This chapter provides an introduction to the European case study chapters in this volume on curriculum making. The chapter explores different conceptions of curriculum and curriculum making. It offers a critique of existing thinking about curriculum making as something that occurs within reified levels within an educational system. Such thinking often construes curriculum making as occurring through linear and hierarchical chains of command from policy to practice. Drawing upon previous conceptualizations of curriculum making, the chapter develops a new approach to understanding curriculum making. This is a heuristic rather than a normative framing; it is essentially non-linear, framed around the concept of intertwined sites of activity -supra, macro, meso, micro and nano -within complex systems, with curriculum making framed as types of activity rather than institutional functions.

To cite this article: Daniel Alvunger (2018): Teachers' curriculum agency in teaching a standardsbased curriculum, The Curriculum Journal,

This is the published version of a paper published in Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice. Citation for the original published paper (version of record):Alvunger, D., Wahlström, N. (2018) Research-based teacher education? Exploring the meaning potentials of Swedish teacher education ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore the meaning potentials of teacher education in terms of the significance of a research-based approach and the different pedagogic identities that such an approach implies. The study's aim is to examine the important factors for education to be considered research-based and to identify and analyse the research base of teacher education in Sweden. The results from the analysis of a large number of course documents and from a survey administered to teachers and students in four teacher education programmes indicate that the emerging potential meaning is that teacher education is generally a strongly framed professional education with a relatively weak and adapted research base. The analysis of the classification and framing of disciplinary content and pedagogy in the Swedish teacher education curriculum points at different pedagogic identities emerging from the different meaning potentials that are made available to the students. We argue that a thorough understanding of research-based teacher education needs to be grounded in both course content and its research base as well as other possible pedagogical aspects of research-based education; the education as a whole must be included in the concept of research-based education.The purpose of this study is to explore and problematise the meaning of research-based teacher education and to consider the influence of different meaning potentials on teacher-students' pedagogical identities. 1The study's aim is to examine the important factors for education to be considered research-based and to identify and analyse the research base of teacher education in four different teacher education programmes in national Swedish teacher education. The study's theme is current in many countries, and Sweden is used here as an example. The following three research questions have been formulated to guide the study: (1) The first section of the article introduces the concept of research-based teacher education and the study's theoretical and methodological frameworks. The second section presents the results from the literature analysis of selected courses from four teacher education programmes in Sweden. The third section reports the results from a teacher and student survey. The fourth and final section critically examines and discusses the results of the study in terms of potential meanings and pedagogic identities.

In 2013, the Swedish government launched a reform of career services for teachers that introduced fö rstelä rare ('first teacher') as a new category. This article presents results from an ongoing research project about the implementation of the reform in a municipal local context in public schools with attention to leadership practices fö rstelärare engage in and the impact on the educational leadership of the principals. The theoretical framework for the analysis provides perspectives on the interdependencies between and within different levels and subsystems in the school organisation through the concepts of nested learning systems and distributed leadership. The main results indicate that the introduction of fö rstelärare strengthens the idea of distributed leadership through the fact that fö rstelärare engage in leadership practices mandated by the principals. However, it also challenges existing collegial structures through an increased need for collaboration and interaction among both principals and fö rstelärare.

In this paper, we theorize on local school governance through a multi-method case study of a large-sized Swedish municipality by drawing on neo-institutional theory. In light of a changing governing landscape in Sweden in terms of a 're-centralization', new conditions between the state, the local education authorities (LEA) and the schools have emerged. The aim of this study is to examine what policy actions the LEA employ for governing the school and in what ways that principals respond and handle these policy actions. The results point to the fact that the LEA uses a bench-marking strategy through its quality assurance system and intervene if results are poor. Principals seek support from the LEA, but are anxious that their autonomy will be diminished and therefore function as 'gate-. The system for quality assurance is appreciated by principals, but standards aimed at framing discursive communication on quality are criticized. Principals turn to managers below the superintendent, which creates a tension between managers. The study shows that different levels and actors must be taken into account in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the multilayered field of local policy enactment.