This article deals with how the increasing use of notions such as ‘risk awareness' and ‘blame’ in relation to school affects the daily work of Swedish teachers. With the help of empirical excerpts from documents and focus group interviews, the authors provide examples of how the introduction of the risk society and audit cultures encourages the creation of new strategies for coping. Two of these concern the mediation of ‘safe school’ images and preventions in order to avoid future blame. The authors depict them as strategies of assurance and insurance. The increasing handling of these strategies seems to draw attention away from relations to students and actual time spent on teaching. When considering an action, teachers seem to balance the risk of attracting blame against the didactic potential. Finally, the possibility of practices which reflect more positive risk logic is discussed.

This article is concerned with the early phase of international large-scale assessments. Drawing on media discussions before and after the release of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) surveys of 1973, the chapter discusses the relationship between international assessments, scandalisation, and descandalisation, with a specific focus on the interpretation of the comprehensive school reform in Sweden. The first section of this article deals with the early years of the 1970s, a time in which international data on education played a minimal role in educational discourse, creating space for other ways of discussing the perceived quality of schooling. The second section covers the effects of the IEA surveys released in 1973, whose positive results took Sweden by surprise, leading to what could be called a de-scandalisation. Finally, the implications of the emergence of international testing are analysed in terms of what de-scandalisation meant in this particular historical phase, and what it tells us about the nature of large-scale assessments.

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This article analyses international large-scale assessments in education from a temporal perspective. The article discusses and compares the different conceptions of time in the early international assessments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by the IEA with the PISA studies conducted by the OECD from the year 2000 onwards. The paper argues that there has been a shift in the ways that the assessments structure time. The early IEA surveys were characterized by a relative slowness, lack of synchronization and lack of trend analyses. PISA, by contrast, is characterized by high pace, simultaneous publication of results around the world and regular and recurrent studies making the analysis of trends possible. The emergence of this new time regime, it is argued, has implications for how education is governed. At the transnational level, it strengthens the influence and importance of OECD as a significant policy actor. At the national level, as educational discourse and policy adapts to the temporalities of the PISA calendar, two kinds of effects can be distinguished. First, there is a tendency towards searching for "retrotopian" solutions for contemporary problems. Second, there is a tendency towards acceleration and short-term planning when it comes to educational reforms. ARTICLE HISTORYWhen the Norwegian minister of education Torbjørn Røe Isaksen woke up early in the morning on December 6, 2016, he knew that it was a special day. In fact, it was "one of the most important days in my time as a minister. The PISA day. It had been written down in my calendar for at least a year." (Morgenbladet, 2016). The idea that there is a special day when the overall quality of a national school system is assessed says something about the peculiar nature of how education, in contrast to other societal sectors, is measured today. The economy and the environment are, to name two examples, measured on a continual basis. Education, by contrast, is with the PISA survey measured every third year and reported on a special day, accompanied by massive media coverage. Historically this is a new phenomenon, marking a new way in which education is measured and governed. What I call the "PISA calendar" refers to a new temporal regime in which international assessments are conducted regularly, reported swiftly and simultaneously across the whole world. The aim of the article is to explore how this temporal regime of international assessments emerged and the potential influence it has over educational policy and CONTACT Joakim Landahl

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between emotions, power and schooling. Focusing on elementary schools during the second half of the nineteenth century, when education for the masses in Sweden emerged, the article discusses the emotionology of early mass schooling. It is argued that the abolishment of the monitorial method in the second half of the nineteenth century contributed to the development of an increasingly emotional pedagogy. It is further argued that the concept of love was important, a concept with moral connotations where children were expected to love their school, country, parents and God. Furthermore, the emotional aspects of punishment are explored, exemplifying why emotions were considered important in maintaining discipline. Finally, drawing on the concepts of emotional labour and emotional community, it is argued that the school of the late nineteenth century in Sweden was characterised by a tight relationship between labour and community.