Search results

This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers' instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein's theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.

This chapter offers a pedagogical, analytical and heuristic framework for the critical analysis of higher education policy texts, and of the processes and motivations behind their articulations, grounded in considerations of relationships and flows between language, power and discourse. Theoretically the framework draws on critical discourse analysis, which provides a systematic framework for exegesis, analysis and interpretation, uncloaking the ways in which language (and other semiotic modes) work within discourse as agents and actors in the realisation, construction and perception of relations of power. The framework itself comprises two elements: one concerned with contextualising and one with deconstructing. The contextualisation element of the frame comprises three parts: temporal context, policy levers/drivers and warrant. The second element of deconstruction engages with text and discourse using a number of analytical lenses and tools derived from critical discourse analysis and critical literacy analysis.

Formative assessment is of critical concern within higher education, particularly as ‘feedback’ remains a recurring source of student dissatisfaction. In contemporary times, the need to decolonise higher education emerged first in post-colonial contexts of the global south, before becoming a more general debate in contexts which historically were at the heart of empire. Literatures on formative assessment and decolonisation have, however, remained discrete and disconnected. This chapter first makes the connection between decolonisation and assessment, highlighting the need to question dominant (modern) understandings of assessment as ‘objective’ measurement. It then suggests potentially helpful strands in assessment and wider literature to re-imagine formative assessment practices that might support decolonisation agendas, discussing this with reference to the authors' previous research. It closes by suggesting some modest ways forward that more openly acknowledge the problematics of assessment as a social practice, as well as the need for further research.

Building on the proposition that Bernstein's ideas are due for a revival in higher education research, the call for studies in which theory is put to use and for policy studies to engage in textual analysis, this chapter argues for the affordances of the theoretical underpinnings of Bernstein's pedagogic device and critical discourse studies in investigating connections between policy and practice. Drawing on the sociology of pedagogy and applied linguistics, this chapter aims to explore the theoretical complementarities of the chosen approaches for exploring how policy ideas move through time and space. A focus on the notion of recontextualisation enables an understanding of how influences beyond the discipline itself, including policy discourses, can shape learning, teaching and assessment practices. The illustrating case examines policy on learning and teaching and how these ideas are recontextualised from national policy through to institutional policy and individual practices. The critical or questioning angle of both approaches in seeing ideas, including policy, as never value-free but as situated within their sociopolitical context can shed light on how policy ideas make their way into universities and in whose interests.

In England there are very strong pressures in schools to meet government targets for public examination results. Thus assessment is very ‘high stakes’ as principals and class teachers can lose their jobs if these targets aren’t met. In such a climate many teachers feel that innovation, such as inquiry-based learning involves taking a considerable risk. As a result teachers in England often enact a hybridised form of inquiry in order to manage the risk and this chapter explores three cases of schools in north east England in which hybridisation has occurred. We use Basil Bernstein’s concept of ‘framing’ to analyse the effect of inquiry-based learning on the relationship between the curriculum, teachers and students in these schools. Inquiry, acts as a disruption to the normal ‘convergent’ pedagogy with many positive outcomes for teachers and students but both feel the constraint of the demands of the examination system. Although the agency, or capacity for action, of teachers is increased through exploring inquiry approaches, we conclude that for inquiry to develop further there is a need for a stronger local ‘ecology’ to support teachers and schools in their efforts to innovate. We describe the contribution of Newcastle University to such an ecology.

In this chapter we open up questions about educational standardisation by thinking through the possibilities of the theoretical work on Totally Pedagogised Societies (TPSs) initially developed by Basil Bernstein (2001). In relation to new modes of teacher professionalism, including the introduction of standardisation measures, researchers have drawn on Bernstein's sociological concepts, including the concept of the TPS (Robertson & Sorenson, 2018). Studies, drawing on the concept of the TPS, have tended to focus on the power scape or power reach of international organisations into pedagogic acts across time space – from cradle to grave, in and out of schools. We seek here to move the analytical possibilities for TPS where the focus on the ‘total’ part of the concept is often read and understood as ‘totalising’ (see, for example, Gewirtz, Mahony & Hextall, 2009; Ball, 2009) and deterministic. Instead, we extend work on the TPS and theorise the redesign of standardisation.

This essay argues for a a radical interactionist framework using autoethnographic tools as well as critical feminist perspectives. Not all “masculine” systems are necessarily all “evil” and “feminist” systems are not unambiguously good, devoid of context. The vantage point from which I engage Lonnie Athens’ work on radical interactionism is rooted personally and professionally: as a woman of color who was formerly a tenured Associate Professor of English and Humanities turned joint Juris Doctor in Law and Women’s Studies Graduate and Teaching Fellow in Women’s Studies.

An autoethnographic exploration of critical pedagogies, as practiced by law professors, concretely shows that a radical interactionist framework more accurately describes the fluctuating borders of power in the classroom. In addition, feminist critiques against Athens’ work, as evidenced, for example, by Deegan’s critique of the “patriarchal” type of “Chicago pragmatism” practiced by Mead, suffer from similar simplistic binaries as Noddings’ “ethic of care” – which reduces gender to sex, and unconditionally idealizes the “feminine” as “feminist.” Most importantly, this biologically determinist perspective does not take into the account the lived realities of lesbians and women of color, for whom the principle of domination is always, already a part of the worlds into which they are flung.

This chapter closes with an examination of how an acceptance of the radical interactionist principle of domination combined with an intersectional approach, rather than a binary of gender, could yield fruitful results in new areas of application, such as international human rights, and critical race theory and criminal law.