Teacher politics bottom-up: theorising the impact of micro-politics on policy generation

Abstract

Education policy is generally understood as a multi-layered process, consisting of diverse interconnected phases. Studies of these interconnections typically ask whether and how the generation of official policy from the top-down affects micro-politics, i.e. how teachers experience and execute their work. The assumption that policy is influenced in the reverse direction is widely held, but has seldom been studied empirically. Little is known, therefore, about how this dynamic operates. This study delineates mechanisms that link teachers' micro-politics to the macro-politics of policy generation. Analytically, it combines concepts from the literature on teacher involvement in macro-and micro-politics in order to develop a framework bridging the two. Empirically, it harnesses the theoretical potential of Swiss language education policy, tracing the process of reforms through which teachers, though formally excluded from policy-making, were able to influence the choice of languages included in official curricula. The analysis identifies three mechanisms through which they exerted influence: voicing experience, subversive enactment, and open resistance. None of these are dependent upon higher levels of teacher unionisation or particular institutions of governance. These findings highlight the importance of engaging with the processual dimension of politics to advance our theories of educational policy.

Welfare conditionality and policy contingencies of school‐allowance retractions in Sweden

“…Veto points have previously been used in policy implementation research to explore the causes behind a specific policy outcome and involve situations where an actor or a set of actors have the capacity to impede implementation of stipulated rules (Schneider et al, 2019; Zehavi, 2012). This approach becomes reasonable if we consider the fact that teachers and school staff, due to their street‐level position in the school system, usually have the capacity to block the guidelines of a policy if they deviate too much from their organisational context or professional preferences (Guidici, 2021). Blockings of this type were also described during the pilot interviews, where organisational aspects, professional norms, and concern over students' social situations seemed to cripple a strict approach to reporting.…”

Bridging gaps: a systematic literature review of brokerage in educational change

“…As these facets only corresponded marginally, researchers need to carefully consider how to define and operationalize brokerage in a study. Another study examined teachers influencing policy generation from the bottom by applying a micro-political perspective (Giudici, 2021 ). These often-informal ways and hidden mechanisms of teachers actively generating new policies might be further illuminated by combining the two perspectives of micro-politics in education and brokerage.…”