Search

This paper explores the production of educational policy discourse based on a view of increasing future unpredictability, focusing on how educational policy knowledge is reconceptualized as a form of anticipatory regime. Specifically, we investigate the Israeli Ministry of Education's Future-Oriented Pedagogy Research and Development Unit, analyzing how the unit produces ways of knowing for policymaking based on the epistemic value of anticipation. Through critical policy analysis of the unit's documents, we explore its structure and rationale, describing two key epistemological mechanisms driving anticipatory educational policy. First, the appeal to 'trends' as a means of generating a certain vision of the future. The centrality of trends establishes a discourse in which policies are subordinated to a future that is at once unpredictable yet inevitable. Second, the introduction of 'adaptivity' as a key educational response to unpredictability, positioning constant change and reaction to external developments as the organizing principle of educational systems.

This paper uses a case study of an Israeli teacher leadership initiative to explore a mode of educational governance that employs 'bottom-up' logic and discourse. The authors analyse the origins of this initiative, and -- through a policy-making ethnography of the initiative's enactment at the district level -- show how it is sustained and governed through 'top-down' structures and strategies. The authors use the term 'bottom-up governance' to describe a hybrid mixture of discourse that valorises grass-roots leadership, of governance through actors' autonomy and reflexivity, of enactment by a complex array of external and internal educational actors, and of initiation and control by central government, which provides insufficient, temporary and unstable resources. Their analysis highlights the conflicted and complex role of mid-level policy-makers in this mode of governance, as well as the simultaneous pursuit by the Israeli education system of centralisation and decentralisation, and 'weak state' and 'strong state' strategies.

This article analyzes the intersection between neo-liberal educational reforms and educational technology in the Israeli education system, through a study of the policy work of an edtech research and development unit in Israel named MindCET, which operates a startup accelerator and other activities and programs. Based on ethnographic research from the first two years of MindCET's operation (2013-2014) alongside analysis of interviews and publications, I explore the edtech sector discourse and practices expressed by MindCET and the ways in which it attempts to promote educational reforms based on technologies, methods, and reasoning from the techno-business world. The article traces the disruption logic of MindCET -- which evolved from disruptive innovation business theory -- and how this logic is manifested in MindCET's activities and educational policy work. I claim that MindCET's policy work is implemented not by promoting in-system change, but rather through its disruption mode: a set of activities that distribute connections, ideas, possibilities, and experiences that are intended to create conditions and mindsets for willingness for disruptive change in education.

This research focuses on 'sociotechnical imaginaries' about education and learning emanating from the Edtech research and development sector. MindCet, the first Edtech incubator in Israel, aims to bring 'disruptive innovation' to the educational field, mainly by bringing in tech start-ups with their problem solving culture and practices. This centre acts as an intermediary between techno-business and education. Based on Biesta's notion of 'the new language of learning,' my research shows how the learning imagined and constructed in techno-business production casts the student as a 'user.' I will argue that the construction of learners as 'users,' not 'students,' is crucial to understanding education technology production and discourse. This user-focused understanding of learning has implications for the commodification and depoliticization of education, and is an important factor in neo-liberal educational reforms and venture philanthropy interventions, both globally and locally.