Search

In 2011, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education issued a policy on the internationalisation of schooling. The policy assumes that being ‘international’ has become necessary in order to maintain economic competitiveness in a globalising world. It was published in two languages: Mandarin, the official language in Taiwan, and English, presupposed as a lingua franca. Treating ‘policy as discourse’, the article analyses internationalism and its performativity through the publication and specific textual construction of this policy. The analysis considers the layout, target readerships, conceptual translation, and spatial representation and construction of ‘Chineseness’ in the two policy texts. This attempt at internationalisation is related to the very specific historical and geopolitical conditions of Taiwan and its liminal position in the globe. The significance of the article rests in expanding ideas of ‘translation’ in education policy studies and in the analysis of the specific geopolitics of East Asia. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Recent analyses of education policy have used the concept of the assemblage to explain how the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s education work contributes to global policy convergence and new forms of policy mobility. These analyses often use Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage to designate relations between things (as actors) and people (as actors). In this paper, we argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking offers promising analytical insights that education policy studies have not fully explored. We propose that revisiting the problematics which animated Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory can broaden the conceptual apparatus at our disposal for analysing global education policy and the work of international policy actors. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The digitisation of higher education is raising significant questions about the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on teaching and learning environments, highlighting the need to investigate how teachers and students can work with new educational technologies in complementary ways. This paper reports results from a pilot study of the collaborative augmentation and simplification of text (CoAST) system, which is online software designed to facilitate the engagement of university students with theoretically-sophisticated academic texts. CoAST offers a digital learning interface that uses natural language processing algorithms to identify words that can be difficult to understand for readers at different ability levels. Course lecturers use their pedagogical content knowledge to add brief annotations to identified words. The software was trialed using a quasi-experimental design with (1) 23 undergraduate Education Studies students and (2) 23 digital and technology solutions students. Results suggest that CoAST offers a digital learning environment that can effectively mediate and enhance pedagogical relationships between teachers, students, and complex theoretical texts.

The use of data to govern education is increasingly supported by the use of knowledge-based technologies, including algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and tracking technologies [Fenwick, T., E. Mangez, and J. Ozga. 2014. Governing Knowledge: Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education. New York, NY: Routledge]. New forms of datafication and automation enable governments and other powerful stakeholders to draw from the past to construct images of educational futures in order to steer the present. This paper examines the competing conceptions of time and temporality that AI posits for policy and practice when used to anticipate educational futures. We argue that most educational futures are already delineated, and machinic expressions of time are the chronologies, habits, and memories that the educated subject inhabits rather than produces. If resetting educational habits and memories can be an alternative to algorithmic anticipations of education then we believe, paradoxically, that machines may help to reset them by accelerating them. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article describes the use of a Learning Commission to experiment with conceptualising and implementing richer modes of educational accountability. A Learning Commission is a form for collaborative thinking that brings different kinds of knowledge and expertise to bear in relation to a common matter of concern: the role of schools in relation to the communities they serve. As part of a broader research project, we used a Learning Commission to co-produce knowledge about community expectations of schools in a regional area of Queensland, Australia. We analysed data generated through this process using a narrative approach and synthesised the findings in a conceptualisation of rich accountabilities that offers an alternative to top-down, test-based modes of accountability. Rich accountabilities raise anew the questions of who should be accountable, what counts and whose practices should be changed by accountability systems. The article thus describes (a) an alternative model of accountability in education and (b) an alternative theorisation of accountability informed by the implementation of this model as a method for co-producing research about schools and communities. The article provides significant conceptual and methodological resources for further experiments in enriching educational accountability. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

January 2021As the new editorial team of Discourse, we are very pleased to publish our first statement concerning the direction of the journal. We feel honoured that the previous Editors – Professo...

New cognitive infrastructures are emerging as digital platforms and artificial intelligence enable new forms of automated thinking that shape human decision-making. This paper (a) offers a new theoretical perspective on automated thinking in education policy and (b) illustrates how automated thinking is emerging in one specific policy context. We report on a case study of a policy analysis unit (‘The Centre’) in an Australian state education department that has been implementing a BI strategy since 2013. The Centre is now focused on using BI to support complex decision making and improve learning outcomes, and their strategy describes this focus as becoming ‘information centric’. The theoretical framework for our analysis draws on infrastructure studies and philosophy of technology, particularly Luciana Parisi’s recent work on automated thinking. We analyse technical documentation and semi-structured interview data to describe the enactment of a BI strategy in The Centre, with a focus on how new approaches to data analytics are shaping decision-making. Our analysis shows that The Centre is developing a cognitive infrastructure that is already creating new conditions for education policy making, and we conclude with a call for research designs that enable pragmatic exploration of what these infrastructures can do. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Young people’s processes of forming identities, linked to the work of anticipating futures, involve significant labors of thought, feeling, ethics and imagination. These labors proceed across both life-worlds and school-worlds, often in tension, especially for those from marginalized positions in social-structural power relations. This paper explores such identity labors, drawing on rich ethnographic data from research, during 2013–2014, that engaged students in Years 9 and 10, from working-class, immigrant and refugee backgrounds, who attended an inner-suburban school in Melbourne, Australia. We investigate two student groupings: (a) selected by the school for “accelerated” curriculum paths; and (b) the “others” we label written off by the school in terms of academic potential (a division we diagnose as driven by policy measures of institutional “performance”). In different ways among students in each grouping, we find their identity labors to reflect historical conditions for what Berlant calls “cruel optimism” about futures. Yet their identity dynamics also draw on rich funds of knowledge from their life-worlds that our research shows to offer resources–funds of identity–for more viable future imaginaries. We argue for curriculum and pedagogy that supports young people in their identity labors to live from their present into emergent, new-generational futures.

This article puts forward the provocation that optimism has become a trap for educational research. It is argued that optimism underpins the implicit model of modern educational thought, which is oriented toward the future and wants it to be better. However, optimism can become a trap when it encourages investment in promises about the benefits of education that cannot be realized for all. As more and more people invest in education to ‘get ahead’ their optimism contributes to decreasing the value of credentials and thus undermines the promised benefits. Educational researchers contribute to this bind because the dominant model of modern educational thought is inherently optimistic. However, pessimism offers an inherently unpromising alternative. In a time of economic, environmental, and technological disruption, this article the concept of disaster might provoke lines of thought that go beyond the alternative between optimism or pessimism. The writings of Lauren Berlant, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze provide the theoretical framing for the argument. The article concludes that if optimism has lured educational thought and research into a trap, then it may be time to give up on ‘the future’ in order to get out. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

© 2018, © 2018 HERDSA. This article explores factors contributing to unequal patterns of access to languages other than English (LOTE) in Australian universities. A critical analysis of qualitative and quantitative data generated through interviews, surveys and document analysis reveals that underrepresentation in LOTE courses in Australian universities is attributable to: (a) unequal access to LOTE learning areas at the school level; (b) low tertiary entrance scores that do not grant access to elite universities that offer broad LOTE course options; (c) differential prior international learning experiences that inform dispositions towards intercultural competence, including proficiency in LOTE; and (d) limited provision of LOTE courses in regional university campuses. We conclude that access to foreign language courses in Australian universities is not equitable, and in the context of globalisation opportunities, this poses a risk of reproducing social disadvantage alongside other structural factors such as socio-economic status and regional background.

This article examines the OECD’s new PISA-based Test for Schools (“PISA for Schools”) program. PISA for Schools is part of the expanding education work of the OECD, building upon main PISA to enable school-to-schooling system comparisons. We examine the development of PISA for Schools, the nature of the instrument, and some initial effects of its introduction. Our theoretical framework focuses on new spatialities associated with globalization and the emergence of topological rationalities and heterarchical modes of governance. We analyze 33 interviews with personnel at the OECD and relevant edubusinesses, not-for-profit organizations, and philanthropic foundations. Pertinent documents and web-based media are also analyzed. We suggest that PISA for Schools provides an exemplary demonstration of heterarchical governance, in which vertical policy mechanisms open up horizontal spaces for new policy actors. It also creates commensurate spaces of comparison and governance, enabling the OECD to “reach into” school-level spaces and directly influence local educational practices Refereed/Peer-reviewed

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper examines the impact of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in two national policy contexts: Canada and Australia. Drawing on theories of globalisation and affect, the paper explores ‘catalyst data’ and its effects in these contexts to show how affective responses to mediations of PISA performance have become important levers for policy change. Two empirical cases of the role of data in the globalisation of schooling are discussed. The first case examines responses in Canada to the PISA 2012 results, which generated senses of anxiety among parents that coalesced into a view that Albertan schools faced a mathematics crisis. The second case interrogates how, since PISA 2009, a narrative about the declining quality of Australian schooling has become dominant in political discourse and in media representations. The paper compares and contrasts the affective effects of data across both contexts.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Education is undergoing various transformations due to new data-driven educational technologies and the management of educational data through data infrastructures. These technologies are frequently promoted to parents and the profession as being ‘revolutionary’ because they represent a new generation of learning. While computer adaptive tests may arguably improve various efficiencies, the argument that they will revolutionise education requires evaluation. In this paper we draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to theorise (a) the desire for data amongst policymakers and (b) the effects of data infrastructures as systems that coordinate educational thought. We argue that, rather than revolutionising learning as promised, datafication in computer-based modes merely offers more intense expressions of longstanding possibilities for learning. We describe three types of events—breaks, cracks and ruptures—and argue that data-events translate cracks (imperceptible changes that constitute learning) into breaks (information), but either cannot generate rupture (difference) or represent rupture as error. However, the intensification of learning through datafication may, we suggest, rupture educational thought more broadly.

© 2017, The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. This paper explores teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools, reporting on findings from an open-ended survey question from an exploratory study that sought to investigate teacher and school leader perceptions and experiences of commercialisation. Commercialisation, for the purposes of this paper, is understood as the creation, marketing and sale of education goods and services to schools by for-profit providers and often includes (but is not limited to) the provision of curriculum content, assessment services, data infrastructures, digital learning, remedial instruction, professional development and school administration support. Our account highlights that commercialisation is prevalent in the day-to-day practice of Australian public schools. The perceptions of teachers and leaders suggest that commercialisation is complex, with both affordances and challenges. Respondents acknowledged that aspects of commercialisation are necessary for successfully running schools and classrooms in the 21st century, but also noted that there is a fine line beyond which these seemingly innocuous services become perilous. Concerns focused on how particular services are leading to the deprofessionalisation of teachers as they have less autonomy over what to teach and how to teach it. Moreover, teachers and school leaders reported being perturbed by the idea that commercial providers and services might work to replace teachers in the future. Drawing on these data we argue that growing commercialisation in Australian public schools clearly requires an ethical debate that schools, education professionals, policy makers and interested publics are yet to have.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Accelerationism is a theoretical movement that seeks to mobilise reason and technological development as a strategy for moving beyond capitalism. The first wave of accelerationism took the effects of capitalism at their most pernicious and suggested that they have not gone far enough. More recent work has complicated this project and explored political, epistemic and aesthetic accelerations. The central push to accelerate, and therefore to manifestly alter time, has consequences in terms of how one understands temporality in education. This article outlines the development of accelerationism and examines whether this theoretical movement can aid critical analysis of the growing presence in education of commercial technology providers, new modes of data analytics, and the application of machine learning algorithms to analyse data. These developments provide a useful example in relation to which a critical question can be asked: is it possible to accelerate technological development in education separate from its capitalist development?

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper examines the development of data infrastructure in Australian schooling with a specific focus on interoperability standards that help to make new markets for education data. The conceptual framework combines insights from studies of infrastructure, economic markets and digital data. The case of the Australian National Schools Interoperability Program is analysed, drawing on a corpus of web-based technical and promotional documents and supporting interviews. The paper shows that Australia has well-developed data infrastructure in schooling that is creating new relations between schools, school systems and commercial vendors within network markets for data-driven educational technologies.

This article draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to consider, from an ethical perspective, the current transparency and accountability agenda in Australian schooling. It focuses on the case of the My School website and the argument that transparent publication of comparative performance data via the website provides a basis for making things better in schooling. The article argues that while technologies of accountability may have potential benefits, they cannot provide a basis for this ethical project. Instead, the ethical experience described by Levinas arises from an encounter with opacity in the face-to-face relation with the Other, who is harshly illuminated by the transparency promised through calculation and comparison. Such encounters with opacity hold the potential to disrupt the politics of visibility promoted by transparency agendas and provide an alternative to the growing practice of 'accountability at a distance' based on performance data. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper provides a critical policy analysis of The Learning Curve (TLC) (2012), an initiative developed by the multinational edu-business, Pearson, in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit. TLC exemplifies the commercialising of comparison and the efforts of edu-businesses to strategically position themselves in education policy processes globally. In analysing TLC, our account seeks to proffer a critical analysis of this emerging policy genre, and the way it functions as part of the new 'soft capitalism'. We analyse TLC in relation to Pearson's new business strategy, which emphasises corporate social responsibility and accountability to consumers for the efficacy of its products and services. We argue that Pearson is now generating and appropriating various data to legitimise its products and services according to a 'neo-social' mode of accountability. Network ethnography is employed to document the global networks of both people and data associated with TLC and we reflect on the emergence of Pearson as a potential education policy actor. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

© 2016, Copyright © The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University. Current debates about test-based accountability policies revolve around questions of how to ensure that all students have access to high-quality schools and teachers. Whether and how one can meet this goal depend, in part, on the nature of the arguments that policy proponents and opponents mobilize in these debates. This article examines these arguments, focusing specifically on how policymakers and educators justify and critique prominent test-based accountability policies, the OECD's PISA, and enhanced teacher evaluation. Drawing on pragmatic sociology and our research on these policies, we show how policy proponents mobilize industrial, market, and civic arguments to define both quality and equity as the efficient production of standardized test scores. In contrast, educators more often employ civic and domestic arguments that expand the definition of educational quality, but do not engage issues of educational equity. We explore how educators can mobilize arguments and the news media to expand the definition of educational quality and equity to enrich both our vision of education and our debates about it.

This article explores the relationship between commensuration and affect in various contexts of education policy. Commensuration is the process through which disparate qualities are transformed into a common metric and is central to the production of performance data. The rise of governance through numbers in education has resulted in a proliferation of performance data, comparisons and rankings that influence political debate and policymaking. The efficacy of data as a governance mechanism depends on their usage to shift perceptions of performance, and this involves both conscious interpretation and affective sense-making of data and their representation in multiple forms. For example, performance data used within accountability systems in education are linked to sanctions and rewards, and their effects are partially due to the feelings that are provoked. The relationship between affect and data is also important in the mobility of policy ideas, which spread via meetings that enable affective proximity between participants. This article draws on a philosophical concept of affect, defined as the feeling of transition in bodily states, and topological concepts that are being taken up in social theory, to consider new perspectives on education policy research that these thinking tools may afford. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper examines the promises made in education policy regarding people's future education, employment and social mobility. Specifically, the paper analyses how the term 'potential' functions in education policy texts and discourses to make tacit promises at an affective level. Contemporary education policies often invoke the need to realise personal and national economic potential, and speak of the risk of 'wasted potential', when justifying reform agendas directed at both increasing human capital investment and reducing educational inequity. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, the paper develops a philosophical concept of potential that provides a theoretical framework for the analysis. The aim of the paper is to analyse how the term 'potential' functions in policy to: (a) couple economic and equity purposes for education; and (b) imply a relationship between talent, opportunity and aspiration, and particular a distribution of responsibility between governments and citizens for 'realising potential'. While primarily theoretical, the paper is informed by analyses of interview data and documents in two research projects: (1) a small pilot study of higher education equity policy in England and Australia since the mid-1990s and (2) a study of the expansion of human capital theory and large-scale educational assessments to include non-cognitive skills. The paper diagnoses the potential of 'potential' as a key word in policy and raises questions about the risks of becoming invested in the promises of education to 'realise potential'. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper reprises the argument for the emergence of a global education policy field and then focuses on the shared habitus of global and national policy actors and technicians. It is argued that this shared habitus is constituted as a reflection of and a contribution to the creation of the global education policy field. Bourdieu's approach to habitus as both methodological tool and concept is used and the significance of the interview encounter to understanding habitus is argued. The authors also draw on the content of interviews with five elite policy-makers and technicians. It was found that the policy actors and technicians shared a similar middle-class embodied habitus; in terms of schemes of perception, they identified with a high-modernist confidence in both science and technology; they identified with a cosmopolitan outlook and sensibility; and demonstrated scientistic approaches that held real confidence in understanding the social through quantitative social science methods. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The Australian curriculum, as a policy imagining what learning should take place in schools, and what that learning should achieve, involves the imagining and rescaling of social relations amongst students, their schools, the nation-state and the globe. Following David Harvey's theorisations of space-time and Norman Fairclough's operationalisation of these theories in the texturing of spatio-temporalities within policy texts, we seek to critically explore the cross-curriculum priorities of the Australian curriculum. These priorities - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's Engagement with Asia, and sustainability - collectively provide a futures orientation to the curriculum. They also mediate and assemble conflicting spatio-temporalities, aligning the purposes of Australian schooling with an instrumentalist concern for Asia literacy, whilst simultaneously recasting the space-times of neoliberal capitalism within sustainable social, cultural and environmental constraints. We suggest these conflicting space-time constructions come to an uneasy resolution with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures priority, where Indigenous peoples are represented as anchoring a reconciled nation-state in a particular place, while it is re-mapped within an Asian economic region. Such curricula constructions potentially diminish student recognition of Indigenous peoples' ongoing struggles for self-determination and steer student knowledge of Asia towards the acquisition of a set of skills to exploit future economic opportunity. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

'Raising aspirations' for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called 'knowledge economies'. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that are recognizable in research with young people and families: a doxic logic, grounded in populist-ideological mediations; and a habituated logic, grounded in biographic-historical legacies and embodied as habitus. A less tangible third 'logic' is also theorized: emergent senses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social-cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Aspiration for higher education (HE) is no longer a matter solely for students and their families. With OECD nations seeking to position themselves more competitively in the global knowledge economy, the need for more knowledge workers has led to plans to expand their HE systems to near universal levels. In Australia, this has required the government and institutions to enlist students who traditionally have not seen university as contributing to their imagined and desired futures. However, this paper suggests that failing to appreciate the aspirations of different groups, understood as a collective cultural capacity, casts doubt over the ability of institutions to deliver increased numbers of knowledge workers. Moreover, inciting subscription to the current norms of HE is a weak form of social inclusion. Stronger forms of equity strategy are possible when HE is repositioned as a resource for different groups and communities to access in the pursuit of their aspirations. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In our current moment there is a resurgence of interest in pedagogy as an object of research and policy. In this context the Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) project sought to improve educational outcomes for students from low-socioeconomic status communities by researching teachers' efforts to develop more connected pedagogies. However, difficulties were encountered during collaborative theory building with teachers. Except for repeated suggestions that pedagogy is 'all about relationships', teachers struggled to develop theoretical accounts of their practice. Using data obtained within the RPiN project, I draw on Massumi's (2002) notion of expanded empiricism and Bauman's (1995) concept of being-for the other to analyze this difficulty. I argue that the condition for pedagogy becoming an ethical experience inheres in an affective dimension of the teacher-student relationship that cannot be translated into a stable object of discursive knowledge. However, this condition is substantive and requires further attention in research and policy. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

edited by Peter McLaren and Joe Kincheloe, New York, Peter Lang, 2007, 411 pp., $44.95 (paperback), ISBN 978‐0‐8204‐8147‐0 One of the enduring issues in schooling is the way in which it reproduces ...

This paper describes a heuristic framework developed to provide a common vocabulary with which to discuss pedagogy within a collaborative university-school research team studying pedagogical redesign in middle-years classrooms (Years 6-9) serving disadvantaged students. The framework was developed in response to discussions about teaching in such settings, during which teacher talk about pedagogy emphasised 'relationships' with students and left the detail of such relationships relatively opaque. In response, the pedagogical processes described in this framework have been developed to provide a vocabulary with which researchers and teachers can talk to each other - with increased conceptual purchase - about pedagogy at the micro-scale of relational interaction between student, teacher and the knowledge they together produce. The use of this framework to analyse teachers' descriptions of their work is suggestive of reasons why difficulties were encountered when trying to talk explicitly about pedagogy with teachers, and of productive pathways for further research about pedagogies as teachers' work. This framework may also be used as a supplement to other pedagogical frames which more strongly emphasise outcomes rather than process. Refereed/Peer-reviewed