The Copenhagen 2019 Symposium is the third of three symposia arranged by the same organizing committee, with the previous two held in Uppsala, 2014 & Oslo, 2017.
Participants have the opportunity to submit a 1000-word abstract focused on the symposium topic. If accepted by the organising committee, abstracts will be discussed in Masterclasses with a mix of junior and senior researchers in order to develop the abstracts into full papers, to be submitted to an edited volume three months after the symposium.
Abstracts must be submitted no later than 16 May 2019 – a response can be expected by 30 May.
Maximum length: 1000 words with title, author name and email address.
The 2017 conference in Oslo was the source for a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE) Vol 2 No 2-3 (2018): Leading and organizing education for citizenship of the world. https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/nordiccie/issue/view/335
The 2014 conference in Uppsala developed a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy (NordSTEP): Educational Leadership in Transition NordSTEP 2015:3. https://dx.doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.30410
We will point to phenomena and conditions for schools and school leadership that are often forgotten in educational discourses and policies, but nevertheless are important aspects of educational and leadership practice:
a. Much educational reform is premised on normalising the idea that those who run schools are leaders and that their work is leadership. We want to critically review the situation and operate on the basis that the people who are required to be leaders, who lead and exercise leadership, are first and foremost educational professionals.
b. National authorities believe in data driving: learning, teaching and leadership must be based on solid data including evidence based on general standards for learning and measurements and comparisons hereof. The reasons for compiling and using data are often obscure, but need to be made known and discussed by researchers and practitioners.
c. If policies, routines and actions are maladapted to concrete school settings, leaders are forced to act and make decisions based on their personal agency and expertise rather than existing structures and frameworks. Their actions have effects on the context outside school, intersections of global, local and national education policy.
d. Relations between material frames, organisational structures and social relations are important in both educational practice and research because the practical construction of schools as spheres of work and learning is as important as theoretical reflections.
e. Contemporary educational policies are often designed to focus on students’ acquisition of basic skills, but schools also need to focus on themes like democracy, equity, social skills and communication, inclusion, immigration, sustainability and local cultures.
