functions of assessment and between micro-, meso- and macro-level actors of assessment and documentation practices. The preschool teachers’ role can be described as trans-actors in the transformative multi-documentation and assessment. The second part of the book, ‘Auditing the child’ with its two chapters will move the focus to the social study of childhood and consider the notions of the child in documentation and assessment from two different starting points. Chapter 5, ‘Documentation and listening to the children’, begins its discussion from a common understanding of child documentation as a means to give children a ‘voice’. By drawing on empirical data from parent-teacher discussions considering children’s responses to specific questions, the chapter problematizes this notion. It argues that despite of its benevolent aims, listening to children through documentation is constrained by and deeply embedded in, institutional and generational practices and assumptions about professionalism in ECE. Consequently, the child’s view can be ‘lost in translation’. Chapter 6, ‘The normal child’, continues the discussion about the notions of the child by inviting the reader to consider how documentation and assessment practices produce normative ideas about the child and how these ideas are intertwined with the social order of the ECE institution. This order both controls and empowers the institutional actors in different ways. The chapter illustrates how the ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’ child is produced in written documentation and in the intertwinement of text and talk. It also illuminates how the assessments and the normative function of documentation are predominantly implicit and actualized, especially, when the child shows ‘resistance’ of the system of ECE or otherwise departs from its expectations. The third part of the book positions ‘Parenthood on focus’ and consists of two chapters. Chapter 7, ‘The governance and pedagogicalization of parents’, highlights the demands on parents in the documentalized practices used to establish collaboration between home and ECE. It considers practices and tools that are used to involve parents in the assessment and documentation of their child and the family. Through them, the parents are expected to embrace the ideas and discourses of the ECE institution. Furthermore, the documentalized practices yield unspoken expectations about how the parents should support their child in lifelong learning and how they can meet the institutional norms of good parenting. Chapter 8, ‘Parenthood between offline and online – about assessment and documentation’ draws on a ‘netnographic’ research on what parents write about assessment and documentation of children on Internet sites. In the discussions parents are free from the institutional constraints that are evident, for example, in parent-teacher meetings. The chapter considers whose interests seem to be involved in the discussions and who is assessing whom. Moreover, it considers in what ways the discussions can be seen both as empowering and constraining parenthood. The final chapter, ‘Conclusion: Dilemmas of documentation’, ties together the key points of the preceding chapters by discussing the ‘junction’ of discourses and contradictory tendencies that are embedded in the assessment and documentation practices of Nordic ECE, regarding children, parents, and professionals. The chapter illuminates the different fields of the contradictory discourses by a multi-dimensional model of the steering of assessment and documentation and proposes the concept of ‘documentalized childhood’ as capturing the function of the steering in the transnational context of contemporary ECE.  

In the light of some recent transformations in higher education, a moral governance of university teachers is starting to emerge, suggesting a decrease of professional autonomy. By drawing on the idea of Gilles Deleuze’s ‘clinical analysis’, the aim of this article is to re-problematize the increasingly common moral image of students’ problems in the light of these recent developments in higher education. The first part of the article focuses on students’ victimization, which is followed by an analysis of the rhetoric and practice of transparency. The third part investigates the relationship between widening participation and the entry of the market model in higher education. The findings suggest that university teachers could benefit from applying a holistic, self-reflective perspective – as a contrast to many policymakers’ reductive individual perception. This perspective enables two practices: (1) the critical ethos concerned with the limits and potentials of professional identity and (2) the political mobilization of university teachers as a profession.

Today anthropologists seem to be increasingly studying phenomena in their own societies. Many have a focus on policies in organizations and an interest in explicating cultural phenomena constituted by power and governance. Consequently, a recent interest has emerged in Michel Foucault's philosophy, especially as an inspiration for ethnographic analysis. However, this type of inquiry is problematic, because the Foucauldian perspective contributes to a pre-established idea of social reality, hence distorting essential aspects of the process of discovery. This article aims to provide an alternative to recent trends in Foucauldian-inspired analysis by showing how Eric Wolf's anthropological project can contribute to a more discovery-oriented ethnography. Wolf's concept formation of structural power, tactical power, chain of signification and cultural brokers is closely examined in relation to studying organizational phenomena. In particular, an analysis based upon Wolf's concept can be useful for an increased understanding of policy processes in the field of higher education.

The focus of this article is on changes of epistemic content in evaluating and controlling teaching at universities. Methodologically, in this study, we integrate macro-historical-political configurations with contemporary micro-social situations in contrast to a discursive-philosophical orientation. We strive for integration between historical processes and social practices. From the theoretical point of departure in the concept of epistemic drift, we want to investigate the changes and ambivalences that are the consequences when epistemic criteria developed in one social jurisdiction (research on teaching and learning in the 1970s and 1980s) are used in another social setting (teaching and learning in higher education, or TLHE, in the 2010s). The epistemic content discussed here is the qualitative turn of teaching and learning in the 1970 s and 1980s, a turn that paved the way for the conceptualization of constructive alignment (CA) later in the 1990s, the concept that is the object of analysis. As the text moves on, it will be shown how CA gradually merge with a managerial form of learning outcome, in various policy contexts on European, national (Sweden) and university levels. We describe how CA became institutionalized as the most common pedagogical model in Swedish TLHE courses. Against this background of historical processes – the theoretical pedagogical foundation of CA, Bologna policies in Europe and Swedish higher education policies and national institutionalization of CA – we illustrate ethnographically how CA is received in local, social situations.

Talking about teachers as ´professionals´ has become commonplace within teacher education, education policies and in everyday discourse. However, the meaning ascribed to the concept of teacher professionalism in these different contexts is often not made explicit. What does it really imply for teachers to be ´professionals´ and how are we to make sense of the idea of professionalism when applied to teaching? In Sweden, a result of the introduction of the idea of teachers as professionals has been that the teacher unions have adopted an agenda of teacher professionalization as their overall policy objective. However, the professional projects of the two Swedish unions are fundamentally different concerning what is to constitute the knowledgebase of a teaching profession. The largest union, The Swedish Teachers Union, is strongly in favor of a view emphasizing the idea of a professional knowledgebase common for all teachers, grounded in the discipline of didactics. The other union, The National Union of Teachers, however, rejects such claims and argues that the only knowledgebase viable for a teaching profession must depart from the subject discipline taught by the teacher in question. Professionalism is, in itself, a contested concept. Hanlon (1998, 51) has argued that the classic version of social welfare professionalism is replaced in contemporary western societies by a kind of ‘commercialized professionalism’, aimed ‘to make professionals accountable and enforce financial and managerial discipline upon them’, resulting in a situation where professional success is measured in terms of profitability and effectiveness and not in terms of serving citizens. The view of teacher professionalism inherent in this political discourse is thereby centered on a particular discourse of ‘good teaching’, what Moore (2004) refers to as ‘the competent craftsperson’. This is a kind of teacher that works effectively with his/her ‘raw material’ in order to produce students whose knowledge can be easily evaluated, thereby also judging the technical skills of the craftsperson in question. Viewing teaching in this rather instrumental manner has been severely criticized within educational research, not least because it hides fundamental aspects of what it is to be a teacher, not least in relation to questions of ethics. From a more philosophical point of departure, Maxwell (2014), using metaphor theory, argues that speaking of teachers as professionals constitutes a metaphor that restricts our view of certain aspects of teaching while highlighting others. First, a professional view of teaching is unable to account for the socio-moral dimension of the occupation, resulting from the close and sustained interpersonal contacts that constitute a fundamental part of teachers’ work. Second, it hides the fact that teachers are accountable to multiple parties, such as children, parents, colleagues, taxpayers, governments etc., placing competing demands on them. It is the intention of this paper to expand on the analysis of how Sweden’s teacher unions define the concept of ‘teacher professionalism’ and how they use it in order to promote their policy priorities. In particular, it will discuss the implications this may have for how teaching is understood, within Swedish educational policy debates, as a ‘professional’ occupation. Is it possible to overcome the seemingly persistent divide between basing teacher professionalism on some kind of pedagogical technology or in the academic traditions of already existing subject disciplines? How are we to account for the ethical and relational dimensions of teaching in relation to the rather instrumental way that teacher professionalism is constituted within contemporary PISA-driven educational policymaking? Or should we, consequently, perhaps give up on the idea of teachers as professionals all together?

The aim of the study was to analyze addiction care staff (N=447) perceptions of needs for psychosocial and medical treatment, and possibilities for self-change in relation to fictitious cases. By means of a factorial survey and multilevel analysis, the importance of user, respondent and work characteristics were estimated, with a particular focus on the comparison between healthcare staff and social services staff. Healthcare staff were more skeptical than social services staff towards self-change and assessed the need for medical treatment to be greater. Despite the ongoing medicalisation of Swedish addiction care, psychosocial interventions were still seen as a central part of treatment by both groups. The importance of user characteristics for the assessments was surprisingly similar across the two groups of staff, suggesting that staff perceptions are analogous to the governing images of substance use and treatment needs that prevail in society.