Autonomy in education: theoretical and empirical approaches to a contested concept: Special Issue of Nordic Journal on Studies on Educational Policy, NordSTEP

Autonomy is a widely used concept in educationpolicy and practice. The etymology of the con-cept derives from the Greekautonomos‘havingits own laws’ (Oxford Dictionaries, 2015). As such, thedebates around the concept circulate around individuals’or groups’ ability and capacity to self-rule, and the gov-ernance and/or constraints, which limit such a capacity.However, autonomy has also been widely contestedin philosophy, and as suggested by Rawls (1980), forexample, the concept has been defined in a variety ofways. In educational research too, the concept has beendebated from varying viewpoints, as, for example, scholarsengaged in education history (Smaller, 2015), educationsociology and policy (Ball, 2006; Apple, 2002), legalissues (Berka, 2000) and pedagogy (Reinders, 2010; Little,1995) have all problematised and defined its meaning inrelation to education.When applied to educational practice, this nuanced andcomplex concept may indeed mean a variety of things.Take school-level autonomy as an example. Schools arecomplicated social systems in which multiple actorsoperate in different roles, and in which one’s scope ofaction may affect the decision-making capacity of that ofothers. The question of who in a school community maypossess autonomy (e.g. the teachers, the principals, or thelearners) has fundamental implications for the ways inwhich the school operates. Also, the matters over whichthe members of the school community enjoy autonomyhave important implications for what school autonomymeans in practice. If we consider teacher autonomy moreclosely, it becomes apparent that teacher autonomy isoften understood in terms of a dichotomous pairing ofconstraint vs. freedom (Wermke & Ho ̈stfa ̈lt, 2014). Itcould be argued that teacher autonomy isalwaysaboutconstraint, and drawing from Gewirtz’s and Cribb’s (2009)work, we suggest focussing on the ways in which auto-nomy is constrained, as well as the matters over whichautonomy is enjoyed and by whom. Therefore, teacherautonomy should be distinguished from other formsof autonomy, for example, school or local autonomy.Indeed, increased school autonomy, or local autonomy, aswitnessed, for example, in relation to theFriskolamove-ment in Sweden orAcademiesmovement in England, doesnot automatically grant to teachers an increased scopeof action (Kauko & Salokangas, 2015; Salokangas &Chapman, 2014; Wermke & Ho ̈stfa ̈lt, 2014).Moreover, the teacher autonomy debate has beeninfluenced by and reflects wider