Professional Knowledge and Educational Restructuring in Europe
Developing a Conceptual Framework for Understanding
The Spanish case points up to conceptual complexity of professional responses, highlights the differences between the teachers noted above and nurses, and between diverse local settings. Their warning is important, a health warning against conceptual over-generalisation.
By comparing our cases it becomes apparent how varied and often contradictory processes of ‘restructuring’ are. They comprise many facets, temporalities and scales.
Thus having been said it is clear how historical periods and trajectories operate in identifiable ways to refract restructuring initiatives. We have clear evidence that the main responses delineated in the earlier chart of restructuration, contestation, resistance and decoupling can be found in our case studies. Moreover our work on generational periodisation and trajectories is of great utility in understanding the pattern of responses.
Theory is always of specific rather than general use. We too need to be parsimonious with our general ambitions. But if there is a message to those in governing agencies who sponsor restructuring initiatives it would be to advise a similar caution in promoting over-centralised, over-generalised expectations and edicts. We have seen how a world movement like restructuring has been widely promoted in Europe. We have also seen how the response has varied immensely and how sensitivity to generations, periodisation and national trajectories helps explain the process of refraction.
