TY - JOUR
T1 - Democracy and emancipation in teacher education
T2 - A summative content analysis of teacher educators’ democratic assignment expressed in policies for Teacher Education in Sweden and Ireland between 2000-2010
AU - Edling, Silvia
AU - Mooney Simmie, Geraldine
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
PY - 2018/4/1
Y1 - 2018/4/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - content analysis
KW - democracy
KW - emancipation
KW - policy documents
KW - teacher education
KW - theoretical frameworks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85045383027&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/2047173417743760
DO - 10.1177/2047173417743760
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85045383027
SN - 2047-1734
VL - 17
SP - 20
EP - 34
JO - Citizenship, Social and Economics Education
JF - Citizenship, Social and Economics Education
IS - 1
ER -