Tore Sørensen wins WUN funding and give presentation at the University of Sydney

UNIKE Associated PhD Fellow Tore Sørensen, based at University of Bristol.

Tent Embassy, Canberra. Photo from Tore's fieldwork in Australia.

University of Sydney. Photo by Tore Sørensen.

Department for Education and Training, Canberra. Photo by Tore Sørensen.

18 January 2016 by Lisbeth Kristine Walakira

“Why are teachers on the global policy agenda?” - This was the topic when Tore Sørensen gave a presentation on December 1st 2015 at the University of Sydney.

Tore Sørensen is a PhD fellow at the Centre for Globalisation, Education & Social Futures at University of Bristol and is thus a closely associated fellow to UNIKE. As a part of the research for his PhD, Tore has been undertaking fieldwork in both Finland and the UK - and now also in Australia - aimed at looking at how and in what ways national education policy and practice agendas are influenced.

To help fund some of the travel costs associated with the fieldwork in Australia, Tore won a World Universities Network Student Mobility Grant, and has been generously hosted at the University of Sydney by Professor Anthony Welch, Faculty of Education and Social Work. University of Sydney and Professor Anthony Welch's status as an associated partner to UNIKE has been a significant help in securing Tore's funding.

Tore Sørensen gave his presentation at a seminar, which he was leading at the University of Sydney. The presentation focused on teachers' position on the global policy agenda and outlined the argumentation of the OECD, The European Commission, teacher unions and businesses. The presentation drew on his research into the OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) – a survey that represents one of the most ambitious efforts to generate knowledge about the teaching profession and put teachers on the policy agenda internationally.

Read Tore's own experiences of conducting research on the labour of teachers as a subject for global education governance in Australia.

Tore Sørensen's PhD project concerns contemporary trends in the global educational policy field. Focusing on the main political actors involved in OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), the project discusses the implications for the teaching profession on a global scale and in selected countries such as Australia, England and Finland.