Tracing a Regional Education Reform Movement Using Author Co-Citation Network Analysis

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Tracing the Formation and Utilization of Evidence in Nordic Education Policy

Proposal

Scholars have documented the emergence of a Global Education Reform Movement (GERM; Hargreaves et al., 2001; Sahlberg, 2016; Verger, Parcerisa, & Fontdevila, 2019). GERM responds to similar problems and priorities, and often draws on a similar policy toolkit that includes accountability, standards, decentralization and school autonomy. While the GERM is evident in many countries, past research suggests that some countries are more immune and resistant to this reform movement. For example, Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden – are going through a wave of educational reforms that is not clearly associated with the GERM. In this study, we examine whether a regional education reform movement is taking place in the Nordic region. We do so by analyzing the policy knowledge base of recent reforms (i.e., documents cited in green and white papers).
Our theoretical framework is Discursive Institutionalism (DI), which was developed in political science over the past decade (Schmidt, 2008). The main premise of DI is that ideas and discourse play an important role in explaining policy shift and stability. For example, “advocacy coalitions” in localized policy contexts (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993) consist of more closely connected individuals who share similar ideas regarding a common policy enterprise. Scholars writing within the DI framework emphasize that discourse is not only what you say, it includes to whom you say it, how, why, and where in the process of policy construction. In this study we analyze the structure of the policy discourse by pointing out the relationships between co-cited authors. In other words, we seek to identify which authors are co-cited frequently in multiple policy documents.
Data for this study come from a collaborative research project ‘Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison.’ The project examines recent educational reforms in all five Nordic countries through bibliometric analysis of green and white documents (source) and the texts/materials they reference (citations). Previous studies from this research project focused on the network of documents (Baek et. al., 2018; Steiner-Khamsi, Karseth, & Baek, 2020). For the purpose of this study, we constructed networks of authors using author co-citation analysis (ACA). In ACA, a node corresponds to one author (e.g., OECD) and a tie/link is created if two authors are co-cited by the same policy document. The weight for the tie is the number of times that two authors are co-cited. It is assumed that the more often two authors are co-cited, the more similar they are in content or idea, thus the weight can be seen as an indicator of similarity between nodes. Our analytical strategy includes analysis of author co-citation networks at the country- and region-level. We also evaluate the correlation between networks to determine whether patterns and structures are similar across social contexts. We identified 2,295 unique authors cited across all source documents. A majority of these authors (82%) are cited once; that is, only one-fifth of all authors are co-cited more than once.
Our analysis suggests that author co-citation networks have a similar structure across all five countries. A common network includes international organizations (e.g., OECD, IEA, and Eurydice Network), domestic agencies (e.g., Ministry of Education), and a small number of international and domestic authors (e.g., John Hattie). These nodes are not only cited frequently, but they are also cited together frequently. In other words, we find a robust discursive structure that has local variants. Our analysis provides mixed results with respect to identifying a regional education reform movement. In the full presentation, we will report on all country-level networks, and the extent to which these networks are correlated.

Authors

• Berit Karseth, University of Oslo

• Oren Pizmony-Levy, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Ninni Wahlström, Linnaeus University