Keywords

The overarching idea behind this book is to explore the relationship between education policy and education practice. The translation of policy into practice is complex and addresses several issues, different stakeholders, and radically different connotations. In the literature, we can identify various theories and reflections, principally exploring and conceptualizing the complexity of policy formulation and the relationship and connections between policy and practice. We can also detect more operative theories and explorations of the specific actions dealing with this complexity and attempt to bridge the gap between policy and practice.

Through the contributions of several scholars, the ambition of this edition is to revisit, describe, illuminate, and further develop theoretical positions and empirical approaches that have been on the agenda in various traditions within educational policy studies. This volume contributes with both theoretical and empirical studies to the interplay between policy, educational practice, and the social realities of science, drawing attention to knowledge production and application and the processes of implementation, change, and innovation. As such, the various book chapters not only connect well with the book series Policy Implications of Research in Education but also offer studies on and discuss the very relationships between policy and practice and research. The book also offers insights into more critical aspects concerning both the understanding of such relationships and policy, practice, and research relationships, focusing on the varied perspectives of these connections involving a range of interests and knowledge domains in different settings.

To stress the importance of these relationships between policy and practice, we put forward a particular term, nexus, which means “connection” or “link.”Footnote 1 We argue that this link holds an analytical place of its own right, and this is the edition’s contribution to the scholarship: focusing on the very relation between policy and practice. This involves an effort of identifying and scrutinizing the nexuses where policy and practice intersect, meet, and integrate but also collide, conflict, or contradict.

Central Concepts and Understandings

The aim of the book is to explore the relationship between education policy and practice from different perspectives and operationalizations to clarify the conceptual and theoretical basis of policy–practice relationships. This requires a presentation of the central concepts for this book. We start with the concepts of education policy and education practice, followed by another central concept for this book and for our understanding of the relationship between policy and practice – the political context. The selection of chapters has been guided by a search for significant cases of policy–practice relationships embedded in different educational political contexts, as they can be employed to increase our understanding of the complex nature of these nexuses. An ambition to shed light on the connection between policy and practice in different political contexts follows from this but without being concerned with the prevalence of the described relationship within the various contexts. Through the various chapters, the aim of this volume is to analyze and understand the nexus and the translation of policy into practice as phenomena across the various contexts from the Global North, with cases from the United States, China, Germany, Sweden, Greenland/Denmark, Norway, and Scotland.

In the following of this introductory we provide the reader with some operationalisations of the three central concepts relevant for the volume’s contributions: policy, practice, and political context.

Policy

A policy is typically described as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome(s). Policy refers to the what and why generally adopted by governance bodies within the public and private sectors. A policy can be considered a statement of intent or a commitment. Policy can further be described as basic principles for the actions of a society or an organization in general or in a certain respect, usually, but not necessarily, laid down in laws or plans.

In the literature, Ball (2021, p. 19) has pointed out how policies, as a semantic and ontological force, play a part in the construction of a “social world of meanings, of problems, causes, and effects, of relationships, of imperatives and inevitabilities,” and that by attending to language and rhetorical constructions of education policy, the histories of policies and links across and within policy fields can be studied.

Public policy, according to Rizvi and Lingard (2009), refers to the actions and positions taken by the state. A characteristic of public policy is the involvement of a range of institutions that share authority and collectivity. They underscore that although decisions are central in policy, an individual decision in isolation does not constitute policy; rather, policy “expresses patterns of decisions in the context of other decisions taken by political actors on behalf of state institutions from positions of authority” (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009, p. 4). They have also pointed out that public policies are normative—often express ends and means aiming to steer the actions and behaviors of people (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009).

However, education policy cannot be understood if we limit our interest to decisions that define ambitions, goals, and legal, financial, and pedagogical measures. To understand policy, we also need to focus on disagreements and conflicts of interest in the policymaking process and in the implementation of education reforms at the school level. Thus, policymaking processes must also be understood in terms of politics. Politics involves the processes by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, but politics can also be observed in other group interactions and settings, including schools and academic institutions. Politics, in this broader sense, consists of social relations involving authority or power and refers to the regulation of affairs within a political unit and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy. The concept of politics draws our attention to processes that determine “who gets what, when, and how” (Aasen et al., 2014).

Practice

Education practice is actions developed from the planning and systematization of the dynamics of policymaking processes and education processes to the concrete realization of learning. Thus, practice is a definite way of dealing with specific problems in local and timely configurations. In this volume, we investigate both political and professional education practices. Practice can be investigated by decision-making in certain situations. In the words of Archer (1988), what we empirically observe is always the present, situated historically:

As Markovic expresses it, both “past and future” are living in the present. Whatever human beings do in the present is decisively influenced by the past and by the future. […] The future is not something that will come later, independently of our will. There are several possible futures and one of them has to be made. (p. xxvi)

What we investigate empirically is also always local (in a very particular space) and possible to observe as a practice. Thus, when we investigate practice in relation to policy, we string together present, local, practical, and analytical units. Time becomes our analytical device. Each unit conditions the next. It is always the prior development of ideas (from earlier interactions) that conditions the current context of the analyses. While the selection of (national and sectorial) cases become critical, comparisons may contribute to uncovering the different layers of universality and particularity (i.e., what is broadly universal, what is possible to generalize, and what is unique to the given instance and political context).

Political Context

A political context or polity is the inherent material/structural, cultural, and social settings in which policy and practice are embedded, such as a nation, local communities, or institutions. Political systems of governance and power relations, as well as political thought and behavior, constitute contexts that are crucial both for the design and understanding of both policy and practice.

The foregoing is in line with what Lingard and Rizvi (2020) emphasizes in Dale’s (1999) note on the importance of understanding changes in education policy considering broader political and economic shifts. Here, the prominent example of the move from the Keynesian welfare state and bureaucratic structures and rationalities to newer ways of educational governance, where globalization and changing spatialities have become highly central.

Another well-known example of our understanding of political contexts at the nation-state level is Esping-Andersen’s (1990) categorization of three types of advanced capitalist welfare state regimes and their impact on policy formation: a social-democratic, a conservative, and a liberal. The concept of welfare state regimes denotes the institutional arrangements, rules, and understandings that guide and shape concurrent social policy decisions, expenditure developments, and problem definitions. The existence of policy regimes reflects the circumstance that short-term policies, reforms, debates, and decision-making take place within frameworks of historical institutionalization that differ qualitatively between countries (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

The political contextual perspective underlines the importance of understanding nexuses for what they are within their locations. This includes an analysis of the role of the nation-state, local communities, and schools in the context of the changing spatialities and politics associated with growing globalization (Dale, 1999).

The context can further be described by situational or contingency factors, states, or conditions that are associated with the use of certain policy and practice parameters (Mintzberg, 1989). As such, the cases in this book represent various configurations of context, framing the time and space of both policy and practice and the relations between them.

The purpose of applying cases in research is to shed light on a phenomenon through the study of a particular instance of that phenomenon (Gall et al., 1996). In line with Yin’s (2011) work, we apply a case-study approach in this volume as a deliberate choice because we consider contextual conditions “especially important when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident in real life” (Yin, 2011, p. 92). As the case study approach deals with a wide variety of evidence, it addresses a broader range of historical, attitudinal, and behavioral issues.

Policy–Practice Relations as Nexuses

The volume at hand aims to strengthen the perception and interpretation of nexuses within education policy research, particularly for the investigation of complex policy practice relations.

Conceptually, a nexus can be understood differently within education research; it is used in a range of studies covering many different topics. More recently, the concept has become increasingly prominent for describing the challenging area of knowledge translation between research, policy, and practice, as well as in debates on evidence and evidence use in various fields and sectors (see, e.g., Dimmock, 2016; Geschwind & Broström, 2015; de Leeuw et al., 2008; Locke, 2009; Ohi, 2008; Segerholm et al., 2019). The term nexus has been used to describe the ambivalence between perspectives of education traditions in higher education (Simons & Elen, 2007), the challenges in varied types of partnerships in education (Levin, 2003), integration and inclusion issues (Connor & Ferri, 2005), and the theory–practice relationship in teacher education (la Velle, 2019).

A general characteristic in this stream of literature is that the nexus is seldom described in depth; first and foremost, it represents an idea, a theoretical place, a meeting point, or an intersection where different fields, actor groups, practices, or theoretical constructs are ideally supposed to meet and integrate or where something does not meet, thus creating an area of tension, challenges, and difficulties. As such, the nexus concept is often used to name a situation or arena where different worlds of different kinds ideally should, do, or do not come together.

However, in higher education research, the term teaching–research nexus has a longer tradition (Henkel, 2004; Neumann, 1994; Tight, 2016Footnote 2). Neumann (1994), one of the earliest to coin the term, identified a set of teaching–research nexuses and presented them in a framework for studying these matters. She distinguished between the following three levels of nexus: “-tangible: the transmission of knowledge and skills, -intangible: the transmission of approaches and attitudes to knowledge and -global: the direction given to course offerings by departmental research” (Neumann, 1994, p. 324). According to Neumann (1994), a nexus can exist at each level independently, as well as at several levels, simultaneously. The framework also allows for consideration of the degrees of intensity in the connections between the teaching–research roles. The nexus debate in higher education of today often refers to how, to a larger degree, modern universities seem to separate more strongly between those who teach and those who research as part of the specialization and differentiation of higher education, which contrasts earlier conceptions of what it means to be an academic.

Another and more recent elaboration of the nexus as an analytical and useful concept can be found in policy history studies that emphasize the multisidedness of nexus(es). For example, in how political discourses are moving in time and space, a nexus is defined as “a meeting point of different historical trajectories of discourses, people, action, practices and material objects” (Ihalainen & Saarinen, 2019, p. 6). Here, a nexus is understood as an intersection of discourses in place, interaction order, and historical body—emphasizing both the contingent and intentional relations between material political contexts and historical continuities and different actors and events. Ihalainen and Saarinen (2019) have pointed out how such an approach can help to decide on the method, data material, and analysis, exemplified by how “the (verbal) debates and the (physical) political activities come together in a parliamentary situation as a nexus …” (p. 504) and provided a tool to, for example, study the challenging micro–macro relations.

Consequently, speaking about relations as a nexus is not new in the field of education; some researchers have worked more in-depth with the concept than others and have done so more recently. However, so far, we can conclude the following: beyond the semantic meaning of the nexus as a link, a theorization of it as a concept is rather rare. Moreover, the application of “nexuses” in educational scholarship in the field is rather fragmented. There is apparently potential for the fruitful applicability of the investigation of places where practices or arenas encounter. Drawing on our interest in the relationship between policy and practice, we aim to contribute to a further elaboration by conceptual discussion and empirical examples of the nexus conception.

Elaborating on the Nature of Policy–Practice Nexuses

This volume aims to explain the nature of policy–practice nexuses through empirical and conceptual chapters. Next, we present how the various cases in the chapters contribute to a nexus picture. We explore policy and practice relationships through three dimensions organized in the following sections:

  • Conceptualizations of nexuses of education policy and education practice

  • Nexus formations in time, space, and place

  • The complexity of education nexus studies

Conceptualizations of Nexuses of Education Policy and Education Practice

As shown earlier in this chapter, the limited literature on education policy and education practice nexuses calls for stronger conceptual clarity and a theoretical basis in the discussions of varied forms of policy–practice relationships, as well as in nexuses where policy and practice are both related and unrelated. Therefore, the contributions selected for the first section of the book, Conceptualisations of nexuses of education policy and education practice, discuss conceptual and theoretical aspects of the policy–practice nexus. The authors investigate agentic work in the classroom, education change, teacher agency in classrooms, education reform and sequencing and conceptions of research use that inform teachers’ roles as professionals from conceptual and theoretical positions. Central to all contributions here are conceptual elaborations on the education policy and practice nexus, which also prepare for the two empirical book sections to come.

In the first chapter of this section, Michael Apple provides a critical examination of examples of agentic work. Each has its basis in successful struggles over knowledge, over what is “legitimate” or official understanding, and over the educational mechanisms that make these understandings available. The chapter directs our attention to students as political or epistemological actors and demonstrates the importance of understanding the nature of collective alliance-building and the creation of activist identities to promote change in educational practice. Barbara Schulte, in her chapter, approaches the policy–practice nexus by scrutinizing the relationship between teacher agency and professional autonomy. She questiones the conflation of professional autonomy with teacher agency in the research literature. Drawing on the concept of “politics of use” and findings from fieldwork in China, she proposes a framework for conceptualizing autonomy and agency as they operate in and between systems, involving and producing different types of agents. In the next chapter, Wieland Wermke and Eva Forsberg continue with a discussion of the policy and practice nexus by exemplifying a strategy for understanding and examining policy and practice nexuses in relation to education reform trajectories. Education policymaking is an increasingly complex process—for the most part, it is neither linear and rational nor unidirectional. For the sake of understanding these processes, the authors advocate for complexity reduction through analytical distinctions, sequencing, and entity–relationship thinking. In the last chapter in this section, Sølvi Mausethagen and Hege Hermansen examine “research use” as a concept that informs the role of the teaching profession in the policy–research–practice nexus. As a policy construct, “research use” has gained significant attention over the past decade. However, the concept, particularly its translation into practice, is often left undefined regarding both the meaning of “research” and the meaning of “use.” The authors examine how the specification of these terms contributes to producing manifestations of the policy–research–practice nexus.

Nexus Formations in Time, Space, and Place

This next section presents cases that exemplify significant policy and practice nexuses in education. As described earlier, nexuses are contextualized in timely and spatial configurations. Accordingly, Section II, Nexus formations in time, space, and place, presents empirical studies that aim to understand structure and agency complexity in different political contexts. The contributions stress the relational aspects between structure and agency in education grounded in varied approaches and at different times, such as in different cases of curriculum formation, student preparation schemes, and development of teacher professionalism and in supportive local authority, higher education and school partnerships.

The cases are anchored in varied country contexts comparatively and internationally Germany and Norway and the United States of America, Denmark and Greenland, Norway, and Scotland. The chapters also consider different parts of education systems, teacher education in schools and of varied actor groups, including civil servants, students, parents, and headmasters in schools. The topic of time and space for policy–practice relationships are highlighted as important variables for understanding the complex and multilayered nexus between policy and practice in this section, first brought forward by the reprint of an article by Stefan Hopmann published in 1999. This chapter reminds us of the importance of understanding the contexts of curriculum formation in which various discursive and loosely coupled levels in public education are connected. In relation to the theme of this book, the republishing of this more than 20-year-old article illustrates that research on nexus phenomena is also a cumulative endeavor. Following the aspect of investigating nexuses as cases bound in time and space, the contribution of Simon Holleufer and Christian Ydesen shows how different actors in different arenas of the Danish–Greenlandic education system have struggled to shape and develop nexuses between policy and practice in relation to the pupil selection process in the preparation scheme in 1961. The postcolonial setting of Greenlandic education in the 1960s displays the complexities of education policy formation and the inherent political dimension of policies and practices. The inherent political dimensions in politics and practices in time and space are also studied in Petter Aasen’s and Tine S. Prøitz’s chapter on how educational policy and reforms have influenced the development of the teaching profession in Norway. The study presents three analytical policy–practice lenses for the analysis of professional development: policies influencing the arenas for professional development; the steering, management, and organization of the professional field; and the content of professional development. The study emphasizes how different knowledge regimes in educational policy and both historical and new forms of differentiation have influenced the construction of the teaching profession. Another approach for studying teacher education and the development of professionalism is brought forward by the timely study of the developments of the Scottish initial teacher education supportive local authority and higher education school partnerships by Paul Adams. He underscores the importance of agency in professional development, as a key part of professional development and that partnership, subsequently should be reconceptualized as ‘existing’ in the overlaps ‘between’ theory and practice.

While this second section has a particular focus on the contextual nature of nexuses, the ambition of the third and final section of the volume is to closely explore situations when policy meets practice, as it happens in the professional work of teachers, special educators, or principals.

The Complexity of Education Nexus Studies

The third section of the studies presented in this book highlights, The complexity of education nexuses, by bringing forward empirical studies of/on/in defined nexuses. The contributions here are in-depth empirical studies on how the involved actor groups work, interact, and develop in varied and intended policy and practice relationships and nexus contexts. The cases presented go deeper into the nexuses by studying the actions and experiences of individuals in everyday settings of schools, classrooms, administration, and policy, such as special educators in Germany, extra-curricular cross-sector partnerships in Norwegian schools, inclusive cultures in policy documents and school practice in Sweden, student group work trajectories in Norwegian classrooms, interactions of students and teachers in oral assessment in schools in Norway, and, finally, actor roles in research practice partnerships in Swedish municipalities and schools.

This section offers insights into real-life nexuses in which policy and practice both set the premises for and contribute to the developments, and the results illustrate how policy and practice are highly intertwined and complex matters. The contributions further raise consciousness of the issues of how we go about to study the nexuses when going deep into the everyday settings of education, both theoretically and methodologically. The studies display how policy and practice nexuses can be studied in varied ways but also how these studies require comprehensive, rigorous, and highly careful approaches to embrace the elements of both policy and practice.

The study of Torsten Dietze, Lisa Marie Wolf, Vera Moser, and Jan Kuhl shows the responsibility for daily inclusive education is shifted to the individual school, largely to the special needs teachers themselves, who are pushed into the role of fragmentation managers. Jorunn Spord Borgen and Bjørg Oddrun Hallås show how extra-curricular cross-sector partnerships of cultural schoolbag and physical activity health initiatives in Norwegian schools require restructuring of content, how those involved in the cross-sector partnerships negotiate the knowledge basis for extra-curricular content, and how practices are influenced by the context-dependent relationships within the research–policy–practice nexus.

The importance of understanding context in policy practice nexuses of the day-to-day life of schools is further emphasized by Gabriella Höstfält’s and Barbro Johansson’s study of how regulated support activities are theoretically designed in governance, interpreted in policy documents, and put into practice in the classroom must be understood in the context where they appear to create meaningful content for each actor in the policy and practice nexus of inclusion. Christine R. Stenersen’s study highlights the apparent dilemma between national policies of developing student collaboration skills and contemporary education focusing on the measurement of the learning outcomes of individual students. She displays how the political and pedagogical ambitions related to the desired outcomes of student group work contrast with the empirical actualization of authentic student group work.

Following the aspect of interaction between students and teachers, Astrid Camilla Wiig show how oral assessment practices through the organization of social groups go beyond assessing students in terms of assessment criteria or scales. The findings raise questions about understanding educational policy when certain educational practices seem to be in front of policy uptake in policy and practice nexuses. The very last chapter of the book by Tine S. Prøitz and Ellen Rye brings forward the education policy–practice nexus operationalized in research–practice relationships in education. The study highlights challenges in policy practice nexuses through the identification of physical, linguistic, work-related, financial, and cultural distances that characterize and separate central actors in education. This chapter nuances previous research on the requirements for research practice partnerships between academia, municipalities, and schools by empirical investigations of what well-functioning partnerships are recognized by.

In sum, this section brings forward an interesting display of how the ambitions and hopes of policy turn out in practice, not necessarily as something completely different or other but mostly adjusted, adapted, and sometimes as rather transformed versions of what was initially intended. The empirical studies presented here thereby add to and extend the policy and practice knowledge base by displaying how policy in practice very often brings unintended consequences—sometimes for the bad and sometimes for the good—and, by that, it also feeds back into the policy practice debate on education and further education development.

The Contribution of this Volume

In this last part of this introductory, we present some overall observations and reflections regarding the policy and practice nexus, drawing on the chapters of this book. Our first observation relates to how all the chapters revisit the structure–agency dualism debated in the 1980s in varied political contexts. A second observation is that studies of education policy and practice raise our awareness of education complexity and bring forward issues of how to handle such complexity in education research. A third observation is how the education policy and practice nexus is to be understood as plural rather than singular; it is contingent and reflects knowledge production logics, and valuations.

Revisiting the Structure–Agency Dualism

With the conceptual and empirical work presented in the volume at hand, we have had the ambition to answer the following questions: What is to be explored in a nexus study? What happens in the nexus, and how is the nexus consequently operationalized? Who and what takes part, in what roles or functions, and for what reasons? Asking questions like these will give us answers that relate to both structure and agency and that often evoke questions regarding the limitations of research traditions, theoretical frameworks, and methods in education research and also open both broader and deeper insights into the elements and factors that constitute the education policy and education practice nexus.

A nexus focus in education research does not aim to or necessarily reduce education complexity, but the studies presented in this book display how a nexus can bring attention to both the elements of structure and agency in education research on policy and practice. Accordingly, the structure–agency duality debate in education that occurred in the 1990s is revisited (see, e.g., McFadden, 1995; Shilling, 1992; Willmott, 1999). Education change and reform in the last couple of centuries has called for renewed explorations and insights into the interrelations between policy and practice, as observed in new ways of education governance and governance technologies, with consequences for how education is structured today.

Recent developments in practitioner roles, professionalization in education, and newer expectations of actor involvement, responsibilities, and agency further challenge older perspectives on policy–practitioner relationships in education. Education systems have become more complex, with greater involvement of a range of actors and stronger and more varied types of government influences (Fuller et al., 2007; Labaree, 1997; Rowan & Miller, 2007; Sun et al., 2013). Consequently, educational organizations encompass more actors, and newer and older structures shape policy and the everyday work of teaching, learning, and leading (Rigby et al., 2016). In addition, globalization has an increasing effect on national policy (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009). Changes in the historical, political, and spatial relations of policy and practice and the different actors involved necessitate renewed and alternative approaches in how we understand policymaking and the study of the interface between education policy and education practice (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2014).

Understanding and Describing the Complexity of Education Systems

Policy is often pictured as a linear system in which decisions, directives, and value messages constructed at a higher system level are communicated to the practice levels below to be implemented. Structurally speaking, this image of linearity, where organization, hierarchy, the distribution of responsibilities, and regulation of division of labor are defined, provides conceptual frameworks for our understanding of systems and their predictability. These structures can secure individual rights and societal needs but may also lead to oppression and skewed distribution of societal goods. Furthermore, it has been well established that the relational aspects of those inhabiting the education systems at all levels produce meanings, norms, and values that are dynamic and unstable and that travel between and across the different contexts in multidirectional ways, thereby challenging such a linear understanding of the policy and practice nexus. Research has shown how the actors in schools realize and frame education policies in classrooms through their individual practices (Coburn, 2006). Varied perceptions of policy affect teachers’ understanding of education through the systems and procedures supplied by policy (Schulte, 2018; Spillane & Anderson, 2019). Research has also emphasized how certain structural, organizational, and professional issues regarding powerful trends in education direct our attention in very particular ways, for example, toward testing, league tables, numbers and data, accountability, and standardization (Martens et al., 2010; Mintrop, 2018; Ozga et al., 2011).

Other influential tendencies that further complicate the study of education policy and practice relationships today are the focus on collaboration between policy and practice, in which both the common understandings and knowledge of the field are characterized as shared, co-developed, and co-constructed (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2022). Governments and universities have introduced initiatives aimed at strengthening relationships among the many actors in education. In a range of countries, we can see variations in such initiatives, for example, in the varied types of partnership agreements between universities and schools, as well as with local authorities and government-initiated funding schemes for both research and development projects that require collaboration between local governments, academia, and practitioners in schools.

These initiatives have interesting potential for the further development of relationships between policy practice and research, but they also represent more complexity through the blurring of structures that traditionally have distributed power and responsibility between policy and practice. How students, teachers, leaders, administrators, and policymakers are framed in such policy and practice relationships and what potential structure and agency tensions can be observed between the various political contexts explored have been central questions for this book.

Understanding and Describing Policy and Practice Nexuses in Education

As shown above, this book’s contribution to the study of the policy practice nexus involves revisiting and nuancing the literature on structure–agency dualism in the exploration of education policy and practice. Starting with a broad and open understanding of the three central terms—policy, practice, and political context—illuminated through cases/empirical illustrations and findings from various countries, we have situated and investigated dualism in the complexity of education systems. Based on the questions we are exploring and discussing in this book, we can summarize the chapters’ overall main contribution in the following four points:

  1. 1.

    The exploration of the education policy–practice nexus in this book suggests that it is not very fruitful to search for the one and only essentialist understanding of the policy–practice nexus in education. The studies presented explore several forms of education nexuses, such as physical arenas in which people and artifacts exist side by side and interact, and conceptual, ideational, and material arenas and nexuses of temporal and spatial character. Based on the studies presented here, we suggest that the nexus should be recognized as something characterized by plurality. Discussing the nexuses of each study in this book shows how education as a phenomenon very often holds multiple nexuses at the same time, and sometimes, it can be difficult to identify the primary nexus of the studies.

  2. 2.

    Nexus formations are contingent. Nexuses can change over time and differ in space and place. In this sense, contingency means that something could have happened differently or be otherwise (Luhmann, 2002). However, contingency means not simply infinite possibilities but a specified finite range in which something is neither necessary nor impossible but is a real alternative (Makropoulos, 2004). Contingency is essentially about understanding the available alternatives, facilitating an understanding of complex possibility structures, and organizing the fluid construction of this reasoning, which, here, is based on political and legal conditions. Thus, contingency becomes visible through an awareness of other possibilities that are genuine alternatives. In line with this understanding, action is not the realization of a possibility that removes all other possibilities by excluding selection and the constitution of definition; rather, it is the realization of a possibility in relation to other possibilities that exist but have not been chosen. Therefore, nexuses and their formations must be understood in their particular contexts, time, space, and place.

  3. 3.

    A decisive prerequisite for analyzing the relationship between education policy and practice is reflecting on the logic and knowledge-generation strategies that underpin policy formulation. Therefore, the connection between research, policy formation, and policy is also a central dimension in the nexus between policy and practice. Weiss (1979, 1998, 1999) has, for example, described six models for how knowledge and evidence are used in political decision-making. The knowledge-driven model assumes that new knowledge will lead to new applications and, thus, new policies. In the problem-solving model, the research findings are actively sought and used for pending decisions. In the interactive model, incremental policy change is interactively driven back and forth by emerging research outcomes. In the tactical model, the fact that research is being undertaken may be an excuse for delaying decisions or deflecting criticism. The point of departure for the enlightenment model is that the concepts and theoretical perspectives that social science research has engendered permeate the policymaking process, rather than single studies or research programs having a discernible impact on policy priorities.

  4. 4.

    This leads us to the fourth point: The translation of knowledge into policy is not an unambiguous and a value-free process. To better understand both the circulation of national policy documents and technical and administrative plans, and the situation of those involved in education practice, one must start from the fact that education at all levels, from policy formulation to practice, is inherently a political act. There are built-in priority tensions and contradictions in education policy and reforms. These contradictions in education policy also work within education practice—at the school and classroom levels. To understand the policy practice nexus, we must also acknowledge the tensions that may arise between, for example, political reasoning, accountability regimes, and assessment criteria, on the one hand, and teachers’ professional reasoning, assessments, and professional validity criteria, on the other hand. The questions of the “what,” the “how,” the “where,” and the “when” in education, policy formation, and education procedures and practices will always draw upon a selection of knowledge that underpins policy and practice. The priorities, decisions, and assumptions determine the answer to questions about who ultimately gains the most from the ways in which schools, the curriculum, and practices are organized and operated.

The chapters of this book show that scholars in the field of educational policy studies should pay significant attention to the complex systems and environments in which policy is made and implemented and in which the policy is perceived, interpreted, and operationalized in educational practice. Special attention should also be paid to conflicting interests that are often at play when actors interact in policy–practice nexuses.