The Fluidity of "Science" in Contemporary Literacy Reforms: The Swedish Case

The Fluidity of "Science" in Contemporary Literacy Reforms: The Swedish

Case

One. Setting the scene

Over the past several decades, the relationship between educational research and policymaking in Sweden has undergone substantial transformation. Although the idea that schooling should rest on a scientific foundation has long been present, its meaning has shifted repeatedly in response to changing political priorities, institutional reforms, and epistemic debates. Recent scholarship shows that "science" in Swedish education policy has never been a neutral descriptor of knowledge but a malleable policy construct whose meaning is continuously rearticulated through political struggle and institutional design. Birck's historical analysis of the "research-based school," for example, demonstrates how different research traditions have gained or lost legitimacy as part of changing governance regimes, particularly from the late nineteen nineties onward, when decentralisation, marketisation, and accountability reforms reshaped the interfaces between research, policy, and practice.

Historically, Swedish school reforms have relied on shifting constellations of scientific authority. Early twentieth-century expansions of teacher education drew on psychological and pedagogical research. The post-war construction of the compulsory school was grounded in a social-engineering logic in which educational psychology and large-scale experimentation were seen as the epistemic basis for system design. During the nineteen seventies, critical and sociological perspectives reshaped the academic field, whereas the reforms of the nineteen nineties and early two thousands marked a shift toward evidence-oriented governance. Birck identifies three particularly consequential shifts between nineteen ninety-seven and twenty fifteen: the movement from indirect to direct expectations of research relevance; the positioning of teachers as implementers of externally validated knowledge; and the relocation of responsibility for synthesising and disseminating educational research from academia to state agencies, including the establishment of Skolforskningsinstitutet in twenty fifteen. These developments strengthened an evidence-oriented epistemic cluster privileging systematic reviews, intervention studies, and cognitive-psychological research.

The last decade has seen a marked intensification of this scientisation of Swedish educational policy. Political speeches, agency reports, and government investigations routinely invoke "scientifically grounded teaching," "stable knowledge based on science and proven experience," and "evidence-based methods" as foundational principles in literacy, curriculum, and teacher-education reform. This trend mirrors international developments in the evidence movement, yet the Swedish articulation has become particularly coherent across multiple reform arenas. Early reading instruction, curriculum epistemology, and teacher education are all framed as domains in need of stronger scientific anchoring. Public interventions by government ministers further amplify these discourses. Edholm and Persson argue that Swedish teacher education insufficiently reflects "internationally recognised research on learning," promoting an increased emphasis on cognitive science and memory research. Their argument aligns with a broader policy tendency to treat "science" as an uncontested arbiter of effective teaching, while implicitly narrowing what counts as legitimate scientific knowledge. A broader international backdrop helps illuminate this development. Popkewitz shows how the scientisation of schooling is part of a wider reform rationality in which scientific knowledge is mobilised as a governing technology that promises stability, efficiency, and objectivity. Within this rationality, "science" functions not merely as epistemic authority but as a political and administrative resource that shapes what counts as desirable teaching, legitimate knowledge, and even what kinds of students and teachers are imagined as possible. The policy coherence around scientised literacy reform is particularly striking given that the proposals have simultaneously met sustained critique from Swedish academia. In consultation responses and public commentary, several universities and university colleges problematise what they describe as increased detail steering, a narrowed conception of knowledge, and an epistemic privileging of cognitive science as if it were an uncontested foundation for curriculum and teacher education. A recurring concern is that reform proposals move instructional strategies and method prescriptions closer to the level of steering documents, thereby shifting the role of teachers and teacher educators from professional interpretation toward compliance with externally validated sequences. Another line of critique targets the knowledge assumptions attributed to schools and teachers: critics reject problem descriptions that portray contemporary curricula as relativistic or pupils as primarily passive recipients, and instead call for models of knowledge and learning that recognise interpretive work, institutional conditions, and the plurality of research traditions within literacy education. Across the critical responses, the critique is, in other words, directed at the reform texts' selective mobilisation of what counts as science and at the policy consequences of treating one research orientation as capable of settling normative and curricular questions.

Beyond the discursive privileging of certain research orientations, the scientisation of literacy reform is also materially reinforced through contemporary funding infrastructures. In twenty twenty-five, the Swedish Research Council allocated more than one hundred million SEK to initiatives explicitly grounded in cognitive or phonics-oriented perspectives on reading and writing development. These included two national research schools (together approximately eighty-four million SEK), a research environment focused on decoding-based interventions (approximately fourteen point seven million SEK), and a project on explicit phoneme instruction (approximately five point two million SEK). Such allocations indicate that the state is not only discursively elevating a particular notion of "scientific" literacy, but is also materially investing in the research infrastructures that stabilise this orientation and make it institutionally consequential. This development resonates with international debates about the "evidence movement" in education and the tendency to frame teaching in terms of interventions that can be optimised through research syntheses and effectiveness studies. A central critique in this discussion is that evidence-based policy often presupposes a model of professional action in which education is treated as a causal technology for producing pre-established outcomes. As Biesta argues, such a model risks overlooking that educational practice is not primarily a technical activity concerned with "what works," but a normative and moral practice in which professional judgment necessarily involves questions of educational desirability rather than only effectiveness. In this sense, the policy turn to "science" and "evidence" does not merely reorganise the knowledge base of schooling; it also shifts how teaching is conceptualised as professional action and what kinds of judgment are foregrounded as legitimate. Internationally, the Swedish development resonates with the longer trajectory of literacy policy in England, where phonics has functioned not only as a pedagogical approach but as a policy technology tied to curriculum specification and national assessment. Wyse and Bradbury's analysis of the English "reading wars" shows how synthetic phonics has been elevated through appeals to scientific evidence and through governance infrastructures that reward particular operationalisations of reading. Their account is useful here not because Sweden replicates the English case point-for-point, but because it highlights how "evidence" can travel as a legitimising language that reorganises the field of possible pedagogies while presenting this reorganisation as neutral and research-led. Read against the Swedish inquiries, the English case offers a comparative lens for understanding how a phonics-centred settlement can be produced through the coupling of evidence hierarchies, assessment regimes, and curricular specification, even when broader understandings of reading - including comprehension, interpretation, and meaning-making - remain central to what schools are publicly said to value. Yet, despite such critiques, Swedish policy discourse increasingly invokes "science" as an apparently self-evident foundation for literacy reform.

This article addresses this puzzle by analysing "science" as what Laclau and Mouffe describe as a floating signifier: a signifier whose political power derives precisely from its semantic openness and its capacity to be filled with different, and sometimes competing, meanings. From this perspective, the discursive work surrounding "science" is not simply a matter of citing research; it is a political project that seeks to stabilise particular epistemic, pedagogical, and organisational visions of literacy while marginalising others. Earlier scholarship has noted that concepts such as literacy, evidence, and science often function as politically charged signifiers within education policy. Yet few studies have examined how the meaning of "science" is constructed across multiple, simultaneous reforms and how these constructions together produce discursive coherence. To address this gap, the article examines three recent Swedish government investigations that collectively shape the contemporary literacy landscape: En tioårig grundskola, which introduces new systems for early assessment and support; Ämneskunskaper och lärarskicklighet, which proposes substantial changes to teacher education; and Kunskap för alla, which articulates a curriculum reform explicitly grounded in science and proven experience. Correspondingly, this article asks: How is 'science' articulated, fixed, and mobilised across three contemporary Swedish literacy reforms, and what hegemonic project does this articulation support?