Selected research publications

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  • The Teacher and The State: A Comparative Analysis of Nordic and East Asian Nations
    • Description: The Teacher and the State explores the dynamic relationship between the state and teachers using a theory of global cultural dynamics. Through a comparison of eight Nordic and East Asian regions, the authors examine how interactions between teachers and the state influenced the teaching profession, educational policies, reforms, and social capacities.

      The book explores the responses of regional and national actors to international reforms and policy discussions within a globally influenced education system. The authors illustrate how, over time, the teaching profession has been pivotal in shaping national identity, generating human capital, and more recently, enhancing a society’s ability to adapt to change. In a world where global forces can significantly impact national education, they examine how regional and national actors respond uniquely to globally spreading reforms and transnational policy dialogues.

      This is a valuable resource for graduate courses in comparative education, international politics, and teacher education. It provides extensive historical, qualitative, and quantitative data linked to core theories, and critiques the impact of globalization on academic research, engaging with global governance theories to refine assumptions about organizational power in a globalized world.
    • Link to buy the book: https://bookstore.emerald.com/the-teacher-and-the-state-hb-9781836629931.html
  • From an age of measurement to an evidence era? Policy-making in teacher education in England
    • Abstract: The Department for Education (DfE) in England seeks to determine the actions of educationists in both the public and private sectors through the use of targeted instructive documents and white papers where broader policy intention is presented. Since 2010, as we will show, there has been a shift in the nature of such papers towards justification with ‘evidence’ and transparency through referencing in a ‘scientific’ style, with ramifications for both how policy is justified and the contestation of practices in education. This leads us to suggest that we are in an ‘evidence era’ where a dominant rationalized myth centres on the use of ‘evidence’ to justify practice. Meanwhile, how ‘evidence’ is constructed as research is undertaken, and how it is transformed as it enters a political environment, are important questions that are often overlooked. In this text, we analyse the change in ‘evidence’ practices before and after 2010, consider why the practices changed, and infer the effects the changes have had on the wider education environment.
    • Full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2020.1748722
  • The Importance of Context: Teacher Education Policy in England and France Compared
    • Abstract: This chapter discusses how England and France are on contrasting paths in teacher education. The paths are driven by reforms and policies by their respective central governments, and have had ramifications for how the teacher, through their prescribed education, is conceptualized in the two countries over time. In England, changes since the 1980s till today have been addressed as a turn to the practical as school-based training has come to dominate teacher education. Meanwhile, the official image of the ideal teacher in England has arguably gone from “scholar” to “self-improving craftsperson.” In France, changes in the same time period are a from a teachers’ college model centered on practical pedagogy for the primary teacher and a university focused subject mastery model for the secondary teacher toward a common model of university-based teacher education, with a broad emphasis on theory of learning, practical experience, and subject knowledge for all teachers. The conceptual changes in France are centered on harmonization between the primary and secondary teachers toward a universalist teacher who is obliged to master all facets of the modernizing profession. This text discusses these changes in relation to three different contexts of policy: influence, text production, and practice.
    • Full text: https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-030-59533-3_75-1
  • The Global and the Local: Idea flows, contexts, and the influencing of education policy in the 21st century
    • Abstract: This chapter, under the format of an essay, discusses the importance of context in comparative education analysis and for understanding teacher education policy. It looks at the global context from the age of enlightenment to the age of PISA and TALIS, the regional context of the Bologna Process and European integration, and the local context of teacher education in England and France. This essay, rich in references to the current cannon in teacher education analysis, can be seen as providing an overview of, and entry point for, scholars who desire further knowledge on the interaction between the global and the local in teacher education.
    • Full text: https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal:275881
  • One thing can be more than one thing: a comparative study of the teacher professionalization app ‘TeacherTapp’
    • Abstract: This article analyses the smartphone application TeacherTapp that is used to collect and disseminate information on teachers’ views on education and their classroom practices. The research takes as its object of analysis the use of TeacherTapp in England and Flanders. We analyze what TeacherTapp is, how it relates to a given localized community in its form and function, as well as how it impacts education by re-shaping discourse on teaching. We find that this technology is a ‘multiple enactment’ that is articulated, used, and viewed differently between England and Flanders as well as in different contexts of use. We furthermore find that this multiple enactment centers on the complexities of the participatory data streams’ flowing from, and generated by, the app. We conclude that TeacherTapp enables new forms of participatory datafication in education that constitutes new modes of enacting teachers’ professional voice as a teacher professionalization app.
    • Full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439884.2023.2226876