Conference Agenda

This paper examines how school participation settings organise whose knowledge counts in interactions between schools and parents. Rather than explaining unequal participation mainly through parents’ individual resources, the paper reconstructs how participation is shaped through role-making, credibility judgements, and discursive boundaries in everyday school–family encounters. The guiding question is: How do parental roles become epistemic categories that structure credibility and ‘actionability’ of parents’ knowledge—and how are these roles co-produced by schools and parents?

Analytically, the study follows Situational Analysis (Clarke, 2018) and works the situation through situational, relational, and positional maps. This mapping sequence is essential for reconstructing parental roles not as personal attributes, but as discursive positions that emerge from patterned relations and include sites of discursive silence. It draws on a theory-driven qualitative subsample from the project SODETE (“Social and Democratic Participation through Parent Participation”), based on 12 semi-structured interviews with parents, school leaders, school social workers and municipal actors, and three participant observations of formal participation settings (two parent council meetings and one parents’ evening). Following Clarke’s mapping practices, the analysis develops situational maps and positional maps to identify role positions and their relations, including sites of discursive silence—positions that are not openly voiced or represented, yet still shape the situation through what others anticipate, avoid, or mark as ‘not us’.

The paper’s central argument is that participation settings generate and stabilise parental roles that function as epistemic categories: they define what ‘good’ participation looks like and, at the same time, determine which kinds of parental knowing are treated as credible and relevant. Using the lens of epistemic injustice, the analysis traces two linked processes: unequal credibility (some parents are treated as more trustworthy or competent knowers than others) and uneven interpretive uptake (some experience-based accounts do not become meaningful within institutional frames and therefore fail to travel into organisational action).

Empirically, two role-making mechanisms are foregrounded. First, participation is moralised through responsibilising role constructions (“parents must also…”). This frames cooperation and educational success as parental duties, while organisational conditions that would support recognition (e.g., translation, low-threshold formats, reliable feedback loops) remain weakly secured. Second, the role of the “passive”, “uninterested”, or “hard-to-reach” parent is produced as a negative reference point. Importantly, this role is not only constructed by the organisation through familiar categories (e.g., ‘hard to reach’). It is also actively reconstructed within parent communities: ‘good’ or highly engaged parents draw boundaries by distancing themselves from imagined others (“those parents who do not care“, „those who never show up”), thereby making this role socially real even when it is not represented by an identifiable persona. In Clarke’s terms, these negative reference roles operate as sites of discursive silence: powerful in organising participation, yet rarely available as legitimate, speakable positions.

A Key finding is therefore relational: role positions are co-produced across school and parent worlds. Parents do not merely ‘adapt’; they participate in the ongoing construction of legitimacy by aligning with expected codes of ‘proper’ participation, by translating their concerns into institutionally acceptable frames, or by withholding issues that would risk being read as ‘demanding’ or ‘difficult’. This helps explain why epistemic inequalities can persist without overt exclusion: voice may be formally invited, yet resonance and uptake depend on role-based legitimacy regimes and the discursive boundaries they create.

The paper contributes to research on school–family participation by showing how epistemic (in)justice is organised through parental role-making and discursive silence. For debates on knowing and acting, it specifies how participation becomes effective (or ineffective) depending on the recognition and translation of parents’ knowledge within these role regimes.

The study also contributes to our understanding of the factors that influence the three types of strategic responses of teacher organizations to the rise of neo-liberal policies: (1) resistance to proposed or actual changes; (2) rapprochement, or acquiescing to changing circumstances, often viewed as a necessary trade-off; and (3) renewal, or an adherence to the organization’s own priorities, making “use” of change in order to advance the organizational agenda (Carter, Stevenson, & Passy, 2010).

This paper investigates how the Union of Education Norway (UEN) has understood and responded to neoliberal reforms over the past three decades. The case study of the UEN is one of four teacher organizations that participated in a longer-term study initiated in 2020 – the Queensland Teachers’ Union (QTU), New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) and the California Teachers’ Association (CTA).

The research project considers the perspectives of senior organizational leaders to examine the extent to which and under what conditions their organizations have taken proactive, agentic stances in support of teachers, teaching, and the quality of public education in relation to the impacts of neoliberalism on education and the “global educational reform movement” or Global Education Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2011, 2013; Verger & Altinyelkin, 2013). These ideological shifts have intensified teacher organizations’ disadvantageous position within education systems. Furthermore, Robertson (2012) and Lingard (2010; Lingard et al., 2013) articulate the "architectures" of neoliberal globalization that have impacted the education sector, detailing how global policy actors and organizations (such as the OECD and World Bank) construct supranational governance structures that bypass national democratic debate, reshaping education systems toward economic competitiveness and human capital formation.

Rather than offering a chronological history of each union over the span of the leaders’ careers, the study utilizes a specific conceptual framework proposed by Huidan Niu (2025) to analyze union strategy. Niu’s systematic review posits that teacher organizations efforts to advocate for their members is a dynamic process shaped by the interplay of three strategic activities:

1. Discursive strategies: How unions frame problems, define teacher professionalism, and utilize language to shape public and member understanding.

2. Relational strategies: How unions configure their relationships with the state, employers, communities, and other social actors.

3. Contextual strategies: How unions read, adapt to, and leverage the specific political, historical, and institutional structures in which they operate.

We apply Niu’s (2025) tripartite framework across three distinct domains or spheres of activity common to all four unions: 1. Governance, 2. Curriculum and Assessment, and 3. the COVID-19 Crisis.

Domain 1: Governance

The domain of governance concerns the fundamental architecture of decision-making in education: who has the authority to decide policy, how resources are distributed, and the mechanisms through which teachers act as either subjects or agents of the system. Under neoliberal architectures (Robertson, 2012), governance has often shifted toward managerialism, decentralization of responsibility coupled with centralization of control, and the erosion of intermediary bodies like unions.

Domain 2: Curriculum, Assessment, and Accountability

This domain sits at the core of the neoliberal project in education: the redefinition of learning as measurable output, the standardization of curriculum, and the use of data for surveillance and market competition (Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashti 2013). This is where the Global Educational Reform Movement is most visible.

Domain 3: Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis

The pandemic acted as a sudden stress test for the neoliberal education settlement. It stripped away the normal routines of schooling and forced a confrontation with the essential nature of teaching, safety, and system capacity. It represented a unique "state of exception" where the usual rules of governance and accountability were suspended, potentially illustrative of Klein's (2007) shock doctrine in real-time.

Until now, the Finnish phenomenon of subject-specific emphasized education (2–3 extra lesson hours per week) has been studied from the perspective of student selection, as the class-based emphasized education involves student selection made by parents and schools. This is often based on skills obtained in paid extracurricular activities (e.g. music) but extending the selected set of students as a permanent group for in the learning of other subjects as well (Kantasalmi & Kupiainen, 2021; Seppänen et al., 2023; Pasu et al., 2023). It has been observed that the classes with emphasized education tend to attract and select children of highly educated, well-off parents, leading to measurable differences in school achievement between teaching groups, and creating social differences within a comprehensive school that is lauded for its unity and equality (e.g., Berisha & Seppänen, 2017; Kupiainen & Hotulainen, 2019).

From a learning-psychology perspective, the use of selective emphasized education as a basis for class formation alters class composition affecting the peer group in which students study (Koivuhovi, 2021; Ketonen & Hotulainen, 2019). International research indicates that, for instance, the average ability level of and variation in a student group (group homogeneity or heterogeneity) can influence both the development of students' cognitive ability and motivation in various ways (see e.g., Hienonen et al., 2021; Ketonen et al., 2023). Previous studies conducted in Finland, have found that studying in a class implementing class-based emphasized education can enhance students' positive motivational beliefs and skill development (Koivuhovi et al., 2025). However, studying in a selectively high-achieving group can also reflect negatively on learners' self-beliefs regarding their learning (Koivuhovi, 2021). The selective class formation is associated with an observed increase in the effect sizes of class-level differences in both measured cognitive competences and motivational beliefs across the three years of lower secondary education (Kupiainen et al., 2021).

With the City of Kerava lower-secondary education 2023, emphasized teaching will no longer be used as a basis for class formation, except for music classes which will remain class-based. Otherwise, the reform extended emphasized education to all lower secondary students, offering all students the opportunity to build a personal syllabus choosing between four ‘paths of emphasis’ (City of Kerava, 2023). Based on earlier research, it can be assumed that students’ increased opportunity for choice either strengthens or weakens students’ engagement and motivation in their studies, while simultaneously equalizing teachers’ expectations regarding each study group (Koivuhovi et al., 2025).

The aim of this study is to explore whether the change in emphasized teaching arrangements reveals observable differences in students’ self-reported engagement and academic achievement and their development, related to their class and choice of emphasis . An additional interest is to find if there are deviant subgroups in the two cohorts followed from the 8^th to 9^th grade. The earlier cohort (2023–2024) studied according to the former selective class composition , whereas the latter cohort (2024–2025) studied according to renewed system, which provides emphasized teaching for all. The theoretical basis of the study is in school engagement research, while we assume that the reform could also affect students’ perceptions of schooling. Especially we are interested in how supportive the school environment has been perceived to be, how this has developed during the one-year follow-ups, and if there are any observable differences between the perceptions of the two cohorts in this. We apply Fredricks’ and colleagues’ (2004) three-dimensional school engagement theory, comprising affective, behavioral and cognitive engagement, to study students’ perceived engagement support. Furthermore, we will examine how students’ school achievement, parents’ education, chosen emphasis path and class composition are related to engagement.

In light of current polycrises, the long-unquestioned notion of agency as a uniquely human capacity to intentionally shape a shared future has come under increasing scrutiny. While some contemporary sociological accounts see individual and collective agency eroding due to mounting institutional restrictions (Rosa 2026) or due to the perceived disintegration of political movements challenging the unsustainable status quo (Blühdorn 2024), recent posthuman and new materialist scholarship has raised more fundamental theoretical questions about the concept of human agency as such. As a result, planetary and political crises, together with these academic debates, have led to a degree of disorientation in educational research. This has compelled researchers and practitioners to re-evaluate whether and how education can inform meaningful action and foster individual and collective agency (e.g. Schenk 2025, Scherrer & Obex 2023).

At the same time, educational research faces growing public and political expectations to demonstrate societal impact by providing research-based knowledge and evidence intended to inform education policy and support actors’ agency in responding to contemporary crises. These demands have led, among other effects, to increased impact requirements in public funding programmes for educational research and beyond. Amplified by the growing reliance on third-party funding in academia, these institutional pressures have made the question of how educational research can foster meaningful agency increasingly salient for academics. Nevertheless, researchers continue to point to the limited impact of research on practice and a persistent research-practice gap (e.g. Penuel et al. 2020).

As a particular approach to bridging this gap between knowing and acting, research-practice-partnerships (RPPs) have proliferated in recent years. RPPs explicitely aim to narrow this divide by bringing together researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives and ways of knowing to address complex societal problems and facilitate social change (e.g. Farley-Ripple et al. 2018; Coburn & Penuel 2016). This trend is reflected in a growing body of research that has generated empirically grounded insights into the potentials and pitfalls of RPPs (e.g. McGeown & Sjölund 2025; Coburn & Penuel 2016). Recent studies focus on knowledge and boundary work in RPPs, providing more detailed conceptually informed insights into the epistemological practices in RPPs (e.g. Farrell et al. 2019; Sjölund et al. 2022a; 2022b). However, while existing research primarily examines how knowledge work is carried out in RPPs, there has been little reflection on the substantive content of this work and the broader discourses that actors draw upon as they attempt to build collective agency to address societal problems.

Moreover, empirical research – predominantly based on case studies – rarely considers the material and discursive effects of third-party funding and project-based organization that often structure knowledge work in RPPs, treating these contexts instead as unquestioned preconditions. From a critical organizational perspective, the underlying assumption that improved outcomes – such as better access to education for disadvantaged children – can be achieved through enhanced networking and collaboration among organizations and individual actors in local educational landscapes has been described as a rationalized myth. As such, it may obscure the tensions between managerial logics and inclusive ambitions that structure these projects and downplay potential conflicts between stakeholders (Schmachtel 2022; 2016). Similar objections have been raised regarding another common premise in publicly funded research projects: that research evidence can inform local educational RPPs and thereby facilitate organisational change through a dialogic process of knowledge ‘transfer’ or ‘transformation’ (Janowitz et al. 2025).

In light of these underexplored issues, we examine factors that enable or constrain the discursive construction of collective agency in the knowledge work of the RPP analyzed in our study. Specifically, we focus on how actors negotiate the contradictory imperatives arising from political, institutional and funding contexts.