Democracy and emancipation in teacher education: A summative content analysis of teacher educators’ democratic assignment expressed in policies for Teacher Education in Sweden and Ireland between 2000-2010

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Abstract

How questions concerning democracy and emancipation thread through teacher education is currently under theorized and there is a paucity of cross-national studies examining the problem. In this study, we draw from a number of theoretical frameworks for their discursive positioning of democracy and emancipation in teacher education and what we are calling teacher educators’ democratic assignment. The framework allowed us to identify key words which we then used for a limited content analysis of policy documents in two European countries, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland, in two separate timelines 2000/2002 and 2010/2012. Our findings indicate that despite significant cultural and contextual differences between the two education systems, key words linked to democracy and emancipation have significantly decreased in policy documentation in both countries in this timeline. This prompts our hypothesis that a paradigm shift has occurred in the discursive positioning of teacher educators’ democratic assignment. The findings suggest the need for a deeper discourse analysis of the four documents as the next phase in the research design. The findings while tentative have implications, well beyond two nation states, for contemporary issues in teacher education and society that require collective consciousness and action.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)20-34
Number of pages15
JournalCitizenship, Social and Economics Education
Volume17
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2018

Keywords

  • content analysis
  • democracy
  • emancipation
  • policy documents
  • teacher education
  • theoretical frameworks

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