Already ten years ago Tomlinson (2012) spoke of the “rise of the expanded and expensive SEN [Special Educational Needs] industry”(p. 75). In this paper, we explore the SEN industry on a continuing professional development (CPD) market for teachers in Sweden. This market seems to well meet the exaggerated importance of teachers’ CPD. Such an exaggeration is a highly globalized phenomenon and thus, we argue, of high significance to the research community (cf Kennedy, 2014). International studies reveal clear evidence of an increasing state-encouraged marketization and privatisation of teacher CPD. Characteristic of this development is that companies establish and profile themselves on the market by selling solutions and improvements aligned with current policy discourses – a dimension of the ongoing privatisation of the education sector that Ball (2009) calls “organisational recalibration” (p. 84).

A recent estimation is that about 25 000 commercial actors operate within the Swedish education sector (It-pedagogen, 2021) and previous research exemplifies how some of these “edupreneurs” offer CPD packages to schools and teachers, which in many cases can be linked to policy trends (Forsberg & Wermke, 2012; Player-Koro & Beach, 2017). Over the past decade, there has been a flood of governmental initiatives in Sweden offering various forms of professional development programs for teachers – as for example the ‘Special Educator Initiative’ – and commercial actors seem to pick up the discourses of these policy reforms and develop their businesses accordingly (Ideland et al., 2020; Levinsson & Norlund, 2018). Ideland et al. (2020) illustrate “how companies enact spaces of business possibilities made up through discourses of ‘schools in crisis’ and policy reforms” (p. 85). However, what characterizes dicsourses in the content descriptions of CPD offered at a commersialised CPD-market – and how this might influence SEN-oriented practices – needs further investigation. 

In this paper, we present results from the ongoing project Following invoices – finding professional learning (the Invoice Project), funded by the Swedish Research Council. The overall aim in the project is to deepen the understanding of teacher learning, in times when different stakeholders try to control and impact on education and teachers’ work.  

We started the project by “following the money” (Ball, 2012) in three municipalities in Sweden and analyzed a multitude of invoices concerning teachers’ professional development. One of the results, so far, is the fact that the CPD market in Sweden to great extent offers content with a SEN focus. 37 % of the collected invoices relate to SEN content. 

The aim of this paper is to unpack prevalent SEN-oriented discourses on the CPD market and to discuss the possible impact these may have on various educational practices, such as professional learning and teaching practices. From a practice-oriented perspective educational practices are interdependent; they enable and constrain each other mutuallly in the ‘education complex’ (e.g., Kemmis et al., 2012; Mahon et al., 2020). 

Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used

In the overall study - the Invoice Project – 674 invoices from 2018 and 2019, were collected from the CPD accounts for elementary and upper secondary school teachers in three Swedish municipalities (municipal invoices are subject to the principal of openness in the Swedish constitution). The selected municipalities were chosen to reflect rural and urban areas with varying socioeconomic characteristics. 

A first analysis of the invoices revealed that a majority of the invoices (37 %) had a SEN-oriented content. The criterion for the categorization was that the CPD title and/or the content description included not only the notion of Special Needs Education but also phenomena such as ‘dyslexia’, ‘dyscalculia’, ‘ADHD’, ‘gifted children and ´neuropsychiatric disorders’.

The data production and analytical work for this paper included the following steps:

1. Extending information. The collected invoices regarding SEN-oriented CPD did not always supply the information needed to address the purpose of and the questions posed in this paper. Therefore, we made further Internet searches and/or contacted schools and/or CPD providers via email or phone to obtain the information required. 

2. Extracting and coding. Information was extracted from the invoices and coded into an SPSS program file comprising a number of variables including SEN-oriented CPD. We distributed all SEN invoices evenly among the three of us to organise the work and perform the first step of the coding process in individual SPSS files based on the same variable structure. We continuously engaged in formal and informal coding sessions to construct subcategories of SEN-oriented CPD. 14 different SEN categories were developed in this process. The data in the individual files were later transferred into a joint SPSS file for analysis.

3. Mapping and analysing.  We used descriptive statistics, mainly frequencies and relative frequencies, computed in the SPSS program to explore the distribution of invoices, costs and actors over SEN related CPD contents. Frequencies and relative frequencies were mapped via bar charts and tables to illustrate and summarize the characteristics of SEN-oriented CPD in the studied municipalities. 

4. Identifying discourses. We identified tentative discourses in the CPD actors’ content descriptions collected from our Internet searches. To deepen the analyses, we exploited our joint experiences in working with educational discourses in a Faircloughian and Foucauldian critical sense (see Langelotz 2014; 2017a; 2017b; Norlund, 2009; 2021; Norlund & Levinsson 2018).

Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings

The findings show a number of prevalent discourses, of which we will present a few during our presentation this paper. These discourses seem, in turn, to be embedded within an umbrella discourse of solutionism. The discourse of solutionism starts with a well-defined (and often simplified) problem to which the CPD offers a solution (cf. Ideland et al., 2020).

We will discuss the potential consequences in relation to each practice in the education complex (practices of teaching, learning, researching, leading and CPD) respectively. 

References

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Forsberg, E. & Wermke, W. (2012). Knowledge soursces and autonomy: German and Swedisch teachers’ continuing professional development of assessment knowledge. Professional Development in Education, 38(5), 741-758. 

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