**Policy Implications of Research in Education 15**

Tine S. Prøitz Petter Aasen Wieland Wermke *Editors*

# From Education Policy to Education Practice

Unpacking the Nexus

# **Policy Implications of Research in Education**

Volume 15

### **Series Editor**

Paul W. Miller, Institute for Educational & Social Equity, London, UK

#### **Editorial Board Members**

Prof. Helen Gunter, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Prof. Stephan Huber, Institute for the Management and Economics, University of Teacher Education Central, Zug, Zug, Switzerland Prof. Jonathan Jansen, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa Prof. Karen Seashore Louis, Educational Policy and Admin, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA Dr. Guri Skedsmo, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Prof. Allan Walker, Ctr, c/o Anthon Chu Yan Kit, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong

In education, as in other felds, there are often signifcant gaps between research knowledge and current policy and practice. While there are many reasons for this gap, one that stands out is that policy-makers and practitioners may simply not know about important research fndings because these fndings are not published in forums aimed at them. Another reason is that policy-makers and educational authorities may tend to apply only those fndings that agree with and legitimate their preferred policies. Yet we hear often the mantra that policy and practice should be research based and informed by evidence. This claim relates to the interplay between the social realities of science, politics and educational practice and draws attention to knowledge production and application, processes of implementation, change and innovation. However, there are often different interests involved, different knowledge domains, political and economic interests, and legitimate questions can be raised with regard to what counts as 'research', what counts as 'evidence', who should defne it, what are their implications for policy, and what kind of actions should consequently be taken to improve education for children and youth.

Please contact Astrid Noordermeer at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>if you wish to discuss a book proposal.

Tine S. Prøitz • Petter Aasen • Wieland Wermke Editors

# From Education Policy to Education Practice

Unpacking the Nexus

*Editors* Tine S. Prøitz University of South-Eastern Norway Vestfold, Norway

Wieland Wermke Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

Petter Aasen University of South-Eastern Norway Vestfold, Norway

ISSN 2543-0289 ISSN 2543-0297 (electronic) Policy Implications of Research in Education ISBN 978-3-031-36969-8 ISBN 978-3-031-36970-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36970-4

This work was supported by University of South-Eastern Norway

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023 . This is an Open access publication.

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# **Preface**

The chapters in this book are the results of several research projects and conceptual refections presented over the last couple of years focusing on relationships between education policy and education practice. The authors of the book have been brought together by a common interest in questions on how, when and where policy intersect with practice in their respective felds and in discussions in seminars such as the annual Åsgårdstrand-seminar at the University of South-Eastern Norway that particularly focus on education policy and practice relationships, and in conferences and seminars at Uppsala University. Central research projects driving the work have been the *LOaPP-Tracing Learning Outcomes in Policy and Practice-project* #254978 and the ongoing *CLASS-Comparisons of Leadership Autonomy in School districts and Schools-project* #315147, both funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

We would like to thank the authors for supporting our ambition to collect all the thought-provoking contributions from the seminars in this book. We hope the book will contribute to further developing and expanding our understanding and critical assessment of the education policy and education practice nexus.

# **Contents**

# **Chapter 1 Education Policy and Education Practice Nexuses**

**Tine S. Prøitz , Petter Aasen, and Wieland Wermke**

**Abstract** This introductory chapter addresses the complex interrelations between education policy and education practice developed under new ways of governance. It highlights education nexuses as a concept of its own right and discusses what constitutes the contemporary nexuses in education of today. Based on the cases of education nexuses presented in the volume the chapter summarizes four central characteristics of education nexuses and raise the issue of the need to re-consider how we study education policy and practice in the interface between structure and agency for the future developments in education.

**Keywords** Education policy · Education practice · Nexus · Structure and agency

The overarching idea behind this book is to explore the relationship between education policy and education practice. The translation of policy into practice is complex and addresses several issues, different stakeholders, and radically different connotations. In the literature, we can identify various theories and refections, principally exploring and conceptualizing the complexity of policy formulation and the relationship and connections between policy and practice. We can also detect more operative theories and explorations of the specifc actions dealing with this complexity and attempt to bridge the gap between policy and practice.

Through the contributions of several scholars, the ambition of this edition is to revisit, describe, illuminate, and further develop theoretical positions and empirical approaches that have been on the agenda in various traditions within educational policy studies. This volume contributes with both theoretical and empirical studies to the interplay between policy, educational practice, and the social realities of

T. S. Prøitz (\*) · P. Aasen

University of South-Eastern Norway, Vestfold, Norway e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
W. Wermke Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023

T. S. Prøitz et al. (eds.), *From Education Policy to Education Practice*, Policy Implications of Research in Education 15, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36970-4\_1

science, drawing attention to knowledge production and application and the processes of implementation, change, and innovation. As such, the various book chapters not only connect well with the book series *Policy Implications of Research in Education* but also offer studies on and discuss the very relationships between policy and practice and research. The book also offers insights into more critical aspects concerning both the understanding of such relationships and policy, practice, and research relationships, focusing on the varied perspectives of these connections involving a range of interests and knowledge domains in different settings.

To stress the importance of these relationships between policy and practice, we put forward a particular term, nexus, which means "connection" or "link."1 We argue that this link holds an analytical place of its own right, and this is the edition's contribution to the scholarship: focusing on the very relation between policy and practice. This involves an effort of identifying and scrutinizing the nexuses where policy and practice intersect, meet, and integrate but also collide, confict, or contradict.

# **Central Concepts and Understandings**

The aim of the book is to explore the relationship between education policy and practice from different perspectives and operationalizations to clarify the conceptual and theoretical basis of policy–practice relationships. This requires a presentation of the central concepts for this book. We start with the concepts of education policy and education practice, followed by another central concept for this book and for our understanding of the relationship between policy and practice – the political context. The selection of chapters has been guided by a search for signifcant cases of policy–practice relationships embedded in different educational political contexts, as they can be employed to increase our understanding of the complex nature of these nexuses. An ambition to shed light on the connection between policy and practice in different political contexts follows from this but without being concerned with the prevalence of the described relationship within the various contexts. Through the various chapters, the aim of this volume is to analyze and understand the nexus and the translation of policy into practice as phenomena across the various contexts from the Global North, with cases from the United States, China, Germany, Sweden, Greenland/Denmark, Norway, and Scotland.

In the following of this introductory we provide the reader with some operationalisations of the three central concepts relevant for the volume's contributions: policy, practice, and political context.

**Policy** A policy is typically described as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome(s). Policy refers to the what and why generally adopted by governance bodies within the public and private sectors. A policy can be considered

1See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nexus. Retrieved October 2022.

a statement of intent or a commitment. Policy can further be described as basic principles for the actions of a society or an organization in general or in a certain respect, usually, but not necessarily, laid down in laws or plans.

In the literature, Ball (2021, p. 19) has pointed out how policies, as a semantic and ontological force, play a part in the construction of a "social world of meanings, of problems, causes, and effects, of relationships, of imperatives and inevitabilities," and that by attending to language and rhetorical constructions of education policy, the histories of policies and links across and within policy felds can be studied.

Public policy, according to Rizvi and Lingard (2009), refers to the actions and positions taken by the state. A characteristic of public policy is the involvement of a range of institutions that share authority and collectivity. They underscore that although decisions are central in policy, an individual decision in isolation does not constitute policy; rather, policy "expresses patterns of decisions in the context of other decisions taken by political actors on behalf of state institutions from positions of authority" (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009, p. 4). They have also pointed out that public policies are normative—often express ends and means aiming to steer the actions and behaviors of people (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009).

However, education policy cannot be understood if we limit our interest to decisions that defne ambitions, goals, and legal, fnancial, and pedagogical measures. To understand policy, we also need to focus on disagreements and conficts of interest in the policymaking process and in the implementation of education reforms at the school level. Thus, policymaking processes must also be understood in terms of politics. Politics involves the processes by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, but politics can also be observed in other group interactions and settings, including schools and academic institutions. Politics, in this broader sense, consists of social relations involving authority or power and refers to the regulation of affairs within a political unit and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy. The concept of politics draws our attention to processes that determine "who gets what, when, and how" (Aasen et al., 2014).

**Practice** Education practice is actions developed from the planning and systematization of the dynamics of policymaking processes and education processes to the concrete realization of learning. Thus, practice is a defnite way of dealing with specifc problems in local and timely confgurations. In this volume, we investigate both political and professional education practices. Practice can be investigated by decision-making in certain situations. In the words of Archer (1988), what we empirically observe is always the present, situated historically:

As Markovic expresses it, both "past and future" are living in the present. Whatever human beings do in the present is decisively infuenced by the past and by the future. […] The future is not something that will come later, independently of our will. There are several possible futures and one of them has to be made. (p. xxvi)

What we investigate empirically is also always local (in a very particular space) and possible to observe as a practice. Thus, when we investigate practice in relation to

policy, we string together present, local, practical, and analytical units. Time becomes our analytical device. Each unit conditions the next. It is always the prior development of ideas (from earlier interactions) that conditions the current context of the analyses. While the selection of (national and sectorial) cases become critical, comparisons may contribute to uncovering the different layers of universality and particularity (i.e., what is broadly universal, what is possible to generalize, and what is unique to the given instance and political context).

**Political Context** A political context or polity is the inherent material/structural, cultural, and social settings in which policy and practice are embedded, such as a nation, local communities, or institutions. Political systems of governance and power relations, as well as political thought and behavior, constitute contexts that are crucial both for the design and understanding of both policy and practice.

The foregoing is in line with what Lingard and Rizvi (2020) emphasizes in Dale's (1999) note on the importance of understanding changes in education policy considering broader political and economic shifts. Here, the prominent example of the move from the Keynesian welfare state and bureaucratic structures and rationalities to newer ways of educational governance, where globalization and changing spatialities have become highly central.

Another well-known example of our understanding of political contexts at the nation-state level is Esping-Andersen's (1990) categorization of three types of advanced capitalist welfare state regimes and their impact on policy formation: a social-democratic, a conservative, and a liberal. The concept of welfare state regimes denotes the institutional arrangements, rules, and understandings that guide and shape concurrent social policy decisions, expenditure developments, and problem defnitions. The existence of policy regimes refects the circumstance that shortterm policies, reforms, debates, and decision-making take place within frameworks of historical institutionalization that differ qualitatively between countries (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

The political contextual perspective underlines the importance of understanding nexuses for what they are within their locations. This includes an analysis of the role of the nation-state, local communities, and schools in the context of the changing spatialities and politics associated with growing globalization (Dale, 1999).

The context can further be described by situational or contingency factors, states, or conditions that are associated with the use of certain policy and practice parameters (Mintzberg, 1989). As such, the cases in this book represent various confgurations of context, framing the time and space of both policy and practice and the relations between them.

The purpose of applying cases in research is to shed light on a phenomenon through the study of a particular instance of that phenomenon (Gall et al., 1996). In line with Yin's (2011) work, we apply a case-study approach in this volume as a deliberate choice because we consider contextual conditions "especially important when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident in real life" (Yin, 2011, p. 92). As the case study approach deals with a wide variety of evidence, it addresses a broader range of historical, attitudinal, and behavioral issues.

# **Policy–Practice Relations as Nexuses**

The volume at hand aims to strengthen the perception and interpretation of nexuses within education policy research, particularly for the investigation of complex policy practice relations.

Conceptually, a nexus can be understood differently within education research; it is used in a range of studies covering many different topics. More recently, the concept has become increasingly prominent for describing the challenging area of knowledge translation between research, policy, and practice, as well as in debates on evidence and evidence use in various felds and sectors (see, e.g., Dimmock, 2016; Geschwind & Broström, 2015; de Leeuw et al., 2008; Locke, 2009; Ohi, 2008; Segerholm et al., 2019). The term nexus has been used to describe the ambivalence between perspectives of education traditions in higher education (Simons & Elen, 2007), the challenges in varied types of partnerships in education (Levin, 2003), integration and inclusion issues (Connor & Ferri, 2005), and the theory– practice relationship in teacher education (la Velle, 2019).

A general characteristic in this stream of literature is that the nexus is seldom described in depth; frst and foremost, it represents an idea, a theoretical place, a meeting point, or an intersection where different felds, actor groups, practices, or theoretical constructs are ideally supposed to meet and integrate or where something does not meet, thus creating an area of tension, challenges, and diffculties. As such, the nexus concept is often used to name a situation or arena where different worlds of different kinds ideally should, do, or do not come together.

However, in higher education research, the term teaching–research nexus has a longer tradition (Henkel, 2004; Neumann, 1994; Tight, 20162 ). Neumann (1994), one of the earliest to coin the term, identifed a set of teaching–research nexuses and presented them in a framework for studying these matters. She distinguished between the following three levels of nexus: "-tangible: the transmission of knowledge and skills, -intangible: the transmission of approaches and attitudes to knowledge and -global: the direction given to course offerings by departmental research" (Neumann, 1994, p. 324). According to Neumann (1994), a nexus can exist at each level independently, as well as at several levels, simultaneously. The framework also allows for consideration of the degrees of intensity in the connections between the teaching–research roles. The nexus debate in higher education of today often refers to how, to a larger degree, modern universities seem to separate more strongly between those who teach and those who research as part of the specialization and differentiation of higher education, which contrasts earlier conceptions of what it means to be an academic.

2Tight (2016) describes this in detail in his review article: "By using the term 'research/teaching nexus,' authors are implying that the linkage between research and teaching – as the two major functions of higher education – is close, essential and undeniable. For them, a university is not worthy of the title unless it engages in both teaching and research (for an early discussion, see Flood Page 1972)". (p. 294)

Another and more recent elaboration of the nexus as an analytical and useful concept can be found in policy history studies that emphasize the multisidedness of nexus(es). For example, in how political discourses are moving in time and space, a nexus is defned as "a meeting point of different historical trajectories of discourses, people, action, practices and material objects" (Ihalainen & Saarinen, 2019, p. 6). Here, a nexus is understood as an intersection of discourses in place, interaction order, and historical body—emphasizing both the contingent and intentional relations between material political contexts and historical continuities and different actors and events. Ihalainen and Saarinen (2019) have pointed out how such an approach can help to decide on the method, data material, and analysis, exemplifed by how "the (verbal) debates and the (physical) political activities come together in a parliamentary situation as a nexus …" (p. 504) and provided a tool to, for example, study the challenging micro–macro relations.

Consequently, speaking about relations as a nexus is not new in the feld of education; some researchers have worked more in-depth with the concept than others and have done so more recently. However, so far, we can conclude the following: beyond the semantic meaning of the nexus as a link, a theorization of it as a concept is rather rare. Moreover, the application of "nexuses" in educational scholarship in the feld is rather fragmented. There is apparently potential for the fruitful applicability of the investigation of places where practices or arenas encounter. Drawing on our interest in the relationship between policy and practice, we aim to contribute to a further elaboration by conceptual discussion and empirical examples of the nexus conception.

# **Elaborating on the Nature of Policy–Practice Nexuses**

This volume aims to explain the nature of policy–practice nexuses through empirical and conceptual chapters. Next, we present how the various cases in the chapters contribute to a nexus picture. We explore policy and practice relationships through three dimensions organized in the following sections:

# *Conceptualizations of Nexuses of Education Policy and Education Practice*

As shown earlier in this chapter, the limited literature on education policy and education practice nexuses calls for stronger conceptual clarity and a theoretical basis in the discussions of varied forms of policy–practice relationships, as well as in nexuses where policy and practice are both related and unrelated. Therefore, the contributions selected for the frst section of the book, *Conceptualisations of nexuses of education policy and education practice*, discuss conceptual and theoretical aspects of the policy–practice nexus. The authors investigate agentic work in the classroom, education change, teacher agency in classrooms, education reform and sequencing and conceptions of research use that inform teachers' roles as professionals from conceptual and theoretical positions. Central to all contributions here are conceptual elaborations on the education policy and practice nexus, which also prepare for the two empirical book sections to come.

In the frst chapter of this section, Michael Apple provides a critical examination of examples of agentic work. Each has its basis in successful struggles over knowledge, over what is "legitimate" or offcial understanding, and over the educational mechanisms that make these understandings available. The chapter directs our attention to students as political or epistemological actors and demonstrates the importance of understanding the nature of collective alliance-building and the creation of activist identities to promote change in educational practice. Barbara Schulte, in her chapter, approaches the policy–practice nexus by scrutinizing the relationship between teacher agency and professional autonomy. She questiones the confation of professional autonomy with teacher agency in the research literature. Drawing on the concept of "politics of use" and fndings from feldwork in China, she proposes a framework for conceptualizing autonomy and agency as they operate in and between systems, involving and producing different types of agents. In the next chapter, Wieland Wermke and Eva Forsberg continue with a discussion of the policy and practice nexus by exemplifying a strategy for understanding and examining policy and practice nexuses in relation to education reform trajectories. Education policymaking is an increasingly complex process—for the most part, it is neither linear and rational nor unidirectional. For the sake of understanding these processes, the authors advocate for complexity reduction through analytical distinctions, sequencing, and entity–relationship thinking. In the last chapter in this section, Sølvi Mausethagen and Hege Hermansen examine "research use" as a concept that informs the role of the teaching profession in the policy–research–practice nexus. As a policy construct, "research use" has gained signifcant attention over the past decade. However, the concept, particularly its translation into practice, is often left undefned regarding both the meaning of "research" and the meaning of "use." The authors examine how the specifcation of these terms contributes to producing manifestations of the policy–research–practice nexus.

# *Nexus Formations in Time, Space, and Place*

This next section presents cases that exemplify signifcant policy and practice nexuses in education. As described earlier, nexuses are contextualized in timely and spatial confgurations. Accordingly, Section II, *Nexus formations in time, space, and place,* presents empirical studies that aim to understand structure and agency

complexity in different political contexts. The contributions stress the relational aspects between structure and agency in education grounded in varied approaches and at different times, such as in different cases of curriculum formation, student preparation schemes, and development of teacher professionalism and in supportive local authority, higher education and school partnerships.

The cases are anchored in varied country contexts comparatively and internationally Germany and Norway and the United States of America, Denmark and Greenland, Norway, and Scotland. The chapters also consider different parts of education systems, teacher education in schools and of varied actor groups, including civil servants, students, parents, and headmasters in schools. The topic of time and space for policy–practice relationships are highlighted as important variables for understanding the complex and multilayered nexus between policy and practice in this section, frst brought forward by the reprint of an article by Stefan Hopmann published in 1999. This chapter reminds us of the importance of understanding the contexts of curriculum formation in which various discursive and loosely coupled levels in public education are connected. In relation to the theme of this book, the republishing of this more than 20-year-old article illustrates that research on nexus phenomena is also a cumulative endeavor. Following the aspect of investigating nexuses as cases bound in time and space, the contribution of Simon Holleufer and Christian Ydesen shows how different actors in different arenas of the Danish– Greenlandic education system have struggled to shape and develop nexuses between policy and practice in relation to the pupil selection process in the preparation scheme in 1961. The postcolonial setting of Greenlandic education in the 1960s displays the complexities of education policy formation and the inherent political dimension of policies and practices. The inherent political dimensions in politics and practices in time and space are also studied in Petter Aasen's and Tine S. Prøitz's chapter on how educational policy and reforms have infuenced the development of the teaching profession in Norway. The study presents three analytical policy–practice lenses for the analysis of professional development: policies infuencing the arenas for professional development; the steering, management, and organization of the professional feld; and the content of professional development. The study emphasizes how different knowledge regimes in educational policy and both historical and new forms of differentiation have infuenced the construction of the teaching profession. Another approach for studying teacher education and the development of professionalism is brought forward by the timely study of the developments of the Scottish initial teacher education supportive local authority and higher education school partnerships by Paul Adams. He underscores the importance of agency in professional development, as a key part of professional development and that partnership, subsequently should be reconceptualized as 'existing' in the overlaps 'between' theory and practice.

While this second section has a particular focus on the contextual nature of nexuses, the ambition of the third and fnal section of the volume is to closely explore situations when policy meets practice, as it happens in the professional work of teachers, special educators, or principals.

# *The Complexity of Education Nexus Studies*

The third section of the studies presented in this book highlights, *The complexity of education nexuses,* by bringing forward empirical studies of/on/in defned nexuses. The contributions here are in-depth empirical studies on how the involved actor groups work, interact, and develop in varied and intended policy and practice relationships and nexus contexts. The cases presented go deeper into the nexuses by studying the actions and experiences of individuals in everyday settings of schools, classrooms, administration, and policy, such as special educators in Germany, extracurricular cross-sector partnerships in Norwegian schools, inclusive cultures in policy documents and school practice in Sweden, student group work trajectories in Norwegian classrooms, interactions of students and teachers in oral assessment in schools in Norway, and, fnally, actor roles in research practice partnerships in Swedish municipalities and schools.

This section offers insights into real-life nexuses in which policy and practice both set the premises for and contribute to the developments, and the results illustrate how policy and practice are highly intertwined and complex matters. The contributions further raise consciousness of the issues of how we go about to study the nexuses when going deep into the everyday settings of education, both theoretically and methodologically. The studies display how policy and practice nexuses can be studied in varied ways but also how these studies require comprehensive, rigorous, and highly careful approaches to embrace the elements of both policy and practice.

The study of Torsten Dietze, Lisa Marie Wolf, Vera Moser, and Jan Kuhl shows the responsibility for daily inclusive education is shifted to the individual school, largely to the special needs teachers themselves, who are pushed into the role of fragmentation managers. Jorunn Spord Borgen and Bjørg Oddrun Hallås show how extra-curricular cross-sector partnerships of cultural schoolbag and physical activity health initiatives in Norwegian schools require restructuring of content, how those involved in the cross-sector partnerships negotiate the knowledge basis for extracurricular content, and how practices are infuenced by the context-dependent relationships within the research–policy–practice nexus.

The importance of understanding context in policy practice nexuses of the dayto-day life of schools is further emphasized by Gabriella Höstfält's and Barbro Johansson's study of how regulated support activities are theoretically designed in governance, interpreted in policy documents, and put into practice in the classroom must be understood in the context where they appear to create meaningful content for each actor in the policy and practice nexus of inclusion. Christine R. Stenersen's study highlights the apparent dilemma between national policies of developing student collaboration skills and contemporary education focusing on the measurement of the learning outcomes of individual students. She displays how the political and pedagogical ambitions related to the desired outcomes of student group work contrast with the empirical actualization of authentic student group work.

Following the aspect of interaction between students and teachers, Astrid Camilla Wiig show how oral assessment practices through the organization of social groups go beyond assessing students in terms of assessment criteria or scales. The fndings raise questions about understanding educational policy when certain educational practices seem to be in front of policy uptake in policy and practice nexuses. The very last chapter of the book by Tine S. Prøitz and Ellen Rye brings forward the education policy–practice nexus operationalized in research–practice relationships in education. The study highlights challenges in policy practice nexuses through the identifcation of physical, linguistic, work-related, fnancial, and cultural distances that characterize and separate central actors in education. This chapter nuances previous research on the requirements for research practice partnerships between academia, municipalities, and schools by empirical investigations of what well-functioning partnerships are recognized by.

In sum, this section brings forward an interesting display of how the ambitions and hopes of policy turn out in practice, not necessarily as something completely different or other but mostly adjusted, adapted, and sometimes as rather transformed versions of what was initially intended. The empirical studies presented here thereby add to and extend the policy and practice knowledge base by displaying how policy in practice very often brings unintended consequences—sometimes for the bad and sometimes for the good—and, by that, it also feeds back into the policy practice debate on education and further education development.

# **The Contribution of this Volume**

In this last part of this introductory, we present some overall observations and refections regarding the policy and practice nexus, drawing on the chapters of this book. Our frst observation relates to how all the chapters revisit the structure–agency dualism debated in the 1980s in varied political contexts. A second observation is that studies of education policy and practice raise our awareness of education complexity and bring forward issues of how to handle such complexity in education research. A third observation is how the education policy and practice nexus is to be understood as plural rather than singular; it is contingent and refects knowledge production logics, and valuations.

# *Revisiting the Structure–Agency Dualism*

With the conceptual and empirical work presented in the volume at hand, we have had the ambition to answer the following questions: What is to be explored in a nexus study? What happens in the nexus, and how is the nexus consequently operationalized? Who and what takes part, in what roles or functions, and for what reasons? Asking questions like these will give us answers that relate to both structure and agency and that often evoke questions regarding the limitations of research traditions, theoretical frameworks, and methods in education research and also open both broader and deeper insights into the elements and factors that constitute the education policy and education practice nexus.

A nexus focus in education research does not aim to or necessarily reduce education complexity, but the studies presented in this book display how a nexus can bring attention to both the elements of structure and agency in education research on policy and practice. Accordingly, the structure–agency duality debate in education that occurred in the 1990s is revisited (see, e.g., McFadden, 1995; Shilling, 1992; Willmott, 1999). Education change and reform in the last couple of centuries has called for renewed explorations and insights into the interrelations between policy and practice, as observed in new ways of education governance and governance technologies, with consequences for how education is structured today.

Recent developments in practitioner roles, professionalization in education, and newer expectations of actor involvement, responsibilities, and agency further challenge older perspectives on policy–practitioner relationships in education. Education systems have become more complex, with greater involvement of a range of actors and stronger and more varied types of government infuences (Fuller et al., 2007; Labaree, 1997; Rowan & Miller, 2007; Sun et al., 2013). Consequently, educational organizations encompass more actors, and newer and older structures shape policy and the everyday work of teaching, learning, and leading (Rigby et al., 2016). In addition, globalization has an increasing effect on national policy (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009). Changes in the historical, political, and spatial relations of policy and practice and the different actors involved necessitate renewed and alternative approaches in how we understand policymaking and the study of the interface between education policy and education practice (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014).

# *Understanding and Describing the Complexity of Education Systems*

Policy is often pictured as a linear system in which decisions, directives, and value messages constructed at a higher system level are communicated to the practice levels below to be implemented. Structurally speaking, this image of linearity, where organization, hierarchy, the distribution of responsibilities, and regulation of division of labor are defned, provides conceptual frameworks for our understanding of systems and their predictability. These structures can secure individual rights and societal needs but may also lead to oppression and skewed distribution of societal goods. Furthermore, it has been well established that the relational aspects of those inhabiting the education systems at all levels produce meanings, norms, and values that are dynamic and unstable and that travel between and across the different contexts in multidirectional ways, thereby challenging such a linear understanding of the policy and practice nexus. Research has shown how the actors in schools realize and frame education policies in classrooms through their individual practices (Coburn, 2006). Varied perceptions of policy affect teachers' understanding of education through the systems and procedures supplied by policy (Schulte, 2018; Spillane & Anderson, 2019). Research has also emphasized how certain structural, organizational, and professional issues regarding powerful trends in education direct our attention in very particular ways, for example, toward testing, league tables, numbers and data, accountability, and standardization (Martens et al., 2010; Mintrop, 2018; Ozga et al., 2011).

Other infuential tendencies that further complicate the study of education policy and practice relationships today are the focus on collaboration between policy and practice, in which both the common understandings and knowledge of the feld are characterized as shared, co-developed, and co-constructed (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2022). Governments and universities have introduced initiatives aimed at strengthening relationships among the many actors in education. In a range of countries, we can see variations in such initiatives, for example, in the varied types of partnership agreements between universities and schools, as well as with local authorities and government-initiated funding schemes for both research and development projects that require collaboration between local governments, academia, and practitioners in schools.

These initiatives have interesting potential for the further development of relationships between policy practice and research, but they also represent more complexity through the blurring of structures that traditionally have distributed power and responsibility between policy and practice. How students, teachers, leaders, administrators, and policymakers are framed in such policy and practice relationships and what potential structure and agency tensions can be observed between the various political contexts explored have been central questions for this book.

# *Understanding and Describing Policy and Practice Nexuses in Education*

As shown above, this book's contribution to the study of the policy practice nexus involves revisiting and nuancing the literature on structure–agency dualism in the exploration of education policy and practice. Starting with a broad and open understanding of the three central terms—policy, practice, and political context—illuminated through cases/empirical illustrations and fndings from various countries, we have situated and investigated dualism in the complexity of education systems. Based on the questions we are exploring and discussing in this book, we can summarize the chapters' overall main contribution in the following four points:

1. The exploration of the education policy–practice nexus in this book suggests that it is not very fruitful to search for the one and only essentialist understanding of the policy–practice nexus in education. The studies presented explore several forms of education nexuses, such as physical arenas in which people and artifacts exist side by side and interact, and conceptual, ideational, and material arenas and nexuses of temporal and spatial character. Based on the studies presented here, we suggest that the nexus should be recognized as something characterized by plurality. Discussing the nexuses of each study in this book shows how education as a phenomenon very often holds multiple nexuses at the same time, and sometimes, it can be diffcult to identify the primary nexus of the studies.

example, political reasoning, accountability regimes, and assessment criteria, on the one hand, and teachers' professional reasoning, assessments, and professional validity criteria, on the other hand. The questions of the "what," the "how," the "where," and the "when" in education, policy formation, and education procedures and practices will always draw upon a selection of knowledge that underpins policy and practice. The priorities, decisions, and assumptions determine the answer to questions about who ultimately gains the most from the ways in which schools, the curriculum, and practices are organized and operated.

The chapters of this book show that scholars in the feld of educational policy studies should pay signifcant attention to the complex systems and environments in which policy is made and implemented and in which the policy is perceived, interpreted, and operationalized in educational practice. Special attention should also be paid to conficting interests that are often at play when actors interact in policy– practice nexuses.

# **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# **Part I Conceptualizations of Nexuses of Education Policy and Education Practice**

# **Chapter 2 Rethinking Agents of Transformation: Social Mobilizations and Offcial Knowledge**

**Michael W. Apple**

**Abstract** Questions of structures and agency are signifcant in any serious considerations of the possibilities, limits, and effects of educational reforms. But the interrelations between educational policy and practice cannot be answered unless we deal directly with a number of issues: Who are the agents and what are the structures, movements, and identities that might lead to actions that support or resist dominant educational policies and practices. In this chapter, I critically examine three examples of agentic work. Each has its basis in successful struggles over knowledge, over what are considered to be "legitimate" or offcial understandings, and over the educational mechanisms that make these understandings available. The frst two examples direct our attention to a set of agents who are not talked about enough—students as political/epistemological actors. The third asks whether tactical "hybrid" alliances between ideologically different movements can successfully challenge dominant structures and policies. All of them demonstrate the importance of our understanding the nature of collective alliance building and the creation of activist identities. Each of them contributes to the larger questions that I raised above.

**Keywords** Student activism · Politics of knowledge · Hybrid alliances · Neoliberalism

# **Introduction**

Questions of structure and agency are signifcant in any serious considerations of the possibilities, limits, and effects of educational reforms. But the interrelations between educational policy and practice cannot be answered unless we deal directly with a number of issues: W*ho* are the agents; and *what* are the structures,

© The Author(s) 2023 T. S. Prøitz et al. (eds.), *From Education Policy to Education Practice*, Policy Implications of Research in Education 15, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36970-4\_2

M. W. Apple (\*)

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
movements, and identities that might lead to actions that support or resist dominant educational policies and practices.

In this chapter, I critically examine three examples of agentic work. Each has its basis in successful struggles over knowledge, over what are considered to be "legitimate" or offcial understandings, and over the educational mechanisms that make these understandings available. The frst two examples direct our attention to a set of agents who are not talked about enough—students as political/epistemological actors. The third asks whether tactical "hybrid" alliances between ideologically different movements can successfully challenge dominant structures and policies. All of them demonstrate the importance of our understanding the nature of collective alliance building and the creation of activist identities. Each of them contributes to the larger questions that I raised above. Let us begin by situating them within the struggles over knowledge.

# **Whose Culture, Whose Knowledge?**

From the early 1970s onwards, the issues surrounding the politics of knowledge have been a major concern of the sociology of curriculum and to the critical analyses of educational policy and practice. Central to the development of this tradition both theoretically and empirically were the analyses of people such as Bernstein (1977), Bourdieu (1984), Young (1971), Whitty (1986; Whitty & Young, 1977) and myself (Apple, 2019). At the very core of this work is the commitment to the idea that interrogating what counts as "legitimate" or "high status" culture, and making visible the struggles over transforming it, are essential to building thick democratic educational institutions both in the content of what is taught and how it is taught, as well in who makes the decisions about these issues. In many ways, it connects directly to both a Gramscian argument that in a "war of position" cultural struggles count in crucial ways (Gramsci, 1971; see also Apple, 2013) and Nancy Fraser's arguments about the signifcance of a politics of recognition as well as a politics of redistribution (Fraser, 1997) in signifcant movements toward social change.

Few words in the English language are more complex than *culture*. Its history is interesting. It derives from "coulter," a word originally used to name the blade of a plow. Thus, it has its roots literally in the concept of farming—or better yet, "cultivation" (Eagleton, 2000: 1). The British cultural scholar Raymond Williams reminded us that "culture is ordinary." By this, he meant that there was a danger that by restricting the idea of culture to intellectual life, the arts, and "refnement," we risk excluding the working class, the poor, the culturally disenfranchised, the racialized "Other," and diasporic populations from the category of cultured (Williams, 1958; see also Williams, 1976, 1982; Hall, 2016).

However, even with Williams' caution, and even with its broader farming roots, culture has very often been associated with a particular kind of cultivation—that of refned pursuits, a kind of specialness that needs to be honed. And it is seen to be best found in those populations that already possess the dispositions and values that make them more able to appreciate what is considered to be the best that society has to offer. Culture then is what is found in the more pristine appreciations and values of those above the rest of us. Those lower can be taught such appreciations, but it is very hard and at times expensive work both on the part of those who seek to impart this to society's Others and even harder work for those "not yet worthy" people who are to be taught such refned dispositions, values, and appreciations. This sense of culture then carries with it something of an imperialist project (Eagleton, 2000: 46). As many readers may know, this project has a long history in museums, in science and the arts, and defnitely in schools and their curricula.

Given this history, as you might imagine the very idea of culture has been a source of considerable and continuing controversy over its assumptions, its cultural politics, its view of the differential worth of various people in society, and over who has the right to name something as "culture" in the frst place. As you might also imagine, there is an equally long history of resistance to dominant understandings of "legitimate" culture and an extensive literature in cultural studies, in social science, and in critical education that has taken these issues seriously (see, e.g., Apple et al., 2009; Apple, 2013; Eagleton, 2000; Clarke et al., 1979; Nelson & Grossberg, 1988; Said, 1993, 1994). The critical sociology of curriculum is both a stimulus to and a product of this history. Indeed, it is hard to fully understand the nature of these debates within education without also connecting it to these larger issues.

One of the most signifcant advances that have been made in education is the transformation of the question of "What knowledge is of most worth?" into "Whose knowledge is of most worth?" This rewording is not simply a linguistic issue. While we need to be careful in not assuming that there is always a one-to-one correspondence between "legitimate" knowledge and groups in power, in changing the focus the question asks that we engage in a radical transformation of our ways of thinking about the connections between what counts as important knowledge in educational institutions and in the larger society and the existing relations of domination and subordination and struggles against these relations. As I have documented, because it is a site of confict and struggle, "legitimate" or "offcial" knowledge is often a compromise, not simply an imposition of dominant knowledge, values, and dispositions. Indeed, hegemonic blocs are often required to compromise in order to generate consent and exert leadership (Apple, 2014). All of this has crucial implications for understanding what we choose to teach, how we teach it, and what values and identities underpin such choices (Apple, 2014).

Just as importantly, the question also demands that one word in the fnal sentence be problematized—the word *we*. Who is the "we"? What groups arrogate the center to themselves, thereby seeing another group as The Other? That word—"we" often symbolizes the manner in which ideological forces and assumptions work inside and outside of education. Especially when employed by dominant groups, "we" functions as a mechanism not only of inclusion, but powerfully of exclusion as well. It is a verb that masquerades as a noun, in a manner similar to the word "minority" or "slave." No one is a "minority." Someone must *make* another a minority; someone or some group must *minoritize* another person and group, in the same way that no one can be fully known as a slave. Someone or some group must *enslave* someone else.

 Perhaps even more crucially, it also cuts us off from the immensely valuable historical and current struggles against the gendered/sexed, classed, and raced processes of dehumanization. By severing the connections between nouns and verbs, it makes invisible the actions and actors that make dominance seem normal. It creates a vacant space that is all too often flled with dominant meanings and identities.

These points may seem too abstract. But behind them is something that lies at the heart of being critically democratic educators. A major role they must play is to articulate both a vision and the reality of the fully engaged critical scholar and educator, someone who refuses to accept an education that doesn't simultaneously challenge the unrefective "we" and also illuminates the path to a new politics of voice and recognition in education. The task is to give embodied examples of critical analyses and of a more robust sense of socially informed educational action as it is actually lived out by real people, including committed educators and cultural workers in the complex politics at multiple levels of education, even when there predictably are tensions and contradictions. The critical traditions that have evolved have always been deeply concerned with these complex politics at multiple levels, especially but not only in terms of the issues surrounding policies involved in what should be taught, what counts as successful teaching, how is it assessed, and who should decide.

Of course, these concerns are not new. Teachers, social activists, and scholars in multiple disciplines have spent years challenging the boundaries of that usually unexamined space of the "we" and resisting the knowledge, perspectives, epistemological assumptions, and accepted voices that underpin them. There was no time when resistance, both overt and covert, was not present (Berrey, 2015). This is especially the case in education, a feld where the issues surrounding what and whose knowledge should be taught and how it should be taught are taken very seriously, especially by those people who are not included in the ways in which dominant groups defne that oh-so-dangerous word of "we" (Apple, 2013; Apple & Au, 2014; Au et al., 2016; Warmington, 2014).

Yet, there is another reason that the issues surrounding the curriculum are central here. For all of the well-deserved attention that is given to neoliberal agendas and policies, to privatization and choice plans, to audit cultures and standardization, we must continue to pay just as much attention to the actual stuff that is taught—and the "absent presences" (Macherey, 2006) of what is not taught—in schools, as well as to the concrete experiences of those who live and work in those buildings called schools. Documenting and understanding these lived realities are crucial to an interruptive strategy and to making connections between these experiences and the possibilities of building and defending something so much better. They are also crucial in building counter-hegemonic alliances that create and defend alternatives to dominant assumptions, policies, and practices in education and the larger society. This is not a utopian vision. There are very real instances of the successful building of such

alliances, of constructing a more inclusive "we," ones that show the power of connecting multiple groups of teachers, students, parents, and community members around an issue that they share. The conficts over school knowledge often play a key role here. And that is a major focus of the three examples I give in the later sections of this chapter.

# **Knowledge and Progressive Mobilizations**

First, let me make some general points. One of the most signifcant areas that remain understudied is the complex role of struggles over what counts as "legitimate knowledge" in the formation of social mobilizations. Yet this phenomenon is crucial to the debates over whether education has a role to play in social transformation (see, e.g., Apple, 2013; Apple et al., 2018). In the next section of this chapter, I examine the place of conficts over offcial knowledge in the formation of counter-hegemonic movements. I pay particular attention to some examples of student and community mobilizations in the United States to defend progressive curricula and to build alliances that counter rightist gains. After that I turn my attention to the building of *hybrid alliances* across ideological divides and raise the question about whether these temporary tactical alliances can create important interruptions of dominant policies and practices.

It is worth stressing again that these examples of the politics of culture and identity surrounding schooling document the signifcance of curriculum struggles in the formation of both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic movements. As I noted above, the fact that there is all too often an absence of in-depth analyses of what is and is not actually taught, of the politics of "offcial knowledge," (Apple, 2014) in so many critical discussions of the role of neoliberalism in education is notable. We simply cannot grasp the reasons why so many people are convinced to come under the ideological leadership of dominant groups—or act to resist such leadership--if we don't give a prime place to the struggle over meanings in the formation of identity.

Social movements—both progressive and retrogressive--often form around issues that are central to people's identities, cultures, and histories (Giugi et al., 1999; Apple, 2013; see also Binder, 2002). More attention theoretically, historically, and empirically to the centrality of such struggles could provide more nuanced approaches to the reasons various aspects of conservative modernizing positions are found compelling, and just as importantly to the ways in which movements that interrupt neoliberal agendas have been and can be built (Apple, 2013).

The importance of this is clearly visible in the two analyses of mobilizations against rightist efforts to move the content of the curriculum in very conservative and often racist directions that follow. The frst alliance was built in response to the conservative takeover of a local elected school board in the western part of the United States. It galvanized students, teachers, parents, and other community groups to not only overturn some very conservative curricular decisions, but also resulted in the election of a more progressive school board. Both neoliberal and

neoconservative policies were challenged successfully, in spite of the fact that the conservative majority of the school board had received a large amount of fnancial and ideological support by the Koch brothers' backed group American for Prosperity,1 one of the most powerful and well-funded rightist organizations in the United States (see, e.g., Schirmer & Apple, 2016).

The second example focuses on the role of students in the struggle over racist policies of incarceration and funding cuts in education. Here the students employed what is usually seen as "elite knowledge" to interrupt dominant policies and to build a larger alliance. At the same time, they successfully challenged not only educational decisions, but the normalization of the racializing underpinnings of the "carceral state" (Foucault, 1977; Alexander, 2012). Let us now turn to the examples.

# **Students in the Lead2**

In the United States, conservative organizations have increasingly focused their efforts on the local state. In late summer of 2015, feld organizers for the wellfunded and powerful right-wing group Americans for Prosperity marched through the streets of Jefferson County, Colorado (known as Jeffco), knocking on doors and leafeting voters about the upcoming school board recall election. Jeffco had become deeply tangled in political battles, and the school board became a key site for these struggles. Jeffco had a mix of conservative and liberal tendencies. This mix was important outside as well as inside the town. In such a political context, skirmishes between conservative and progressive forces were considered predictive for the rest of the state. As one political analyst told news reporters, "As Jefferson County goes so goes the state of Colorado, that's why the stakes are so high here is because it is a leading indicator or a bellwether …it is ground zero for all kinds of political wars but at the moment that political war is over the public education system" ("In 'Purple District,' Jeffco School Board Recall Could Have Big Infuence", 2015).

In 2013, three conservative school board members gained control of the Jeffco school board, and immediately pushed forward a series of controversial educational policies. First, the school board recruited and hired a new superintendent, whose starting salary of \$280,000 a year – one of the highest education employees in the state – provoked public consternation (Garcia, 2014b). Second, the conservative school board and superintendent expanded school choice models by increasing funding for additional charter schools and requiring that private and public charter schools receive equal per-pupil funding as public schools (Garcia, 2014a). Third, the school board disbanded the union-approved teacher pay salary scale and instead implemented a highly controversial performance-based pay compensation model.

1The Koch brothers are among the wealthiest people in the US. They are major leaders and funders of rightist movements and organizations.

2Much of the material in this section is drawn from Apple et al. (2018).

The fnal straw in the school district, however, was when the newly conservative board ordered changes to the school district's Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum to promote more "positive" aspects of national heritage by eliminating histories of U.S. social movements. The curriculum changes were designed to "promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefts of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights" while minimizing and discouraging the role "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law" ("High schoolers protest conservative proposal", 2014). This kind of ideological pressure is increasingly visible not only in the United States, but in multiple nations (See, for example, Verma & Apple, 2021).

This last "reform"—the attack on more progressive elements in the curriculum provided the spark that turned into a fre that could not be controlled by the Right. In response to the curriculum changes, hundreds of students walked out of six high schools in the district in protest. Marching and carrying signs that read slogans such as, "There is nothing more patriotic than protest", "People didn't die so we could erase them", and "My education is not your political agenda", "I got 99 problems and the B.O.E. [Board of Education] is all of them," the students' demonstrations caught national attention.

The effects of this spread not only to an increasing number of students, but also to the district's teachers and the community. The students' willingness to mobilize inspired teachers to conduct a two-day sick-out in protest of the changes to their pay scales, which would now implement performance-pay for teachers based on students' standardized test performance. This change frustrated many teachers, who believed such compensation models were not only disproved by research, but also damaged the collaboration and mentorship necessary for effective teaching (Robles, 2015). Parents also began to organize, creating an online petition which garnered tens of thousands of signatures from around the country.

Deeply distressed with not only the curricular changes, but also a lack of investment in important school programs, like defunding an all-day kindergarten for "atrisk" students, a group of parents, teachers, and community members organized a recall election of the three conservative school board members. The grassroots recall election triggered the interest of Americans for Prosperity. Determined to support the conservative candidates and defeat the community recall effort, Americans for Prosperity spent over \$180,000 (a very large amount for a local school board race) on their opposition campaign, paying for fyers, door knocking, and a \$70,000 television ad. As the Colorado state director of Americans for Prosperity candidly declared, "We advocate competition. Education shouldn't be different," Fields says. "Competition really raises the quality of education. … Where you get the best solutions is through free market principles" (Robles, 2015). Despite their heavily-fnanced campaign to protect the conservative school board, the efforts of Americans for Prosperity were not successful. In November 2015, all three of the conservative candidates were recalled. This defeat became a symbol of progressive potential for many other communities throughout the nation.

While this seems like simply a small "local" defeat, in many ways Jeffco constitutes a test case for the conservative movements' focus not only on national and state-wide rightist elections, but increasingly on local mobilizations. Jeffco was a politically mixed school district that faced neoliberal education reform agendas: high-paid administrators, expanding school choice policies at the expense of educational equity, changes to teachers' employment rights, and diminished community morale. In the district, progressives mounted opposition campaigns to the conservative policy regime of the school board. In response to organized progressive activism, Americans for Prosperity poured more funds into the conservative campaigns in the district. Yet, unlike a number of other high profle school districts, progressives in Jeffco successfully defeated the conservatives (see Schirmer & Apple, 2016; Apple et al., 2018). Why did such a well-funded rightist campaign lose in Jeffco?

Three key elements exist in the struggles in Jeffco. First, conservative forces in Jeffco not only focused their vision on key educational policy forms –such as teachers' contracts and school choice proposals – but as well on such issues as *educational content* itself – the knowledge, values, and stories that get taught in schools. This recognition of the cultural struggles at stake in educational policy signaled their engagement in a deeper level of ideological reformation. By overtly restricting the curriculum to supposed "patriotic" narratives and excluding histories of protest and injustice, the conservative school board majority attempted to exercise their power to create ideological dominance, Yet, despite the school board's attempt to control the social narratives of meaning, they missed a key component of ideological formation: meaning is neither necessarily objective nor intrinsic, and therefore cannot simply be delivered by school boards or other powers, no matter the amount of campaign fnancings. Rather, meaning is constantly being constructed and coconstructed, determined by its social surroundings.

In the case of Jeffco, this meant that students' response to the curricular changes became very signifcant. Students' organized resistance became a leading and highly visible cause. One of its major effects was that it also encouraged teachers to mobilize against the school board. This is the second key element in Jeffco. In Jeffco, *both* students and teachers alike engaged in direct actions of protest and, importantly, exit. Students walked out of school; teachers withheld their labor in coordinated sick-outs. As social movement scholars inform us, the most signifcant impacts of social movements are often not immediate changes to social policy or programs, but rather the personal consequences of participating in activism. Once engaged with networks of other activists, participants have both attitudinal willingness and structural resources and skills to again participate in other activist efforts (e.g., McAdam, 1989). Organizing and participating in a series of effective walkouts created activist identities for Jeffco high schoolers. Cultural struggles over what should be taught, struggles that were close to home for students and parents, galvanized action. This has important implications for how we think about what kinds of struggles can generate progressive transformations. As I noted earlier, and as Nancy Fraser reminds us, a politics of recognition as well as a politics of redistribution is crucial (Fraser, 1997; see also Apple, 2013).

Finally, supporters of public education in Jeffco were able to develop a coalition around multiple issues: curricula, teachers' compensation models, and school choice. This mobilized a coalition that had suffcient popular support and power to successfully recall the conservative candidates. Thus, progressives in Jeffco were able to form a powerful alliance that addressed multiple registers of the impending conservative reforms. This is truly signifcant since in other similar places it was conservatives who formed such alliances (Schirmer & Apple, 2016). The creation of what I have elsewhere called "decentered unities" (Apple, 2013) provided the social glue and cooperative forms of support that countered rightist money.

The failure of the Right in Jeffco reveals some key lessons in the strategies of rightist movements. As I pointed out, the Right has shown a growing commitment to small political spaces, and the political persistence necessary to take control of them. There are now many examples where the Right has successfully occupied micro political spaces by waging lawsuits against the liberal school boards, running political candidates to take over local school boards, and providing large amounts of fnancial support for these candidates. We also know that conservative movements offer identities that provide attractive forms of agency to many people. In the process, these movements engage in a form of social pedagogy, creating a hegemonic umbrella that effectively combine multiple ideological elements to form a more unifed movement (Schirmer & Apple, 2016; Apple, 2006).

But as the example of Jeffo demonstrates, the Right is not alone in understanding this. In Jeffco, this creative stitching together of new activist identities into a united movement was crucial. Stimulated by student protests against the attacks on progressive elements within the curriculum, a series of issues that could have divided people into separate constituencies instead united students with parents and teachers around curricular changes, anti-school choice plans, and against merit pay for teachers. Whether this alliance can last is an open question. But there can be no doubt that the initiatives taken by students to challenge conservative attempts to redefne "offcial knowledge" played a crucial role creating new more activist identities not only for students but for others as well. The leadership of students was a key.

# **Elite Knowledge, Racialization, and the (In)Justice System**

The above example of Jeffco directs our attention to the local level and to issues internal to schools. However, there are other examples of how progressive alliances can be built that start out with a focus on school knowledge, but extend their effects well beyond the school system to the larger society. These alliances may start with educational action and then spread out to other institutions and groups in important ways. And once again, students have often been at the center. The movement by students in Baltimore to interrupt the all too visible school-to-prison pipeline is a signifcant example here (see Alexander, 2012).

Baltimore is one of the poorest cities in the United States. It is highly segregated by race, and not only has extremely high rates of impoverishment and unemployment among minoritized communities, but also among the highest rates of incarceration of people of color in the nation. The city and state were faced with predictable economic turmoil due to the fscal crisis of the state in a time of capital fight and the racial specifcities of capital's evacuation of its social responsibilities to the urban core (See also Mills, 1997). As very necessary social programs were being cut, money that would have gone to such programs was in essence being transferred to what is best thought of as the (in)justice system. In this case, a large amount of public money was to be spent on the construction of a new detention facility for "juvenile offenders." The unstated choice was "jail" or social and educational programs. And the choice increasingly seemed to be jail.

This meant that educational funding for the development of innovative and more culturally responsive school programs, teachers, community outreach, building maintenance—the entire range of things that make schooling an investment in poor youth in particular—were under even more threat than usual. In this example again, youth mobilization was a central driving force in acting against this neoliberal and racializing agenda (Farooq, 2012).

Student activists within minoritized communities in that city pressed forward with a campaign to block the construction of the youth detention facility. A key here is a curriculum project--the Algebra Project--that was created as an effort to equip marginalized poor youth of color with "academic" knowledge that is usually denied to them, especially high status mathematical knowledge such as algebra and similar subjects (Moses & Cobb, 2002). The Algebra Project has developed a national reputation for its hard work in pressing for responsive models of curriculum and teaching in a subject—mathematics—that has been a very real sorting device that actively marginalizes and segregates all too many youth of color. While the Project is controversial within some segments of oppressed communities, there can be no doubt about its fundamental commitment to providing a transformative education to youth of color (Moses & Cobb, 2002). The similarities between the goals of this approach and Antonio Gramsci's position that oppressed people must have both the right and the means to reappropriate elite knowledge are very visible (see Apple, 1996).

When public funding for the Algebra Project in which the students participated was threatened, the leaders of the project urged students to "advocate on their own behalf." This continued a vital tradition in which the Algebra Project itself had aggressively (and appropriately and creatively) pushed state lawmakers "to release about \$1 billion in court mandated education funding, engaging in civil disobedience, student strikes and street theater to drive home its message: 'No education, no life'" (Farooq, 2012: 5).

Beginning in 2010, the students engaged in a campaign to block the building of the detention center. They were all too familiar with the tragic and strikingly unequal rates of arrests and incarcerations within black and brown communities compared to dominant populations. They knew frst-hand about the nature of police violence, about what happened in such juvenile "jails," and the implications of such rates of arrest and violence on their own and their community's and family's futures.

Using their mathematical skills and understanding that had been developed in the Project, they engaged in activist oriented research demonstrating that youth crime had actually dropped precipitously in Baltimore. Thus, these and other facts were on their side. Coalitions against the detention center were formed, including an alliance with community groups, with critical journalists, and with the Occupy

Baltimore movement. The proposed construction site was occupied. And even with dispersals and arrests, "daily civil disobedience and teach-ins persisted." All of this generated a good deal of public attention and had the additional effect of undercutting the all too common and persistent racist stereotypes of youth of color as uncaring, irresponsible, unknowledgeable, and as uninvolved in their education. The coalition's persistence paid off. The 2013 state budget did not include funding for yet another youth prison (Farooq, 2012: 5). But the activist identities developed by the students remained.

The implications of this example are clear. The campaign grew from the Algebra Project and its program of reconstituting knowledge, what it means to know, and who are seen as knowers. It then led to enhanced understandings of oppressive realities and misplaced budget priorities, to activist identities, to committed action, to alliance building, recursively back to even more committed action, and then to success. Like the previous example from Jeffco, it was students who took control of their own lives and their lived experiences, this time with an oppressive (in)justice system that incarcerated large numbers of the community's youth.

Once again, among the most important actors were the students. Their mobilization and leadership was based not only on the larger concerns with the claims of neoliberalism. Rather the radical changes that the conservatives wanted to make that would limit the possibilities of serious and progressive engagement with important and often denied subject matter also drove the students to act. Clearly, then, the curriculum itself can be and is a primary focus of educational struggles, and is exactly what can be seen in the struggle by the youth of color involved in the Algebra Project in Baltimore when they employed that project and its knowledge to create alliances and to successfully stop the building of a new juvenile prison there. A form of knowledge that was usually seen as "useless" and simply the knowledge of elites was connected to the lived realities of youth in a manner that enabled them to become activists of their own lives (Apple, 2013).

# **Hybrid Alliances and Agentic Possibilities**

In the previous sections of this chapter, I have focused on the agency of groups of people—particularly students--who take on active roles in defending and extending thick democratic policies and practices. They seek to challenge the epistemological and political common-sense of dominant groups and exert leadership in the process of interrupting neoliberal and neoconservative agendas. Conficts over social and cultural understandings played a major role in each of these examples.

These movements were constituted by largely progressive groups and basically dealt with people whose political positions were largely liberal to left in orientation. This kind of analysis opens up our sense of who the agents of social transformation are to a larger array of actors, in these cases students. The Baltimore example also places race inside and outside of school as a fundamental dynamic, something I have repeatedly stressed as a constitutive dynamic both nationally and internationally (Apple, 2013).

But such an analysis also has weaknesses. It too often ignores the agency of conservative groups and movements and it ignores the power of religious identities in the struggles over culture and meaning. I now want to turn to this issue and ask an increasingly signifcant set of questions. Is it possible to form alliances with *ideologically conservative* and often religious movements to also interrupt aspects of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas, policies, and practices? My focus here will be on religiously conservative groups.

In order to deal with some of the issues that are raised by these question, in this section I must be somewhat more personal. There are a number of reasons for this. First, these are not simply academic and theoretical questions for me. I am an actor in mobilizations around them. Second, because this involves personal political/educational praxis, where theory and action are merged in a dialectical relationship for me, my answers to these important question are contingent and contextual. I do not have any certainly about them. Because of this, this section of the paper is more suggestive both analytically and politically.

Give this, let me begin this section with an honest personal statement. I have been struggling for years with the question of what role religious understandings and commitments should play in public education and in the larger society—and especially in both limiting and enhancing progressive mobilizations. Part of this is perhaps due to my search for my own religious roots as a secular and politically progressive "public intellectual" (Apple, 2019). And part of it is connected to my quite strong ethical and educational disagreements with the increasingly infuential role that what I have called "authoritarian populist" religious conservatives are playing in educational policy around privatization, educational fnance, home schooling, curriculum politics, teacher certifcation, and a number of other areas (see Apple, 2006; Hall, 2017).

Yet at the same time as I worry about the effects of religious authoritarian populism, I also applaud and support more progressive religious groups that have served as a counter to some of the more conservative (and at times racist) religious mobilizations that have grown in infuence over the past decades in the US and elsewhere. Thus, I remain hopeful that these groups and actions can serve as a corrective to the ways in which religious groups are often portrayed in the media and in the narratives of a large number of progressive critics and critical educators. Conservative evangelicals are primarily focused upon in these narratives, while much more socially and culturally critically oriented religious groups are less often included except perhaps in passing. I recognize that these narratives have an effect on how I try to deal with my contradictory feelings about the place of religious understandings and commitments in education in the larger society.

Of course, in saying this, there is no doubt in my mind that we must not ignore the fact that many conservative religious groups play a key role in the "hegemonic bloc" that supports much of the damaging neoliberal and neoconservative agenda in education and so much else. Indeed this is one of the reasons I have devoted a good deal of attention to them elsewhere (see Apple, 2006, 2014). However, in the United States and in many other nations, religious support for critical democracy, for anti-racist, non-homophobic, and more robust thick participatory forms of public institutions including schools, and similar things have been essential to building and defending more progressive policies and in cementing alliances to defend them (Apple et al., 2018). Much of the motivation behind these actions is inspired by deeply religious convictions.

Let me again give a personal example. I am often asked to work in many countries where authoritarian tendencies have been institutionalized. This has meant that I am faced with a choice: Either remain largely publicly "neutral" or speak out against oppressive relations. My choice has almost always been to act in solidarity with marginalized groups and to speak out publicly in support of their demands, sometimes with results that are predictable. Interestingly, these are just as often profoundly transformative experiences in challenging my presuppositions about religion and other relations. Thus, when I was arrested in South Korea for speaking out against the military dictatorship in power at that time, a number of the people who were arrested with me were also deeply religious, guided by an understanding that "Jesus spent his life working for the poor and oppressed. I will commit myself to this myself no matter what the risks." This is a powerful sentiment, one I believe needs to be supported (see Apple, 2013).

There are lessons to be learned here, both for me and for many people within the critical educational community who are suspicious of religion or who automatically assume that it is by its very nature deeply politically conservative. It raises clear questions about the tendency among some factions of the secular Left inside and outside of education to dismiss religious understandings. It raises strategic questions as well about whether religious and secular groups can fnd common ground, even when there are deep divisions among (and at times within) them.

In saying this, as I noted above I do not at all wish to ignore the growing power of ultra-conservative and repressive religious movements and ideologies in many nations such as Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Israel/ Palestine—and yes in parts of the United States. Indeed, I have written very critically about them in *Educating the "Right" Way* and elsewhere (see, e.g., Apple, 2006). However, I fear that many progressive activists and scholars who are struggling to build and defend more thickly democratic institutions and social relations may be pushing away a considerable number of people who are religiously motivated. This is a very real limitation of a number of the critical positions that the Left in education has taken over the years. Too often many advocates for radical egalitarian positions have been overly dismissive of religious motivations and understandings. This is more than a little unwise tactically and also forgets the history that a number of religious movements have played in the ongoing struggles for social justice in so many societies, especially but not only with racialized and minoritized oppressed groups (see, for example, West, 2002). Indeed, this act of historical amnesia can be a performance of "whiteness." It is also more than a little odd in another way. One of the guiding fgures in the development of critical education internationally was Paulo Freire, someone who himself was strongly infuenced by liberation theology.

In countering this overly dismissive attitude, we need to think more subtly about how we should understand the complexities of religious movements and thereby open up other possibilities. Let me take the belief that the divide that separates authoritarian populist religious advocates and secular progressive groups is so wide that it is impossible to fnd common ground. To begin, rather than assuming that religious conservativism is based on a totally rightist sensibility about everything we may hold dear, it would be wiser to look at what I call the elements of "good sense" as well as bad sense in people's anger about current policies inside and outside of education and how they are convinced to follow the leadership of more neoliberal and neoconservative groups (Hochschild, 2016). This is a wise position not only theoretically, but strategically as well. People are not "puppets." They have real reasons for their worries—and it is not automatic that they move to the right rather than toward more progressive politics. It takes hard ideological work, what I have called a vast social/pedagogic project, for people to agree with rightist "solutions." Discursive politics are crucial elements here, both in responding to religious sentiments, but also in other areas of social life (Apple, 2006).

But the fact that dominant groups have been successful in moving many people to the right by connecting to people's partly accurate understandings of their daily lives, means that progressives must also do a much better job of making connections to the core meanings of their lives and to the real problems people experience (Hochschild, 2016; Apple, 2013). A politics based on better attempts to understand the realities of people's lives has a much greater chance of having them listen more carefully to our arguments.

Do not misunderstand me. There is of course a very real danger here. People's commonsense may already be articulated around racist nativist understandings, by unarticulated assumptions grounded in possessive individualism and selfshness rather than a concern for a more robust sense of the common good. Thus, while I agree that there is a defnite need to listen carefully and to talk across our ideological differences, not only do *both* sides have to be willing to do this, but we must not do it in a manner that somehow legitimates things such as anti-immigrant racism and other profoundly racist positions,3 educational visions of children as simply future workers, the attacks on women's control of their bodies, an arrogance in assuming that "God only talks to me," and similar ethically problematic positions. This will be diffcult. Obviously we need to go into these dialogues with respect for real people's concerns and a greater knowledge of the local. But we also need to realize that respect must come from both sides and that we will have to think very carefully about what compromises are worth making in order for the dialogue to go further and lead perhaps to joint understandings and joint actions.

This is something I've given a good deal of thought to and have tried to embody in personal and professional actions. For example, in books such as *Educating the*

3There is a complex historical connection between conservative religious forms in the United States and racist understandings and positions. See for example Heyrman (1997), Kintz (1997), Noll (2002), and Goege (2015).

*"Right" Way* and *Can Education Change Society?* (Apple, 2006, 2013), I have previously called for "hybrid alliances" between what are usually very different ideological and religious allegiances. A prime example in education in the United States was the case of Channel One, a for-proft television station that was broadcast in a very large number of public and private schools and that, thankfully, for many economic and political reasons is no longer in operation (see Apple, 2014).

Channel One provided 10 minutes of "news" accompanied by 2 minutes of well-designed commercials. Many schools agreed to have Channel One in their schools not only because it was slickly marketed as a "solution" to real school problems about making our students "more knowledgeable about current affairs," but also because it gave the school equipment such as a satellite dish, TV monitors, and other things that can add up to many tens of thousands of dollars. The catch is that, as a captive audience, students were required to watch the commercials. Teachers and students were given no choice about this. Not to do this meant that Channel One would sever the contract and the equipment would be removed. This connected then and now to the growing concern about the increased uses of schools as sites of proft (Apple, 2014; Burch, 2021).

In response to this, I and others formed an alliance with conservative religious groups to remove Channel One from schools. For the conservative evangelicals, "children are created in God's image" and it is "ungodly" for them to be bought and sold as commodities for proft in schools. For me and other progressives, we may not have agreed with the specifc theological position taken by the conservative religious advocates, but we too were and continue to be deeply concerned about commodifying children as a captive audience for corporate profts. Thus, these two usually diametrically opposed ideological positions were unifed around a specifc educational project, stopping the selling of children for proft. This alliance enabled the removal of Channel One from a number of school districts. But it has also has led to the reduction of stereotypes on both sides and to keeping open a space for further dialogue.

This focus on things that bind us together, not pull us apart, can also be seen outside the United States. A prime example can be found in Porto Alegre in Brazil where religiously inspired movements played a very large role in the growth of progressive mobilizations there—and of keeping them together. This was especially the case in education where critical democratic educational institutions, policies, and practices that drew on a rich combination of progressive religious understandings and equally progressive more secular educational theories and politics were combined. These gains are under threat currently with the growth in power of rightist movements, including very conservative and powerful evangelical movements that receive considerable amounts of funding from similar movements in the United States. But the defense of the continued existence of such critically democratic schools, curricula, and teaching practices still stands as a remarkable achievement (Apple et al., 2018).

Of course, the United States is not Brazil. But if too many progressives in the United States and elsewhere tend to automatically mistrust groups who fnd meaning in religious understandings, in the process this risks marginalizing religious motivations and traditions that could underpin alliances over crucial elements of agreement. These alliances are visible in such growing grassroots populist movements surrounding the "Moral Monday" actions that have been stimulated by important religious leaders such as the Rev Dr William J. Barber and others. They are visible as well in the pro-immigrant sanctuary commitments advanced by multiple churches, mosques, synagogues, and other formal and informal religious institutions and meeting grounds found among multiple populations here. They are also visible in the growing pro-environmental worries among a number of evangelical movements. It is well worth considering whether "hybrid" alliances across our differences that advance specifc progressive projects inside and outside of education can be built.

*But*, and it is an important but, in even considering this I again do not want to minimize my original worries. It remains very important to recognize that the continuing growth of "authoritarian populist" conservative religious movements who are actively defending existing and even more radical and at times anti-democratic policies may still make this diffcult in education and other areas. These movements are among the fastest growing advocates for particular kinds of educational reform throughout the US and many other nations (see, e.g., Verma & Apple, 2021). Take as one example the growth of homeschooling, one in which millions of children are engaged. In some ways, the home schooling phenomenon is partly a reaction to the attention being given to the ways in which the "crisis in public schools" is portrayed in the media. Much of it is also part of a larger reaction to the perceived dominance of secular values in schools, to the feelings that conservative religious knowledge and ways of understanding the world are not given equal weight in the curriculum. Yet, just as importantly, while the homeschooling movement is varied, in all too many cases it functions as the creation of ideological "gated communities" in which the culture and body of the Other are seen as forms of pollution that must be avoided at all costs (Apple, 2006; see also Kintz, 1997). Struggles over culture, over identities, and over Whiteness and the feeling that one is part of the "new oppressed" are core parts of the emerging politics of education on the right and within the religious right in particular.

While we should want to be respectful of diversity, it is important to understand that in many parts of this movement, issues of Biblical authority intersect with long histories of racial fear, of the loss of "our" God-given roles as men and women, and of a government that actively takes away "liberty" (Apple, 2006, 1996; MacLean, 2017). It will not be easy to fnd dialogic space when faced with these kinds of positions.4 Thus, there will be dangers as well as possibilities and any attempts to engage cooperatively with such groups should be approached with honesty and the maintenance of a deep commitment to justifably held anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and social justice values about this. These are not things that should be sacrifced as we try to build a broader we.

4There is a growing population of Black homeschoolers, however. This is a group with whom I have a good deal of sympathy. The lamentable conditions within which large numbers of minoritized students have to somehow survive in all too many schools are too painful to recount once again.

There are still fundamental differences between the larger agendas of the groups involved in these debates. Dialogue across ideological boundaries and a focus on the elements of good sense among people who disagree are necessary and can engender more respect and understanding. Therefore it should (very cautiously) be sought after. However, let us again be honest. As I noted above, such dialogue can give legitimacy to positions which we justifably fnd homophobic, sexist, racist, and anti-immigrant. We need to constantly refect on whether these dialogues, possible hybrid alliances, and the policies and practices that might evolve from them are leading in more critically democratic directions in the long term.

# **Conclusion**

As you know, like me, many people have consistently grounded their work in the belief that it is absolutely crucial to understand the social realities of schooling (see, e.g., Whitty, 2002). What is happening today makes these analyses even more signifcant. As I have shown, it is not neoliberalism and its attendant policy initiatives alone that are changing our commonsense about education. Indeed it is a major error to reduce our critical analyses of education to simply being a refection of one set of tendencies within a dominant hegemonic bloc (Apple, 2006, 2014; Apple et al., 2018)).

In expanding our focus, I have taken insights about the role of curriculum conficts and the creation of identities and alliances, and have focused on struggles over "culture," over what counts as "offcial knowledge" in schools and over its uses not only inside the school but in assisting and generating mobilizations against dominant policies and practices. All this is grounded in a strong ethical/political position that we have an obligation to challenge these dominant policies and practices and that it is crucial to defend a robust education that is based on human fourishing.

But for those of us engaged in critical social and cultural research, one other question has stood behind each of these other issues. It is the central organizing question that gives meaning to these others. Indeed, it is the basic issue that guides any critical education and especially the critical sociology of education. Can schools change society? This is the fundamental question that has guided almost all of my books and much of the political and educational action many critical educators throughout the world. However, I do not think that we can fully deal with this question unless we connect it another one. Who are the actors individually and collectively who now and in the future will be agents of such substantive changes? Dealing honestly with what this means—and honestly facing the dilemmas and contradictions involved--is fundamental to a more robust understanding of critical educational theory, research, policy, and practice.

The three examples I gave in this chapter signify the continuing search to answer the frst of these questions in the affrmative. As I argue in *Can Education Change Society?* (Apple, 2013), schools are key parts of society, not something that stand outside of it. Struggling over "legitimate" culture, over educators' labor processes, over privatization, over identities, and so much more *is* struggling over society. Anything less risks accepting cynicism and despair.

But, in taking this position, we should not be "romantic." Indeed, as Geoff Whitty warned us early on, we need to recognize that there are persistent dangers of what he called the "romantic possibilitarian" tendencies of the Left (Whitty, 1974). Instead, in Raymond Williams' wise words, our "journey of hope" (Williams, 1989) must be grounded in our own continual development of serious knowledge of the concrete ways in which our individual and collective attempts to build a more socially critical and responsive education always occurs in a social and cultural feld whose traditions and realities offer both limits and possibilities (See Wright, 2010, 2019). Continuing on this journey requires that we ask and answer the questions surrounding the politics of knowledge inside and outside of education.

Just importantly as I have stressed throughout this chapter we must ask and answer the question of who are the agents of transformation—again individually and collectively--in these politics. As I have shown here, among these agents nationally and internationally are students. But is it suffcient to simply add them to a list of progressive actors? Are there complex and contradictory possibilities involved in tactically "temporary" hybrid alliances as well? This too has crucial implications for our collective mobilizations against dominant policies and practices in education and the larger society.

Let me end this chapter with a fnal set of crucial questions, many of which are raised in *The Struggle for Democracy in Education: Lessons From Social Realities* (See Apple et al., 2018). Each of the examples I have discussed here has led to a victory. Such victories should of course be celebrated. But will they last? Will the activist identities that have been formed out of these conficts be maintained? Will the hybrid alliances that cut across what are substantial ideological and religious differences open a space for the further joint actions that both challenge dominant agendas and policies? Can they also lead to shifts toward more progressive understandings on the part of more conservative ideological movements that partially weaken their previous ideological affliations?

Only long-term research and long-term socially committed actions can answer these questions. There's work to be done.

# **References**

Alexander, M. (2012). *The New Jim Crow*. The New Press.

Said, E. (1993). *Culture and Imperialism*. Vintage Books.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Chapter 3 The Policy-Practice Nexus as 'Politics of Use': Professional Autonomy and Teacher Agency in the Classroom**

### **Barbara Schulte**

**Abstract** This chapter approaches the policy-practice nexus by scrutinizing the relationship between teacher agency and professional autonomy. Teacher agency has usually been researched from two different perspectives. On one side, scholars are concerned with questions of professional autonomy vis-à-vis specifc accountability regimes, and apply, in the broadest sense, a governance framework. On the other, there is a more normatively grounded discussion of professional autonomy, emphasizing how teachers, due to various new forms of (neo-liberal) governance, become increasingly de-professionalized. While acknowledging both perspectives, this chapter questions the confation of professional autonomy with teacher agency. Drawing on the concept of the 'politics of use' and fndings from feldwork in China, the chapter proposes a framework for conceptualizing autonomy and agency as they operate in and between systems, involving and producing different types of agents. The chapter's fndings suggest that the ways in which policy implementation processes have been conceptualized need to be reconsidered. Particular attention must be paid to the political-ideological and normative specifcities of both the investigated policy system and of the investigator's own research traditions, to ensure that policy implementation processes can be compared across a broad variety of cases.

# **Introduction**

In a history lesson at a middle school in Beijing, the 13-year-old students get to learn about China's "new democracy". As a case in point, they study some details of the battle between the communist Red Army and the nationalist Guomindang in the 1930s. Zhu, the young teacher, lectures on the various Communist heroes, with the students acting as fll-ins on the heroes' specifc character qualities, at times reading

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36970-4\_3

B. Schulte (\*)

University of Vienna, Wien, Austria e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023

T. S. Prøitz et al. (eds.), *From Education Policy to Education Practice*, Policy Implications of Research in Education 15,

passages from the textbook. As a highlight, Zhu then shows them a clip from a movie which features gruesome and very noise-intensive battle scenes, with hardly any words spoken (except for deafening death screams), and with many combatants left wounded or dead. She stops the movie towards the end of the lesson, when a Guomindang soldier is shot fatally, accompanied by appreciative grunts from the students. In the ensuing interview, I ask Zhu about her choice of material. She tells me how in her teacher training, she had learned about student-centered approaches in the classroom and the importance of developing social and emotional skills. She then refects upon the lack of such learning approaches in China's exam-oriented schools, and adds that by selecting this movie, she sought to transfer some of the pedagogical spirit from her teacher training into the classroom.

What does this story – which I have encountered in multiple variations during two decades of doing feldwork – tell us? First, it illustrates the importance of observing practices. Analyzing policy and curriculum documents, textbooks, or even interviews cannot reveal how teachers realize (or resist) the curriculum on the ground. Desk research can tell us a lot about the intended curriculum, producing valuable insights into the agendas of various stakeholders, such as international organizations (e.g. OECD or UNESCO reports), governments (e.g. laws, regulations, white papers), ministries and local educational authorities (e.g. curricular specifcations, guidelines), and schools (e.g. school programs); but it discloses very little about how the curriculum is enacted: the movie shown by this teacher is not included in any database of teaching material, let alone the pedagogical approaches utilized during the lesson.

This leads us, second, to the much-discussed question of policy-practice divergence, or with reference to this edited volume's theoretical focus, to the fruitful concept of the policy-practice nexus (see e.g. Ohi, 2008; Schulte, 2018): How is policy transformed when being fltered by teacher professionalism (Evetts, 2003), and how is policy negotiated and appropriated within the micropolitics of school environments (Kelchtermans & Vanassche, 2017)? Such questions direct our attention, on one side, to the complexities and layeredness of educational practices (Wermke & Prøitz, 2022), as they need to respond to multiple and at times contradictory expectations (e.g. from parents, colleagues), norms (e.g. in the institutional or political realm), and traditions (e.g. in the form of pedagogical or professional knowledge). On the other side, these multiple processes of fltering and appropriation reveal how we need to think of 'nexus' in the plural: policy meets practice not just once, as for example when Teacher Zhu does her lesson planning; but practices dock onto policies both vertically (as for example when researchers, textbook authors, or school principals engage in policy translation at different levels of policy implementation) and horizontally (as for example when policy is enacted across different settings at the same level, such as at the level of the classroom).

Third, and most importantly for this chapter, this story can help us reassess the intricacies of teacher agency. On the surface, Zhu takes the liberty to digress from the textbook and teach the subject in her own way. She can thus be seen as gaining agency in designing her lessons, which especially in the Chinese context has not always been the case. But are her choices autonomous, from a pedagogical point of view?

41

The movie she has chosen would most likely not have been included in an offcially sanctioned list of teaching materials, screened and accredited by educational authorities. In that sense, her approach could be considered autonomous vis-à-vis crucial control mechanisms within the education system. Looking more closely, however, we can argue that her choice to emotionalize her history lesson in the way she did is severely compromised by her ideological-political environment. To teach and display love of the Chinese Communist Party is a constant expectation from the central government, and this expectation has recently been rendered more intrusive in the Ministry of Education's decree of integrating Xi Jinping thought – an ideology named after the current president – at all educational levels (MOE, 2021). Thus, ironically, what looks like an increase in teacher agency does not translate into greater professional autonomy. Again, with regard to policy-practice relations, we can locate various nexuses where certain workings and enactments of policy are produced, involving agents and forces both internal and external to the education system.

Teacher agency and professional autonomy are usually researched from two different perspectives. On the one hand, scholars are concerned with questions of professional autonomy vis-à-vis specifc management forms and accountability regimes, and apply, in the broadest sense, a governance framework in order to analyze their cases (see e.g. Wermke et al., 2019). On the other hand, we can observe a more passionate discussion of professional autonomy, emphasizing how teachers, due to various new forms of (neo-liberal) governance and governmentalities, become increasingly de-professionalized (see e.g. Priestley et al., 2013). In a sense, these two strands of research can be regarded as two sides of the same coin, in that the latter is a normative response to the fndings from the former. This chapter acknowledges both approaches – governance analysis and normatively framed responses – but twists both perspectives by asking the following two questions. Firstly: If we assume a weakly institutionalized education system that is vulnerable to infringements from other systems (such as from the political system) and thus can be said to possess limited autonomy – how does that impact the agency of teachers? Will their agency diminish, along with their system's autonomy, or can it actually also increase? Secondly, and perhaps provocatively: is teacher agency always good?

The frst question hence attempts to destabilize our own thinking about how education systems (and their subsystems) interact with other systems, by including socio-political contexts which deviate from what could be called the 'prototypical' education system of the Global North. Such a perspective can help discern policypractice nexuses that are often hidden in 'prototypical' scenarios, such as the nexus linking individual teacher practices and political ideologies, as can be seen with the example of Teacher Zhu. The second question intends to make more explicit the normative connotations surrounding the concept of teacher agency. Academic discussions of 'teacher agency' are often framed within the emancipatory tradition of pedagogy, idealizing teacher agency as something inherently good (see e.g. Cloonan et al., 2019; Samoukovic, 2015). Rather than arguing for a removal of these underlying normative biases, this chapter aims to look into the workings of norms and values more systematically, in order to understand how norms and values co-produce the 'agentic teacher'.

The following section will address the potential interactions between teacher agency, professional autonomy, the education system, and what I call the wider environment, including e. g. the political and economic realms. In an ensuing section, I will then zoom in on the interrelations of autonomy and agency and present a nested model of these two concepts, which takes into account both systemic and agents-based interactions. In a fourth section, and based on the approach of the 'politics of use' which I have discussed elsewhere (Schulte, 2018), I will address the question of whether teachers, as street-level agents of the state, can actually gain more agency when the autonomy of their schools and of the wider education system becomes restricted. I have called this process 'side-stepping', since the state establishes new ways to form direct alliances with teachers and circumvents their professional environments, thereby bypassing acknowledged mechanisms of quality control and accreditation. By looking more closely at the nature of agency that teachers can develop within their given contexts, I am proposing different 'ideal types' of teachers linked to the specifc relationships between educational and political systems. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that we need to reconsider the ways in which we have conceptualized policy implementation processes. If we eclipse the political-ideological specifcities of both the investigated policy system and of our own research traditions, we may unnecessarily limit our capability to compare policy implementation processes across a broad variety of cases.

# **Teachers, Schools, the Education System, and the State: A Complicated Ménage à Quatre**

Teachers, schools, the education system, and the state are usually conceived as being embedded in a hierarchically structured system: the state sets the parameters and boundaries for the education system, which in turn produces and shapes the conditions for schools to operate, including the specifcs of teacher education and training, examination and assessment procedures, school inspection etc. At the bottom of this hierarchical system, schools defne the range within which teachers can meaningfully act. Depending then on the respective legal, political, and fnancial structures of governance, we tend to think about the entities of teachers, schools, and the education system as possessing more or less autonomy vis-à-vis the (hierarchically higher placed) entity that has the power to exert constraints.

But is autonomy merely the left-over space that is untouched by constraints? As Dworkin (2015) has pointed out, to defne 'autonomy' entails the dilemma of reducing the concept's complexity to the extent that it loses its theoretical power – which however has rendered 'autonomy' a crucial concept in the frst place. Still, Dworkin convincingly argues that 'autonomy' cannot be simply equated with 'freedom' or 'liberty'. He proposes that the concept must instead be understood as the "secondorder capacity of persons to refect critically upon their frst-order preferences, desires, wishes and so forth and the capacity to accept or attempt to change these in light of higher-order preferences and values." (Dworkin, 2015, p. 14) By redirecting the focus from the mere question of whether or not there is a constraint on freedom, to the question of *capacity*, we move away from an understanding of autonomy as mainly something measurable – such as having more or less autonomy – and instead link 'autonomy' to the extent and the ways in which people can make sense of and navigate their options, freedoms, and constraints.

However, the understanding of autonomy as the capacity for second-order, critical refection has its practical limitations: From what vantage point can we assess a refection to be 'critical', when the nature of critical thinking is itself highly dependent on the context in which an individual has been socialized? Can the refections by Teacher Zhu, who was introduced at the beginning of this chapter, be considered 'critical', since she calls into question teaching and testing practices, and adapts her teaching accordingly? Also, can frst and second-order thinking be clearly distinguished from one another in empirical reality? The latter question is particularly relevant with regard to teachers: If refection is a deeply engrained as well as widely expected part of teachers' everyday activities, can this activity then still be considered higher-order, or would we rather have to add a third-order level of refection – namely a level from which individuals such as teachers can refect upon the very fgure of the 'refective practitioner' (in the sense of Schön, 1983)? Moreover, if we think of individuals as being embedded in multiple ways – socially, emotionally, politically, professionally – how can such a capacity for higher-order refection develop independently, despite the many interdependencies that characterize social and professional lives?

The answer to these questions lies in incorporating, rather than ignoring, these interdependencies. Second- (or third-) order refection does not take place in a vacuum but is bound by norms, which again are produced by (and in turn keep alive) social-cultural, emotional, political, professional, etc. normative systems. This means that the capacity for refection does not develop in spite of, but because of these system's interactions with individuals (and groups of individuals). Depending on whose and what kind of autonomy we have in mind, these interactions will then by categorized on a spectrum between (illegitimate) interference and (welcome) support. To return to the case of teachers: If we see teachers primarily as professional facilitators of learning, teachers' capacity for second-order refection would then be expected to take place with reference to professional norms (developed within the education system). Any interference that suggests or prescribes other primary references (such as to cultural or political norms) would consequently be labeled as a breach of autonomy. If, however, we were to consider teachers primarily as, say, political or religious agents, the contrary would be the case: Refection oriented towards political or religious norms would be the autonomous default situation, whereas reference to other norms would mean encroachment.

These latter, so far hypothetical cases – teachers as political or religious agents – highlight the importance of environment, including the question of which environment serves as primary reference for conceptions of autonomy. From this perspective, autonomy has little to do with pure freedom, or the "comparative absence of regulation", as claimed by Priestley et al. (2015, p. 144), even though this might be the perception of involved agents (e.g., regarding the so-called 'freedom of teaching'). On the contrary, autonomy usually entails densely regulated systems (such as that of education or teaching), whose agents do not just endure, but engage in mechanisms of self-governance and (internal) control (cf. Mausethagen & Mølstad, 2015).

Inside these systems, autonomy within the professional work of teachers can assume different shapes. As has been shown in empirical studies, teachers can be autonomous in relation to different aspects of their work, such as lesson planning, choice of teaching methods, learning assessment etc. (Dieudé & Prøitz, 2022), as well as in relation to different domains (such as educational, social, developmental, administrative) and different levels (classroom, school, profession) (Wermke et al., 2019). Autonomy thus becomes a concept that is highly practice-related, and develops in relation to (sub-)systems of regulation. These system-specifc regulations do not simply constrain autonomy, but they actually enable autonomy to emerge: Strictly speaking, there would be no teacher autonomy if it wasn't for an educational system that defnes and refnes the rules, and hence creates the space for teachers that then comes to be understood as 'autonomy'. Archer comes to a similar conclusion when she notes that low autonomy entails the diffculty

to pursue goals which have been arrived at within that sphere; instead, institutional operations are defned externally by the party which constrains its services. *It is not interdependence as such which results in loss of autonomy but rather […] the emerging capacity of one part to direct and organize the other in accordance with its own operations*. (Archer, 1979, p. 62; my emphasis)

Following Archer's explication, we can place the organization of the education system on a scale between 'heteronomy' and 'autonomy': On one end of the scale, all organization is determined by the rules, norms, and laws of the 'other' (*hetero*); empirically, it would be very diffcult to fnd a pure heteronomous education system, since the mere existence of a system already entails a certain extent of autonomy. On the other end of the scale, organization is completely driven by the laws of the 'self' (*auto*), molding the respective system into a distinct system with specifc tasks and rules. It is from this vantage point – autonomy through specialization, or differentiation – that also Luhmann (2017, p. 114; emphasis in original) has approached the concept of autonomy:1

Autonomy is grounded in the *specifcs* of system-building operations and their structural condensates. […] The dependence on environment cannot be eliminated, on the contrary [the environment] needs to be seen as the precondition for these systems to exist, and it determines the direction of potential differentiations. We therefore defne autonomy as the operative closure of the system, and [we defne] operative closure of the system as the autopoietic reproduction of the system's elements through the network of precisely these elements. Therefore, we can understand the school as a social system, but not […] as a "micro-cosmos" of society within society. […] This [perspective] is absolutely compatible with legal regulations and fnancial dependencies as long as these are not used as sources of power in order to oppress pedagogical intentions and replace them by something else.

1This and all subsequent translations into English have been done by the author.

Simply put, such an understanding of autonomy proposes that autonomy exists when the system can do its own thing – 'its own thing' consisting e.g. of this system's rules, norms, rationales, and routines; while the system's legitimacy and, hence, existence derives from its capacity to produce such rules, and generate a suffcient extent of specifcity, in relation to other systems, in order to be recognized as a distinct system. While we may intuitively think of 'autonomy' as a right or entitlement, a systemic perspective highlights how 'autonomy' is also a "burden […] simply because no other functional system can fulfll the function of another [system]. The state can introduce compulsory education and cover the costs of schools and universities through tax revenues; as an organization of the political system, it cannot itself educate" (Luhmann, 2017, p. 116).

This dialectical approach towards autonomy makes also sense in light of professionalization, such as teacher training: 'autonomous' teachers are certainly not those who have *not* undergone any professional training, but who on the contrary are able to enact their professionally acquired skills and competences within the protected but regulated space of the educational system. To be sure, more recent calls for 'decolonializing' education and thereby 'unlearning' established ways to teach and learn may suggest otherwise (cf. Caruso & Maul, 2020). However, from a Luhmannian perspective, such developments hardly mean that teachers step out of the system; but rather that, through a partial opening of the system to the outside world, some rules are changed in such a way that autonomy can be exercised in new and different ways. Why systems open up is an essential question for understanding change, and will be taken up in the following section, when addressing the interrelations between autonomy and agency.

# **Autonomy and Agency: Same, Same, But Different?**