Peering into the kaleidoscope of equality: comparative perspectives on Nordic education policy

This special issue aims to highlight the comparative and international perspectives on education policy and practice in the Nordic region and other parts of the world. As an interdisciplinary and multifaceted research domain, comparative and international studies have a variety of thematic areas, themselves entailing a variety of theoretical premises, such as the construction of time and space (Nóvoa & YarivMashal, 2003) and the social origins of knowledge (Manzon, 2011). In addition, different approaches take different standpoints concerning what are considered the main driving forces and mechanisms behind cross-national attraction (Phillips & Ochs, 2003), the different interests of knowledge in researching policy borrowing and learning (SteinerKhamsi, 2012), or the different epistemologies used when trying to make sense of change and contingency (Kauko & Wermke, 2018). Exercising and defining comparative research might thus be described as peering into a kaleidoscope in which patterns of objects become visible and alive through the epistemological lenses the researcher has chosen to use. As in a kaleidoscope, the fascination of comparison is not in a static understanding of things per se, but in the dynamic relations and rotation of different thematic, methodological and theoretical perspectives. Nordic education affords an interesting object of research for this purpose. The Nordic education model is often related to the unique type of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) associated with the five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In general, the Nordic education model is often linked with various positive images such as pedagogical progressivism, high learning outcomes and social inclusion, all of which can also be used to legitimate different education policies elsewhere (Takayama, 2010; Waldow, 2017). When asked, Nordic education specialists describe the Nordic model as standing for social values, trans-Nordic cooperation, and a parallel social progression stretching from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present. Although the idea of the Nordic model is in many ways intertwined with the narrative of the progressive welfare state, it is also rooted in non-national social movements and institutions (Hansen, Wallenius, Juvonen, & Varjo, 2018). Furthermore, when the pursuit of the common good is emphasized, the narrative of the progressive state often falls silent in the face of the blind spots of state education, such as the mistreatment of northern minorities in education affairs (Anttonen, 2010). There are different approaches to the construction of time-space and explanations of change in education and society within Nordic comparative education. While some studies present ‘Nordic’ merely as a loose cultural and regional frame for understanding temporal events (Ahonen & Rantala, 2002; Buchardt, Markkola, & Valtonen, 2013) and contingent trajectories (Simola, Rinne, Varjo, & Kauko, 2013), most Nordic comparative research emphasizes the idea of a shared Nordic model born after World War II and developing steadily until the late 1980s, after which it was challenged by the individualization and economization of education (Aasen, 2003; Ahonen, 2014; Arnesen, Lahelma, Lundahl, & Øhrn, 2014; Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006; Blossing, Imsen, & Moos, 2014a; Telhaug, Medias, & Aasen, 2006). The challenge of individualization for the Nordic education model lies both in the realization of pupils’ pedagogical needs (see Carlgren, Klette, Mýrdal, Schnack, & Simola, 2006) and especially in how the policies of education as a public good are challenged by consumerist ideas and economic policies of markets and choice that cause social segregation and differentiation between schools (Dovemark et al., 2018). The economization of education is also related to a new governance by numbers which has emerged to serve both the needs of an output-orientated knowledge economy but also as a response to scientific and political concerns of a growing social and regional inequality of learning and teaching (Prøitz, Mausethagen, & Skedsmo, 2017). The articles for this special issue were gathered through an open call, but each emerged with a different perspective on equality. It may be that the Nordic image we discussed above is somehow connected with this focus, but we cannot be certain of this. What we do know is that when we peer into the comparative kaleidoscope, we see different views on equality in education. This special issue includes five papers approaching these timely questions. The first two focus on the possibilities and limits of assessment-based policy in the Nordic countries, a question strongly linked to equality (Simola et al., NORDIC JOURNAL OF STUDIES IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY 2018, VOL. 4, NO. 3, 117–119 https://doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2018. 1554317