Opening the black box of editors’ work

Abstract

This issue consists of four peer-reviewed articles, and two nonreviewed texts: a book review and a discussion paper. The publication of any text in a journal takes part in the knowledge production in multiple ways. Firstly, in research, the selection of the topic is inherently political in nature: What are the topics that are brought to the fore and how? The topics of the articles published in this issue, digitalization, teacher autonomy in highstakes and low-stakes accountability governance models, public–private partnerships in education and reforms related to educare of school-age children reflect the changing context of education policy in the Nordic countries. The changing education policy context compels researchers to acknowledge the complexity of power relations and governance in teachers’, students’ and children’s lives. Secondly, the peer review process that is an essential part of scholarly discussion both adds to, and is part of, the knowledge-making process, and this collaborative work between authors, reviewers and editors has epistemic consequences beyond a particular publication. Therefore, discussing the nature and principles of the publication process, including peer review and editorial work, is vital for the whole field of education policy research. This editorial will focus on this topic, epistemic power of publication process. Before diving into this topic, we will introduce the four articles of this issue. In the first article of this issue, Marita Ljungqvist and Anders Sonesson examine the discourses related to the digitalization of education. They ask what the values embedded in the argumentation promoting the acceleration of digitalization in education are. They demonstrate how policy argumentation related to digitalization is characterized by a reductionist neoliberal framing of education. In this discourse, students are represented as entrepreneurial citizens with a moral obligation to renew human capital by adapting to market demands. The educational system is constructed as a flexible and automated infrastructure in which teaching is framed as ‘facilitating’. In the second article, Ana Lucia Lennert da Silva examines teacher autonomy in different models of educational governance. The author uses quantitative data from the OECD TALIS 2018 to compare experienced autonomy of teachers in countries with a highstakes accountability governance model and countries with a low-stakes accountability model. In addition, the author uses qualitative interview data from a study on teacher autonomy conducted in Norway and Brazil. Here, the argument is that teachers perceive that they have good control over teaching and planning at the classroom level, regardless of the model. The responses might reflect the views of what is considered possible – autonomy horizons are different depending on the context. The teachers also report that they experience low social value and low policy influence, which raises questions concerning what we mean by teacher autonomy, for example, in policy discussions. Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen explores the topic of public–private partnership in education by presenting a Danish case of setting up a new secondary school in a collaboration involving municipal schools and more than 20 private-sector companies in the third article of this issue. By drawing on the sociology of engagement – especially the concepts of engagement in exploration, familiarity and planned action – the article explores the diverse forms of engagement established in studied public–private partnerships. Carlsen argues that the relations between public and private actors in the studied partnership manifest as a particular form, which Carlsen conceptualizes as ‘a familiar stranger’. A familiar stranger form of engagement combines both exploratory and familiar forms of mutual engagements. Further, the study shows that the management of partnership entails building up mutual engagement but importantly also of ‘handling conflicts and clashes between the differing forms of mutual engagement and of dealing with situations where they fail’. In these ways, Carlsen offers a critical look at the public–private partnership engagements that current education policies in many contexts have a strong belief in. In the fourth peer-reviewed article published in this issue, Richard Andersson examines policies related to school-age educare in the Swedish context. Swedish school-age educare has been the object of multiple government-enforced reform initiatives. A teacher certification reform has been imposed to concretize responsibilities between professionals and regulate hiring procedures to raise the number of qualified personnel. At the same time, Sweden has been battling a severe teacher shortage, including teachers certified for school-age educare. Andersson explores the local responses to this policy dilemma. The article focuses on the ways in which reform demands have been translated into organizational NORDIC JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY 2022, VOL. 8, NO. 2, 85–88 https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2022.2116850