This presentation focuses on recent reforms in Swedish education concerning new grades and extended use of national tests in grade six, and how this extensive reform comes to play in everyday practices in schools. Schools today have to be able to handle a multitude of policy initiatives that get introduced with increasing pace in the new education economy. Not least has several studies on the effects of schools marketization showed how this results in higher demands for schools to produce information about themselves and the students to inform and guide families school choices as well as governments control and inspection  (Ball, 2006; Löfdahl &Pérez Prieto, 2009; Löfgren, 2012).The new national tests and grades in year 6 are examples of policymaking that has the capacity of producing high stake information about the actors in schools (teachers, school leaders and students) as well as information about schools in terms of competitiveness and results in relation to given standards. Here we take an interest in the consequences this could have from the students’ perspective.

Policy reforms are often studied in terms of implementation, i.e. measuring schools’ responses to different specific policy initiatives. As an alternative approach, in recent years the concept of enactment has been used within policy research as an analytical tool for the understanding of how policy gets translated into practice by actors on different levels (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2012; Singh, Heimans & Glasswell, 2014; Tanner & Pérez Prieto, 2014). The concept of policy enactment is used to address the complexities in institutional policymaking not only referring to policy as top-down steering from governments through organizational structures, but as something that is interpreted on all levels by different actors in the school system (Ball et al., 2012).

Most studies on a school level focus on school leaders and teachers, whereas the students often remain unnoticed as actors in policy practice. We have in previous studies argued for the importance of including students’ perspectives in studies of policy enactment, and have suggested new methods for how this could be explored (Pérez Prieto & Tanner, 2013; Tanner & Pérez Prieto, 2014). In this presentation we continue to develop this line of work in relation to the new reforms on grades and national tests in year six. Using conversation analysis (CA) as a methodological approach we explore how these policies are interpreted and realized in student interactions within the school context, and how this helps to produce and re-produce policy discourses in schools today. The aim is to describe how the reform is being made in interaction from the students’ perspective. We depart from the following research questions:

• How are national tests and grades oriented to in students’ interaction?

• How do students position themselves in relation to these changed assessment practices in different situations?

This study is part of a larger project about students’ experiences of doing national tests and getting grades in sixth grade, where in total more than 150 students in 7 schools have been interviewed. Within the larger project, this presentation builds on a complementary video-ethnographic substudy where three groups from two different schools have been followed during preparation and realization of national tests in the subjects of social sciences and natural sciences. The data material in the substudy consists of more than 30 hours of video recordings from classroom interaction in three different groups in two schools, 7 video recorded group interviews with students focusing on their experiences of getting grades and 7 video recorded group interviews with students about doing national tests. From this data different examples where students position themselves to these assessment practices are selected for further analysis on how this policy reform gets interpreted. The selected data consists of different kinds of interactions; between students, between teacher and students or interactions within an interview setting.

To visualize new aspects of how policy is constituted in the interaction between different actors in school, we make a somewhat unusual methodological combination of policy studies and interactional analysis, where we use the inductive approach of conversation analysis (CA) focusing on the institutionally framed interaction within the school context (Drew & Heritage 1992; Heritage, 1997). CA aims at studying human sociality as it is organized in people’s talk-in-interaction and how they together create shared meanings in relation to context (c.f. Hutchby &Wooffitt, 2008). Whereas early CA studies mainly focused on verbal talk in everyday situations, there is now within CA an increasing interest in to how verbal and non-verbal resources such as gesture, gaze and material artefacts are coordinated in human interaction (Goodwin, 2000; 2007). In this study the use of video recordings makes these kinds of multimodal analysis possible. Here we view the participants’ interpretations of policy as social actions, and explore how these kinds of policy practices is being made in student interaction through the use of different kinds of available semiotic resources. 

Even though the combination of CA and the theoretical concept of policy enactment require careful methodological considerations, we find a substantial gain in the way it makes possible new understandings of how students position themselves in relation to educational policy. Preliminary results show how students position themselves as competent actors in relation to peers, teachers and family as they talk about tests and grades. In the interactions they negotiate strategies for coping with expectations and increasing pressure, while at the same time playing down the importance of tests and grades in for example comparisons with friends or in relation to final grades in year nine. To a large extend they position themselves as being responsible for making changes and increasing their efforts to achieve good results. But in the empirical data are also examples of how students’ position themselves in relation to increased demands on teachers and schools, and expectations to produce good results in competition with other schools in a marketized education system.

References 

Ball, S. J. (2006). Performativities and fabrications in the education economy: Towards the performative society. In H. Lauder, P. Brown, J-A. Dillabough & A. H. Halsey (Eds.), Education, globalization & social change (pp. 692-701). New York: Oxford University Press.

Ball, S. J., Maguire, M. & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactment in secondary schools. London: Routledge.

Drew, P., & Heritage, J. (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin, C. (2000a). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489-1522. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00096-X

Goodwin, C. (2007). Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society, 18(1), 53-73. doi:10.1177/0957926507069457

Heritage, J. (1997). Conversational analysis and institutional talk. I D. Silverman (Red.), Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice (ss. 161-182). London: Sage.

Hutchby, I., & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation analysis (2. uppl.). Cambridge: Polity

Löfdahl, A. & Pérez Prieto, H. (2009). Between control and resistance: Planning and evaluation texts in the Swedish preschool. Journal of Education Policy 4(24), 293-408. 

Löfgren, H. (2012). Det sitter inte i väggarna: Identiteter i lärares berättelser om skola och arbete [It is not in the walls – Professional identities in teachers’ stories about school and work). Doctoral dissertation, Karlstad: Karlstad University Studies. 

Pérez Prieto, H. & Tanner, M. (2014): Fabricando buenos alumnos: autoevaluación y negociación en la escuela sueca. I C. Peláez-Paz & M.I. Jociles (Eds) Estudios etnográficos de las políticas públicas en contextos educativos. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños

Singh, P.,  Heimans, S.  & Glasswell, K. (2014) Policy enactment,context and performativity: ontological politics and researching Australian National Partnership policies, Journal of Education Policy, 29:6, 826-844 

Tanner, Marie; Pérez Prieto, Héctor (2014) In between self-knowledge and school demands: Policy enacted in the Swedish middle year classroom. Discourse. Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2014, volym 35 (5)