In this explorative paper we will address the impact of Europeanization (Lawn 2011) on national curriculum reforms with empirical reference to the Swedish elementary school, and based on this case discuss the question of transnational curriculum convergence (Andersson-Levitt 2008) The main interest is directed towards the question of what counts as knowledge in national curricula changing and the research questions of this paper are: (i) what explanatory frameworks are plausible to make sense to processes of curriculum change in the interface between transnational and national arenas? (ii) to what extent and in what ways can the Swedish elementary school reform (Lgr 11) be seen as an expression of a European educational policy discourse when it comes to conceptualising knowledge?

      Theoretically we draw on discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2008, 2011) using a differentiated concept of curriculum as a way to capture the complex dynamics of contemporary curriculum change. We argue that this discursive institutional contextualisation is necessary in order to explain curriculum changes in the nexus of the transnational and the national, tracing discursive processes of coordination and communication to analyse why some discourses prevail and becomes institutionalised while others don’t. Central policy texts have been analyzed as simultaneously a language written text, discourse practice (that include text production and interpretation) and socio-cultural and political practice (Fairclough, 1995). Taken this methodological point of departure a step further the analysis has also combined a discursive institutionalism approach. Processes of discourse formation in policy-making have been investigated as dialectical to processes of re-contextualisation and institutionalization of specific discourses.

      A preliminary conclusion is that the recent Swedish elementary school reform converges to the broader European knowledge discourse on the level of philosophical ideas underpinning curriculum change but that several core concepts used in European policy texts are being rethought and given a different meaning when re-contextualised in the national arena. Exploring new methodological approaches in the analysis of curriculum change is highly relevant as transnational discourses have an increasing impact on Nordic curriculum policy.