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Taking the European Credit and Transfer System as its departure point, this article describes the (mis)fortunes of the figure of the independent learner. This figure is conceptualized by analyzing the expectations of the European learning space that is enacted in discourses, instruments and practices. The independent learner is a de-institutionalized learner who is permanently in need of qualifications, calculations and mobility, and what takes shape is a 'governing by personalization and debt'. Key components of today's European learning space are no longer disciplinary norms (with inspection) and administrative rules (with sanctions), but personalizing profiles (with feedback). Understanding current forms of governing is of importance in order to perceive that what is appreciated today in terms of liberation and independence is in fact the inscription of the student in new forms of governing. The analysis concludes by raising the question of where university pedagogy begins and governing education should hold off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to explore the note-taking experiences of university students using paper-based (non-electronic) and paperless (electronic) resources. By means of a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the note-taking experiences of 18 students from an international program at a university in Belgium were examined throughout a semester. In order to document these students' practices with paper-based and paperless resources, four data collection methods were used: (a) in-depth interviews (b) observations (c) focus group discussions and (d) document analysis of students' lecture notes. The results showed that students experience note-taking as a complex phenomenon in which lived body, lived human relations, lived space and lived time come into play, and in which they try to find a balance between multiple engagements, between autonomy and authority, between attention and distraction, and between being original and mirroring others. This struggle for balance occurs irrespective of which medium (paper-based or paperless) they choose to use. These results provide an in-depth view of the phenomenon, and also highlight the complexity of the note-taking experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last years, the European Commission has heavily promoted various forms of digital education. In this article, we draw upon two recent European policy documents as key articulations of Europe's contemporary governing apparatus: Opening Up Education and the Digital Education Action Plan. The article more particularly conceives of both policy documents as offering a point of departure to analyze how this apparatus is presently seeking to enact a specific mode of existence of the contemporary learner. We argue that this educational mode of existence is being enacted by the fabrication of highly specific sorts of time and space. In order to highlight the particularity of the enacted sorts of time and space exemplified in the policy documents, we start this article with a discussion of how a traditional, modern governing apparatus aims to fabricate linear time and institutional space. The article proceeds by arguing that the present-day European governing apparatus that is concerned with digital education fabricates different sorts of times and spaces, namely potential (rather than linear) temporalities and ecological/networked (rather than institutional) spatialities. Likewise, the concrete instruments (such as platforms, portals, credits and certificates) presently adopted in order to do so largely differ from modern instruments. Conclusively, we argue that the presence of these newly emerging (often digital) instruments, and the times and spaces that are fabricated through these instruments, call for an opportunistic mode of existing as a contemporary learner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question concerning the relation between thinking and the university is the starting point of this paper. After a very brief outline of some reflections on this topic, the case of Campus in Camps, a Palestinian experimental university, is presented to shed light on this issue. Inspired by Isabelle Stengers' ecology of practices, it is possible to discern four requirements on thinking in the work of Campus in Camps, namely storytelling, comparing, mapping, and using. It will be argued that the particularity of thinking at the university, is that it is done via artifices that initiate processes of composition, problematization, and attention. In the concluding section, the paper proposes to understand the study practice of Campus in Camps as an adventure that activates a sense of the possible, and hence opens up futures that are different from the ones that present themselves as obvious or unavoidable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there (still) something specific about academic practice in contemporary neoliberal times? This article reports on a sociomaterial, ethnographic study informed by Deleuze's untimely empiricism conducted at two research centres of a research university. We unfold the specificity of 'the academic' by elaborating upon two central notions: relational aspirations (the attachments of these academics, and the operations that such attachments generate) and mode of existence (the way academic practice comes into being by and through these attachments). The article discerns four types of relations that are typical for academic practice and argues that the way in which academic practice exists nowadays is characterized by a continuous distancing in action, that is, by drawing things together and by slowing things down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a large amount of ethnographic research has been conducted in schools, little is known about the particularity of the school, about what makes the school – as a school – different from other (learning) environments. As school ethnographies focus primarily on the perspectives and interpretations of pupils and teachers, the school itself remains largely ignored. Drawing on ethnographic research within six Flemish secondary schools, the particularity of the school is examined through its possible regime of enunciation. By focussing on both sociomaterial and discursive elements within school practices, we look for markers which point at a specific pedagogical regime of enunciation within these practices. Attention is then paid to the manner of speech, to the elements at stake when sayings occur, to the knitting together of objects, time(s) and space(s) as they are enacted through and as part of practices at school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, different sociomaterial research orientations have emerged. In this article, we argue that most of these orientations are relying on a relational mode of thinking, that is, a way of conceiving of educational practices in terms of the relations between the different actors present in these particular practices. In doing so, these various sociomaterial studies share many of their theoretical assumptions with social topology, an approach inspired by the mathematical field of topology. In educational research, however, this connection between sociomaterial and sociotopological accounts is not commonly made. Therefore, this article calls for a more intricate interweaving of topological thinking with better-known sociomaterial approaches. Furthermore, we assert that using visualisations might play a crucial role in this respect. To that effect, we introduce the Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of the diagram. This notion of the diagram, as the technique that brings the orders of the visual and the articulable together, is conceived as a promising technique in order to investigate different aspects of educational practices. In a concluding section, the article offers some suggestions as to what the general potential of adopting such relational studies in the field of education might be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing emphasis today on different forms of evidence-based policy in education. Several authors address the related emergence of new patterns of governing and describe forms of governing by numbers and related practices of governing by comparison. There is, however, less focus on the governmental use of soft evidence such as examples of good practice. Drawing on the analysis of governing practices in Belgium (Flanders) and Europe, this article attempts to examine in detail how soft evidence, among other elements, constitutes the current governing configuration. It is argued that this configuration includes several mechanisms that appear as evident but have far-reaching consequences: imposing spaces of meaning and discussion, deciding on what is within one's control and what is not, making people believe there is no longer something beyond themselves that is an excuse for actual self-improvement. What takes shape as part of techniques of contextualization, personalization, and permanent monitoring is ‘the power of the example’: learning from examples in view of increased performance. The conclusion expresses some concerns about the tendencies toward a manipulative society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of the many attacks on the school as being outdated, alienating, ineffective and reproducing inequalities we offer a morphological understanding of the school as distinguished from functionalist understandings (sociological or economical perspectives in terms of functions and roles) and idealistic understandings (philosophical ones in terms of ‘ideas of education’). Our educational morphology approaches the school as a particular scholastic ‘form of gathering’ i.e. a particular time–space–matter arrangement (including concrete architectures, technologies, practices and figures) that deals in a specific way with the new generation, allows for a particular relation to the world, and for a particular experience of potentiality and of commonality (of making things public). We elucidate how this form performs particular operations of suspension, profanation and formation of attention and how these operations imply a slowing down and an opening of future. Finally, we emphasise the potentially revolutionary character of the scholastic form and discuss contemporary attempts at taming or neutralising the school. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Central to this article is a case study of one particular governmental instrument in Flanders, the educational magazine 'Klasse voor Ouders' (Klasse for Parents). This popular magazine aims to provide information for and communication with parents as one of the target groups in the educational field. Despite the claimed formal and neutral character, in this study, we assume that 'Klasse voor Ouders' plays a larger role by contributing to the (re-)organisation of the public debate. We suggest that through the 'order of discourse' and thus, through what is said and written, an educational reality is created in which parents and the government are 'positioned' and are asked to reflect on themselves and to act in a well-defined way. By means of a critical discourse analysis in line with Fairclough, we illustrate how parents are understood as having a continuous 'drive' for improving the quality of their own parenting practice while the government is positioned as in charge of and in control for creating a kind of 'parental learning community'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the issue of emancipation in education practices in general and in vocational education and training (VET) in particular. The principal aim is to contribute to the discussion of particular traditions of emancipation in education in connection with VET practices. The exploration of ongoing educational debates on VET policy-making and the issue of emancipation in VET reveals that, ultimately, emancipation in VET is understood as a specific function for socio-economic integration. The paper discusses this functionalist orientation and contrasts it with a vision on emancipation as a feature of an educational process rather than an educational outcome. Freire's and Rancière's core concepts of emancipation guide the discussion regarding the latter interpretation of emancipation in VET practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the focus is on educational governing in the making. Drawing on conceptual underpinnings of socio-technical approaches, this implies an interest both on the way in which a sound knowledge base for policy measures is created, as on the distribution of that knowledge through publically available instruments. Governing by evidence only is possible when it relies on concrete instruments, such as feedback reports, publically consultable audits and examples of good practice. Since knowledge-related practices increasingly make use of online tools where knowledge is accessible for each and all, three websites are analysed in a particular way to describe the making of evidence. First, considered as active devices, the websites are analysed as essential components of the governing by evidence: by publishing specific data and information in a particular way, they come to constitute what comes to count as evidence and the way in which it comes to count. By addressing their visitors in a particular way, moreover, they constitute for whom it comes to count as evidence. As such, we argue, it becomes visible that digital spaces of evidence actually make schools real, and, at once, that there are different modes for schools to exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current literature on the university it is generally accepted that processes of digitization play an important role regarding both the daily functioning of the university as an institution and the academics that give shape to it. This article contributes to our understanding of the role that digitization plays in contemporary academic practices and does this by adopting a relational theoretical framework informed by sociomaterial studies. Furthermore, the article introduces a specific interview technique as methodological approach and makes use of topological visualizations in order to qualitatively analyze the composition of academic work in digital times. As such, combining textual and visual analysis, the article should be conceived as an explorative atlas. The atlas gives an account of how daily academic practices are relationally composed, by focusing on the spatiotemporal constellations enacted in these practices, and on how the digital acts and operates in these practices. Based on three profiles of academic practices, this atlas concludes by exploring whether contemporary academic practices are characterized by a typical mode of existence, and gives some pointers as to how this mode of existence of the university is typically enacted nowadays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the cell phone is omnipresent in our society, certainly amongst youngsters. Its presence, and the possibility to be in constant touch, have some profound consequences on our experience (of our selves, of others and the world) and self-understanding. It is important for educators and scholars in the field of education to understand such consequences and develop an awareness of how students relate to the world they inhabit. Starting from the observation that people often want to know the position of the party they call, this explorative study reports on an analysis of text messages of 10 participants and tries to couple this and related questions heuristically to an environmental self-understanding, wherein a particular environmental kind of positioning becomes a major need and/or obsession. Results point to a particular potential dealing with the present and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two decades, professional standards describing competencies for teaching staff have emerged in nation states all around the world. This article reports on a pilot-study that applies a sociotechnological ‘lens’ to examine this standardisation process in educational policy. In line with ethnographic analyses drawing on science and technology studies and actor-network theory, the authors present a case study of teacher education in Flanders to demonstrate empirically how professional standards for teachers are being translated in (material) reality. First, we show where the Flemish professional profile and the core competencies of the teacher are being inscribed in teacher education. Second, we register how they gather an assembly of people, documents, procedures, instruments, etc. into specific types of stable and self-evident practice, and, third, we describe who and what is therefore set in motion. By displaying where the core competencies of the teacher function as ‘obligatory points of passage’, we make visible how their activity intensifies the standardisation network. This indicates, then, how the presence of professional standards in education is being stabilised or ‘black boxed’. Thus, our analysis traces the role played (or the type of work done) by professional teaching standards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes its point of departure in the current tendency of education policy to become more and more evidence-based. The use of statistics and numbers seems to be a prerequisite for conducting a policy that is both efficient and effective. The kind of knowledge thus produced is regarded as factual and scientific. This article tries to get a grasp on value-added modelling, a commonly used method supposed to produce such knowledge. Drawing on some conceptual underpinnings of actor-network theory, the article advances that such factual matters often take the form of matters of educational performance that are shaped and produced by means of calculative and inscription devices. However, the adagio that measures of performances should guide education policy is only one, albeit strong, point of view. Taking not only performances but also public issues into account could lead to what could be called a more 'concern-oriented' policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to the Special Issue on the French philosopher Jacques Rancière who raises a provocative voice in the current public debate on democracy, equality and education. Instead of merely criticizing current practices and discourses, the attractiveness of Rancière's work is that he does try to formulate in a positive way what democracy is about, how equality can be a pedagogic or educational (instead of policy) concern, and what the public and democratic role of education is. His work opens up a space to rethink and to study, as well as to ‘re-practice’, what democracy and equality in education are about. He questions the current neutralisation of politics that is motivated by a hatred of democracy. This questioning is for Rancière also a struggle over words. Against the old philosophical dream of defining the meaning of words, Rancière underlines the need for the struggle over their meaning. The aim of the article is to clarify how and why education, equality, and democracy are a major concern throughout his work and to offer an introduction to the articles collected in the Special Issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, the article draws attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the ‘governmentalisation of democracy’ and processes of ‘governmental subjectivation’. Here, ideas of Rancière are introduced in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of ‘political subjectivation’, that is, a disengagement with governmental subjectivation through the verification of one's equality in demonstrating a wrong. We will argue that democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of political subjectivation, and that today's consensus society tends to depoliticize all processes of subjectivation. A final step in the argumentation is to introduce the concept of ‘pedagogic subjectivation’—to be understood as the experience of potentiality—that is to be distinguished from governmental subjectivation and also from political subjectivation. The concept ‘pedagogic subjectivation’ is proposed as a way of thinking of the school as a public place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up a text that Rancière published shortly after The Ignorant School Master appeared in French, ‘École, production, égalité’[School, Production, Equality] (1988), in which he sketched the school as being preeminently the place of equality. In this vein, and opposed to the story of the school as the place where inequality is reproduced and therefore in need of reform, the article wants to recount the story of the school as the invention of a site of equality and as primordially a public space. Inspired by Rancière, we indicate first how the actual (international and national) policy story about the school and the organizational technologies that accompany it install and legitimate profound inequalities, which consequently can no longer be questioned (and become ‘invisible’). Second, the article recasts and rethinks different manifestations of equality and of ‘public-ness’ in school education and, finally, indicates various ways in which these manifestations are neutralized or immunized in actual discourses and educational technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do historians (of education) need philosophy? The paper suggests that historians do not need philosophical doctrine or (meta-)theory, or philosophical method, but that in so far as historians (as Koselleck states) are “writing their own time anew” and are “rewriting the past” (and so enlighten their present), they might find some help in a particular philosophical ethos: an ethos of discomfort or “attentive study”. First, how Koselleck describes the price that (famous) historians have paid for writing their own time anew and for rewriting the past will be sketched. This price entails, as will be argued, an uncomfortable exposition and estrangement of the researcher or writer. It is then suggested that such exposition and estrangement is also what is at stake in the ethos of a particular philosophical tradition implying exercises or askesis of uncomfortable exposition (or attentive study). This ethos will be sketched following Foucault, calling himself a “historian of the present”, not in order to intervene in the many controversies amongst historians surrounding his work but in order to support the initial suggestion that philosophy might be of some help for historians. Moreover the article will indicate how philosophy in this sense is intrinsically an educational endeavour (philosophy as education or paideia), although not an issue of learning (acquiring knowledge or competence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the new Decree on teacher education in Flanders, Belgium, as a case study to critically examine the changes in the conception of teacher professionalism in education policy. In this examination, the focus is on the 'form of problematisation' (Foucault) that is enacted in the texts of the Decree. It will be argued that the Decree reflects the movement from a profession-oriented to a market-oriented form of problematisation of teaching and teacher education. The new conception of teacher professionalism will be identified at four levels in the new Decree on teacher education: (1) the definition of the teacher (and her training) as a strategic policy target, (2) the structural reform of teacher education, (3) the qualitative reform of teacher education, and (4) the organisational framing of institutes for teacher education. Based on this analysis, the article concludes that 'profession-oriented virtues' (expertise, responsibility and autonomy) are replaced by 'entrepreneurial' or 'market-oriented' virtues (competency/effectiveness, responsiveness and flexibility). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents and discusses the results of a literature review that was conducted in order to understand ambivalences observed in reflections on the research-teaching nexus. As a result of this literature review, it is possible to attribute these ambivalences to the mixed use of two approaches: on the one hand, a functional approach that regards research as a tool in the learning environment in order to develop competencies that are functional for the knowledge society, and, on the other hand, an idealistic approach that regards research as a process of edification and understands academic education as participation in research. This article examines these two approaches and discusses the critical issues that have to be taken into account in order to deal with the ambivalences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to argue that the evident exchange of information on performance (and its supply, demand and use) should be regarded as a symptom of a new governmental regime that installs less evident power relations. Educational policy in Flanders (Belgium), and in particular the need for feedback information from the Flemish government, will be used as a case to describe this regime. Based upon the analytical framework of 'governmentality' (Foucault), the article focuses on the 'governmentalization' of Europe and Flanders that accompanies the need for feedback information. The main result of the analysis of European and Flemish policy documents can be summarized as follows: government or the 'conduct of conduct' currently takes the form of 'feedback on performance'. This means that the strategy of the governmental regime is to secure an optimal performance for each and all (member states, schools), and acts upon the 'need for feedback' and 'will to learn' of the actors involved. On the basis of these findings, the article introduces in conclusion the notion 'synopticon' in order to grasp the exercise of power in 'feedback on performance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘European Space of Higher Education’ could be mapped as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship and a place where the distinction between the social and the economic becomes obsolete. Using Foucault's understanding of biopolitics and discussing the analyses of Agamben and Negri/Hardt it is argued that the actual governmental configuration, i.e. the economisation of the social, also has a biopolitical dimension. Focusing on the intersection between a politicisation and economisation of human life allows us to discuss a kind of ‘bio-economisation’ (cf. Bröckling), a regime of economic terror and learning as investment. Finally it is argued how fostering learning, i.e. fostering life (as a learning process) could turn into ‘let die’ and even into ‘make die’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the elements which characterize a research attitude and approach introduced by Michel Foucault and further developed as ‘studies of governmentality’ into a sub-discipline of the humanities during the past decade, including also applications in the field of education. The paper recalls Foucault's introduction of the notion of ‘governmentality’ and its relation to the ‘mapping of the present’ and sketches briefly the way in which the studies of governmentality have been elaborated in general and in the context of research in education more particularly. It indicates how the studies of governmentality can be related to a cartography of the learning society, a cartography which helps us to get lost and to liberate our view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To assess the value of a written questionnaire in the follow-up of patients after inguinal hernia repair. Design: Prospective study. Setting: University and two district hospitals, The Netherlands. Subjects: 314 patients with 362 inguinal hernias. Main outcome measures: Correlation between answers to questionnaire and clinical examination in the diagnosis of recurrent hernias. Results: 13/24 recurrences (54%) after a mean follow-up of 33 months with a follow-up rate of 93% were not diagnosed by the questionnaire. Conclusion: Follow-up after hernia repair must be by physical examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several researches published within the issue of the journal which analyzes the relationships between learning society and governmentality and its implications on education.