Policy transfer in education

The POLTRANS project brought a top U.S. researcher, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Ph.D., Professor of Education at Teachers College (TC), Columbia University, and her colleagues in New York, together with researchers within the research group Curriculum Studies, Leadership and Educational Governance (CLEG) at the Faculty of Education, University of Oslo (UiO). It was funded by the mobility grant UTNAM, which aims to propel Norwegian collaboration with North American academics and to strengthen the research capacity of Norwegian research communities in the field of educational sciences. The primary objective of the POLTRANS project was to examine policy transfer within and across national reform contexts. A key objective of the transatlantic collaboration was to develop joint research projects and to explore inter-curriculum linkages between two study programs at UiO and TC. The project aimed at generating joint presentations and publications by faculty and doctoral students at these two institutions. In 2017, the first year of the project, researchers from all Nordic countries were invited to collaborate on national and international research proposals. Steiner-Khamsi contributed to writing the grant proposal for a researcher project within the Research and Innovation in the Educational Sector (FINNUT) program. The project was awarded 11,9 million NOK by the Research Norwegian Research Council in 2018. The new project, "Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison" (POLNET), co-coordinated by Associate Professor Kirsten Sivesind (UiO) and Professor Berit Karseth (UiO), includes funding for doctoral and post-doctoral research fellowships as well as national and international research cooperation between the U.S. and the Nordic countries. In June 2018, in the second year of the project, Steiner-Khamsi applied findings from the POLTRANS data in a key note for the congress of the Swiss Society for Educational Research (Congress of the Swiss Society for Educational Research). In addition, Steiner-Khamsi disseminated results in her keynote address at an annual educational history conference organized by the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE). In addition, Sivesind visited TC Columbia University and participated in a book project led by Professor Florian Waldow, Humboldt University in Berlin, in collaboration with Steiner-Khamsi. The book, Understanding PISA's Attractiveness: Critical Analysis in Comparative Policy Studies (Bloomsbury Academic), was published in 2019. Sivesind's chapter provides an overview of Nordic participation in international large-scale studies, conducted since 1964 under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In 2021, Sivesind co-authored a scientific article with Petteri Hansen, University of Helsinki and Rune Thostrup, Aarhus University on examining temporal topologies in future school reports from three Nordic countries. In 2019, Steiner-Khamsi led a one-week doctoral course on globalisation, education and comparative education policy in collaboration with senior researcher, Antoni Verger, at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The research course resulted from a collaborative initiative between two faculties at UiO and the CLEG research group, and it was included in the 2019 Oslo Summer School in the Comparative Social Science Studies program. It was well promoted and very well received by all the Norwegian and foreign students who participated. During spring, 2020, Gita Steiner-Khamsi also provided a virtual doctoral seminar at the Faculty of Education, University of Oslo: Dissertation Research and Writing for Doctoral Students in the Educational Sciences. The seminar resonated greatly with students as Steiner-Khamsi provided interactive lectures as well opportunities to receive feedback on drafts and work in progress. During the spring of 2021, Gita Steiner-Khamsi taught a two-day course at IPED that introduced various methodological approaches to comparative analyses in education. Additionally, she has provided professional support to a postdoctoral fellow at the same department. In 2020, Chanwoong Baek, Columbia University, defended his dissertation "Knowledge Utilization in Education Policy Making in the United Sates, South Korea, and Norway: A bibliometric Network Analysis" which draws on the Norwegian bibliometric data built with the support from the POLTRANS project. Chanwoong Baek works from August 1st 2020 as a Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oslo as part of the POLNET project. Finally, the Nordic book anthology in POLNET co-edited by Berit Karseth, Kirsten Sivesind and Gita Steiner-Khamsi is now in print and can be downloaded for free, due to the POLTRANS funding.

Future activities will be organized within the framework of the POLNET project, which is scheduled to end in August 2023. We are preparing a stakeholder seminar and a book launch in April 2023, which will take place at the University of Oslo. For this purpose, Steiner-Kahmsi will formulate a policy brief in collaboration with Berit Karseth and Kirsten Sivesind. We are also continuing to co-write articles that will be published in the coming years.

This project brings together a top U.S. researcher Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Ph.D., Professor of Education, TC Columbia University, and her colleagues with researchers at the Faculty of Education, University of Oslo (UiO). A core aim is to develop research projects and inter-curriculum links between study programs in the field of comparative education policy, curriculum, leadership and educational governance and globalization studies. Steiner-Khamsi, is a prominent U.S. scholar who, over many years, has provided new scientific knowledge about the global?local nexus and the ways in which policy transitions and international knowledge are promoted and facilitated across educational contexts. This project will focus on policy transfer and change with a particular focus on the formation of education reform and renewal within an international research and policy context. Within this context, international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) are available for policy usage in policy making processes. The project stimulates research and develops expertise on how international actors and systems promote reform by ILSAs, and how national reform programs, justified by international references, are modified diachronically through reform histories, and synchronically by the transfer of comparative studies and transnational policy perspectives. The project is innovative as it links the fields of study at two departments at the Faculty of Education (ILS and IPED) with US researchers who are in the lead of international and comparative studies in the field of education. We assume that such a link will develop the research fields by new theories and perspectives.