Conference Agenda

Educational research –particularly education policy research, concerned with schooling as the central educational project of modernity– faces a necessary conceptual reorientation. This arises from the growing fragmentation of the research field and the transformation of educational governance, increasingly produced within a dispersed and heterogeneous policy landscape. Authority, decision-making, and responsibility are no longer primarily anchored in the state or coordinated through international organisations, but are distributed across networks of public agencies, private actors, digital platforms, expert groups, and epistemic infrastructures. Understanding these governance shifts is therefore crucial for education policy research, as they reshape how education is governed and how educational purposes, responsibilities, and societal effects are defined and contested.
Against this backdrop, this paper intervenes in education policy research by shifting attention from governance as coordination or optimisation to governance as a historically situated condition that reconfigures educational purpose, professional responsibility, and institutional mediation amid fragmentation.
To clarify these transformations, the paper approaches educational governance as the historically situated set of mediations through which education produces effects in society. From this perspective, governance is not limited to regulation but concerns how education functions as a social and political project: how societies assume responsibility for transmission, welcome newcomers into their cultural and political worlds, and manage continuity and change across generations. Governance fragmentation has implications for the normative foundations of education.
With this lens, the paper revisits the notions of education, teaching, and schooling, drawing on Acosta’s (2026) distinctions. Education is a societal practice focused on transmission, formation, and intergenerational responsibility. Teaching is a professional, relational, and ethical practice that mediates between inherited knowledge and new subjectivities. Schooling refers to the institutional and political frameworks that organise the distribution of education and ensure public accountability. Historically, governance relied on aligning these aspects to support a shared purpose, stabilise roles, and clarify responsibilities. This alignment has steadily eroded, causing a marked shift.
Expanding on Ydesen’s (2026) analysis of education research and governance as a fragmented and contested field, this paper contends that governance no longer stabilises education but increasingly disrupts it. Authority and legitimacy now emerge from epistemic infrastructures such as indicators, benchmarks, scenarios, rankings, and digital systems, which coordinate action in contexts marked by epistemic uncertainty and plural normative orientations. Governance increasingly manages uncertainty rather than resolving it, often replacing political mediation with provisional coordination. This development not only transforms educational governance but also reshapes the objects, assumptions, and responsibilities of educational policy research.
In this context of epistemic and institutional fragmentation, artificial intelligence (AI) serves as an intensifier rather than a driver of change. AI accelerates data-driven coordination, expands indirect modes of governance, and amplifies existing tendencies towards standardisation and responsibilisation, without constituting a new centre of authority. Its significance lies in making visible and accelerating governance dynamics that were already underway, highlighting the nature of contemporary governance.
These transformations have profound consequences for the practice of education, teaching, and schooling. Education risks being reframed as an object of optimisation and continuous adjustment rather than as a historically situated societal practice of transmission. Teaching is increasingly repositioned within governance assemblages that privilege standardisation and data-driven coordination over professional judgement and ethical responsibility. Schooling becomes the institutional site where fragmented demands are reconciled without coherent mediation or clearly assigned responsibility.
Bringing the analysis together, this paper integrates Acosta’s conceptual triad with Ydesen’s account of epistemic fragmentation to argue that re-examining education, teaching, and schooling is crucial for understanding contemporary educational governance. Education and education systems should be understood not as entities to be optimised but as historically situated political and social practices whose meaning, purpose, and legitimacy are increasingly contested in a fragmented and AI-intensified context.

In Sweden, a reform effort is currently underway to develop the third curriculum for compulsory school, with a pronounced focus on facts and subject knowledge, to be launched in 2028—a course restructuring for Swedish schools which, according to the government, will affect all principals, teachers and students in compulsory education. As part of the project The Fact-Based Curriculum – Origin, Content and Realisation (DeFakto), we examine how this curriculum reform is legitimised among policymakers and explore what makes a new fact-based curriculum possible and desirable at this point in time, despite the fact that schools have only recently begun implementing the 2022 curriculum. Furthermore, we investigate why national politicians are once again choosing the same solution as in the two previous curricula in terms of a facts-based knowledge orientation, despite their own analysis that the Swedish school system—in light of the deteriorating PISA results in 2022—is in a serious crisis. At the same time, research on how the idea of a Swedish fact-based curriculum has been developed and legitimised in national education policy is quite limited.

The aim of this critical examination is to contribute, from a curriculum theory perspective, to an understanding of how the idea of a ‘fact-based curriculum’ emerges as a policy discourse to combat what domestic politicians refer to as a crisis within the national school system. Analytical focus will be directed towards what problems this idea supposed to solve and how is a fact-based curriculum understood as a solution to these problems. The examination is guided by the following research question:

How is the idea of a fact-based curriculum reform constructed and legitimised in national curriculum policymaking?

Conceptually, the study is located within the field of curriculum theory (Wyse et al., 2016). From the 2010s onwards, there has been growing interest in the field of how global education policies travel between different countries—so-called ‘travelling policies’—and how they are translated when recontextualised in new settings (Nordin & Sundberg, 2014). Previous research has shown that the national context plays an important role in how global policy ideas are translated into local contexts (Anderson-Levitt & Gardinier, 2024; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012). One such travelling policy idea that has recently had a major impact on national curricula, primarily in the English-speaking world, is that of so-called ‘knowledge-rich curricula’ (Deng, 2022; Rata, 2019; Surma et al., 2025), which is based on Michael Young’s (2008) concept of powerful knowledge. The analysis of the Swedish curriculum reform in this paper builds on and contributes to this branch of research. In addition to the spatial dimension of national curriculum reform, our analysis also sheds light on the temporal dimension. In line with Steiner-Khamsi (2025), we argue that research on political reforms needs to pay greater attention to aspects of the timing and pace of reforms in order to understand what makes them desirable and possible as solutions to certain policy problems (Béland & Howlett, 2016).