Musiklärarprofession på vetenskaplig grund. Iscensättningar på tre policyarenor

Policy work for a scientific foundation in Swedish schools, formalized in the 2010 Education Act (SFS 2010:800), has involved a multitude of actors across various policy arenas. However, debates in policy and research show an ongoing discursive struggle over how such a foundation should be achieved. The aim of this thesis is to critically examine and discuss policy work for a scientific foundation in Swedish schools, with the music teaching profession as a case. The thesis examines how policy is enacted in three educational policy arenas and how such enactments contribute to constructions of music teaching as a profession. Here, music teachers offer an illuminating case, given the profession’s historical autonomy vis-à-vis policy and its heterogeneous professional knowledge base. The study draws on critical policy sociology, in which policy is understood not as rational problem-solving to be implemented, but as politically positioned problematizations, governance intentions, and enactments through texts and discourses by a multiplicity of policy actors. Data included texts published by the Swedish National Agency of Education, the Swedish teacher unions, and a music teacher association, as well as transcripts of group conversations with local teacher teams of upper secondary music teachers. The analyses operationalized Stephen J. Ball et al.’s concepts of policy as text and policy as discourse, and Carol Bacchi’s WPR framework. Discourse psychology served as a microanalytical lens for the teacher conversations. The results show a policy apparatus and discourses for ideal teacher professionalism in the agency texts, an evidence-resistant policymaker discourse in the occupational organizations’ texts, and a discourse of scientized experience and praxis in the local teacher conversations. Across the studied arenas, music teachers emerge as epistemically limited policy subjects, since research specifically related to music education and music teachers’ professional practice is largely absent from the policy discourses. Scientific foundation is constructed through top-down governance, legitimation work, and the scientization of experience-based knowledge. In the concluding discussion, these findings are related to the teaching profession more broadly. Building on Patrick Schmidt’s concept of policy know-how, policy know-why is proposed as a complementary resource for teachers’ professional knowledge.