ABSTRACT
As part of globalised policies on knowledge change in institutions of higher education, those of the European Union and Bologna Process seek to promote curricular reorganisation. Our exploration of national and institutional responses to such policies assumes that understanding them requires analysis of global, regional and national contexts. As the locus of specialised knowledge and research lacking an official recontextualising field (Bernstein, 2000: 60), differences between higher education institutions provide an important dimension in any analysis of change in knowledge organisation. We also assume that academics working in the wide field of Educational Studies tend to feel the embedded contradictions and pressures of policies more than others. Education as a field of study within universities provides a privileged point of entry into questions of how policies (or reforms) influence organisational structure, activity and curriculum. First, the importance attributed to education at present by politicians and media inclines the boundary between its public and academic discourses to become more permeable (Nóvoa, 2007). Research findings are often appropriated by supranational (e.g. EU) and international (e.g. OECD) organisations and agencies in the creation of dominant discourses on societal change and transformation. Second, renewed interest in school teachers’ ‘professionalism’ is a source of pressure upon educational academics and researchers (Hextall et al., 2007; Ball, 2005; Goodson and Norrie, 2005). Third, as educationists seek opportunities, including funding of research projects, that ‘take them out’ of their academic and institutional boundaries, there is an increased risk of being pulled in the direction of doing only policy-driven work focusing on what is ‘useful’, ‘relevant’ and ‘what works’ (Tsatsaroni et al., 2009). It is likely that university departments of education in countries that are otherwise very diverse share certain historical features that tend to affect staff positioning on dominant policy discourse. Historically, departments of education have tended to resolve identity conflict entailed by changes in their institutional status by sometimes cutting themselves off from school developments. While current
pressures on academics might reinscribe hard-won positions and understandings of what it means to be educational researchers, what counts tends to be only what is rewarded in research-assessment processes. Simultaneously, requirements to develop research or teaching activities of relevance to schools (Middleton, 2004; Goodson, 1999; Nixon et al., 2000) raise questions of how tension between orientation to schools’/teachers’ professional formation and to academic research and disciplines is played out by education academics seeking to exploit an outward-looking identity but lacking elite status.
