2a:T4ba,

The topic of citizenship education and the promotion of democratic citizenship in schools has risen to the top of educational policy agendas in Europe over the past three decades. This rise in attention, however, appears to be accompanied by an apparent lack of attention to the specific manner in which citizenship, education and the assumed relationship between both are currently conceptualised and understood in this policy context. The currently dominant notions of citizenship education centre around a concept of citizenship-as-competence, illustrating a certain assumption of equivalence between citizenship and formal education in schools, without further elaborating on this assumption. By means of a critical re-reading of key European educational policy texts referring to citizenship education, and their use of the key concepts of citizenship and education, our analysis shows how the competence-based approach to citizenship education in European educational policymaking entails tensions with its own assumptions, therefore falling short of its own proclaimed purpose of emancipating young people in Europe to become autonomous, engaged and critical democratic citizens.

2b:T44c,

This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as discourses around increasing global economic reach and building solidarity across the world, have produced an internationalisation strategy that is distinctly ‘national’. Drawing on the analysis of the most recent internationalisation strategies we argue that the particular Swedish approach to internationalisation has its ideational foundations in viewing higher education as a political instrument to promote social mobility and justice, as well as a means to develop economic competitiveness and employability capacity. In addition, internationalisation has been used to legitimise national reform goals, but also as a policy objective on its own with the ambition to position Sweden as a competitive knowledge nation in a global context.

2c:T446,

This article seeks to analyse how epistemic work (Alasuutari, 2018; Alasuutari and Qadir, 2019) in Portuguese parliamentary education debates develops through externalisation to world situations (Schriewer, 1990) whose references are used as epistemic capital (Alasuutari, 2018). The study explores debates occurring during Legislature X (2005–2009), in which the number of external references in plenary education debates significantly peaked compared with previous and subsequent legislatures. The analysis demonstrates that there was a change in the (de-)legitimation strategies policymakers used during this legislature. In addition to using the traditional ideological principles associated with each party, deputies often opted to use international organisations and their instruments, alongside reference societies, as authoritative sources to strengthen arguments and persuade their audience of their validity. This suggests that parliamentary policymakers assume that these external elements are useful in earning support for their policy ideas and promoting reform proposals.

2d:T4d2,

Division between academic and vocational education is a predominant feature of both upper secondary and higher education in Finland as well as in many other country contexts. This article focuses on a minority of higher education students, those who have not proceeded to higher education through the traditional academic track but have enrolled through the vocational route. We deploy the concept of institutional habitus and utilize Eurostudent VI survey data (N=7318) to analyse the backgrounds and study experiences of higher education students with different kinds of educational backgrounds. Our findings indicate that those enrolling