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This article presents topological genealogy (TG) as a methodology to research transnational digital governance, and particularly how digital infrastructures are implicated in enacting such forms of governance. Inspired by the field of social topology, TG is centrally interested in investigating the conjoined production of digital infrastructures and present-day education policymaking as governance; as well as how both produce, and are produced by, processes of flows and change. Notably, the TG methodology helps to disentangle digital governance in, through and as change. Through a worked example of the European Commission's eTwinning platform, the article shows TG in action, and complements the topological analysis with methodological foregroundings. These show how the methodology impacts as much the fabrication of research data and its subsequent analysis as it impacts the doings of the researcher.

This paper focuses on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) "PISA for Schools" assessment. Our first substantive focus is a descriptive and analytical account of changes and developments in the functioning of this ground-breaking assessment since its creation in 2012. These changes include an expansion of the number and diversity of participating schools and countries, the introduction of a 'user-pays' model, the enhanced role of edtech firms and an explicit capacity-building focus, which we argue helps to strengthen an instrument constituency for the broader OECD testing regime. The second focus of the paper is the impact of PISA for Schools on changing modes of educational governance, situated against emerging spatialities of globalisation. Here, we provide an analysis using the concept of 'by-passes', which we elaborate as "spatial," "governance" and "systemic," to understand the new topological spatialities of globalisation and the global governance effects of these specific by-passes.

Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of 'global forms' with the dual concepts of 'political rationality' and 'political technology' from governmentality studies, we consider SBRs as a "global techno-scientific form" that coheres at the level of political rationality and which can be abstracted across contexts, but which also manifests in unique "place-specific assemblages" of political technologies. The global form of SBRs thus represents the logics by which policymakers may attempt to align and create commonality across systems in the search for standardisation, even if this can never be fully realised in practice.

The research reports how a particular school reform initiative--'Project 600'--constituted students in one school region Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon topological understandings of power and recent work on the visualisation of data in education, as well as the insights of key staff involved in the project, we reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which so-called 'invisible' (i.e., 'average-performing') students were made 'visible' through data. On the one hand, Project 600 enabled teachers to see these students as learners and beyond broader pressures to enhance results on standardised testing (i.e., beyond data). However, associated processes of datafication meant that these students' 'visibility' as holistic learners was simultaneously challenged, as their schools and region came to be increasingly governed through data. These students were then at risk of becoming 'invisible' in a different sense, as processes of commensuration and visualisation of data contributed to them being constituted as data.

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia's federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on "policy assemblage" within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant "component parts" in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests "the national" is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflect "transnational" traits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems.

The research reports how a particular school reform initiative - 'Project 600' - constituted students in one school region Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon topological understandings of power and recent work on the visualisation of data in education, as well as the insights of key staff involved in the project, we reveal the complex and contradictory ways in which so-called 'invisible' (i.e., 'averageperforming') students were made 'visible' through data. On the one hand, Project 600 enabled teachers to see these students as learners and beyond broader pressures to enhance results on standardised testing (i.e., beyond data). However, associated processes of datafication meant that these students' 'visibility' as holistic learners was simultaneously challenged, as their schools and region came to be increasingly governed through data. These students were then at risk of becoming 'invisible' in a different sense, as processes of commensuration and visualisation of data contributed to them being constituted as data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflecttransnationaltraits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, a local variant of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD’s) influential PISA that not only assesses an individual school’s performance in reading, mathematics and science against international schooling systems, but also promotes 17 identical examples of ‘best practice’ from ‘world class’ schooling systems (e.g. Shanghai-China, Singapore). Informed by 33 semi-structured interviews with actors across the PISA for Schools policy cycle, and supplemented by the analysis of relevant documents, the paper provides an account of how these concrete examples of best practice are represented in the report received by participating schools. Drawing upon thinking around processes of commensuration and the notion of ‘governing by examples’, the paper argues that PISA for Schools discursively positions participating schools as somehow being commensurable with successful schooling systems, eliding any sense that certain cultural and historical factors – or ‘out of school’ factors – are inexorably linked to student performance. Beyond encouraging the problematic school-level borrowing of policies and practices from contextually distinct schooling systems, I argue that this positions the OECD as both the global expert on education policy and now, with PISA for Schools, the local expert on ‘what works’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]