Evidence and What Works strategies in US Teacher Education and K12 Policy: Exploring transatlantic policy borrowings and effects hereof

The project will explore how recent US policies in teacher education and K12 have developed. I intend to explore how these policies address:
- federal/national, state and municipal debates about the purpose of school, e.g. the balances between disciplinary performance, social and citizenship competences, Bildung/broader liberal arts approaches to becoming a full human being, school as a vehicle for economic growth and the like;
- the balance between teachers autonomy/ room for discretion versus accountability according to pre-set standards.
- which kinds of educational research and pedagogical theory that can be legitimately employed in relation teacher education and K12 issues.
I will contrast the knowledge produced with my knowledge of similar Nordic and European developments in order to make visible differences and commonalities. I will explore the complex issue of how policy agendas develop in the interplay between federal, state and municipal levels, and how this affects US agency in transnational forums.
Altogether, my objective with this work is to chart considerable contextual knowledge about US developments. This aims at enhancing my abilities to appreciate and critically evaluate what transatlantic policy borrowings entail, i.e. how US and Nordic/European policy strategies affect and are affected by each other in transnational policy forums, in overt as well as more implicit forms. All this will be done in a politics of knowledge perspective, i.e. an interest in unraveling how K12 and teacher education are transformed at a policy level as relative power positions between policy, market and science/education are being reconfigured as education moves up higher on the policy agenda.