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The post-Soviet transition agenda in the Baltic states included changing the role of teachers from passive recipients of top-down orders to active curriculum developers who feel ownership over curriculum decision-making. Recent studies have seriously questioned the achievement of this goal. In this article, we aim to elucidate Estonian schoolteachers' feelings of curriculum ownership as expressed in a questionnaire that asked about their role as curriculum developers and curriculum users. We found that most of the respondents did not express feelings of curriculum ownership. We will discuss the potential reasons for this finding and the implications for further enhancing teachers' curriculum ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper examines the construction of the professional role of teachers as reflected in the teacher autonomy and control discourses in teachers' newspapers during 1991–2010 in three national contexts: Estonia, Finland and Bavaria (Germany). Despite similar global pressures to increase the efficiency of education through output standardization and marketization, the local teaching traditions and policies have shaped different cultures of teacher professionalism. Throughout the national experiments with decentralization and recentralization of education, Estonian and Bavarian teachers have maintained restricted professionalism while Finnish teachers achieved extended professionalism in terms of the desired amount of teacher autonomy. Highlights • Events in the social and political environment influence the autonomy discourse. • The political response to PISA has been a stronger evaluation and control discourse. • The Finnish newspaper advocates an extended concept of teacher professionalism. • Restricted professionalism can be preferable if sufficient resources are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine different approaches to teacher autonomy in nation-states, three countries were selected for a comparative study: Estonia, Finland and Germany. The emphasis of the study lies on the subjective perceptions of upper secondary school teachers (n = 33 semi-structured interviews) regarding their curricular autonomy and experiences of being controlled by the system. The article discusses different concepts of teacher autonomy and agency theoretically and concludes that they are partly overlapping, but not the same. Agency can be understood as the realistic actualization of autonomy within the constraints of the teaching profession, while autonomy is, in theory, more liberating, focusing on self-directedness, capacity for autonomous action and freedom from control. The data analysis showed that the expectations of teachers as to the amount of desired autonomy varied greatly. While the Finnish teachers in the study perceived control over teachers’ work to be unnecessary, due to their high professionalism, the Estonian and German teachers did not advocate absence of control, instead preferring to ‘have complete freedom to choose within limits.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing national framework curricula is a growing tendency in early childhood education internationally, and is considered to be part of the regulatory requirements framework for enhancing preschool teachers' professionalism. A topical issue in this context is whether and how teachers themselves see these practices as contributing to their professionalism and professional autonomy. We explored preschool teachers' views and expectations as developers and users of the Estonian national curriculum and preschool institutions' curriculum documents. Three hundred and forty-seven teachers across Estonia participated in the study. Data were gathered using semi-structured questionnaires. The findings revealed contradictions in the ways in which the new curriculum practices have contributed to the preschool teachers' professionalism. The respondents' views were contradictory in at least two aspects. First, teachers preferred to have a lot of curricular autonomy in general terms, but when it came to more specific aims, methods and content of education, they preferred to have specific guidelines. Secondly, although teachers preferred a curriculum compiled by internal practitioners rather than by external experts, they expressed a great deal of satisfaction with the current national curriculum compiled by external experts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unlike in England, since the late 1980s the rhetoric of curriculum reforms has been overwhelmingly decentralist in many countries. However, decentralisation has often involved the delegation of centrally appointed tasks, rather than a real shift in power. The Estonian case demonstrates how a decentralised curriculum policy with centralised control can have the same de-professionalising effect on teachers’ perceived professional autonomy as does a system where both input and output are centrally controlled. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]