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International Assessments and How Truth Is Visualized in an Era of Transnational Governance and "Post-Truth"

Mon, April 8, 10:25 to 11:55am, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Floor: 200 Level, Room 206D

Abstract

The “facts” of the “post-truth” era are not merely a phenomenon of the political and social arena but assembled in a grid of practices that that includes important changes in the knowledge production at the boundaries between science and society (Agora). This paper explores those boundaries as they relate to the particular social, institutional and epistemic qualities of the sciences of International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSA) whose changes in the criteria of truth are examined. It is argued that what is called post-truth is given a reasonableness indirectly in this notion of science embodied in ILSA.

The statistical technologies, numbers and their visualization in charts, graphs and magnitudes (ranking and lists) become the testimonials to the truth telling carried into media that have homologies to what is called “post-truth”. The visual knowledge produce an affect that replace sciences that previously sought rule like laws and causation. The paper explores the metrics in the calculations and standardization in the international student assessments as “actors”; that is, the categories and statistic equivalences are models of change that “act” to produce boundaries limits to how truth is what is said and done. The analysis directs attention to how ILSA .provides ways of telling the truth foreshadows and given intelligibility to the present. The analysis directs attention to:

First, the international assessments and numbers embody cultural theses about kinds of people and societies. These cultural theses emerge through the categories, distinctions and differentiations that relate school performances with the characteristics and qualities of teachers, children and families. These characteristics of people appear as universal in order to compare. The numerical rankings and classifications of people seem removed from the nation but loop back into nation through policy, programs and research for intervention and planning.
Second and related, the metrics are about desires as the potentialities of school systems, nations and their populations are to become if “successful”. Stripped of the moral, social and economic entitlements, the international assessments express desires in the Deleuzian sense of actualizing the experiences of the present as potentialities of what children and society should become (Delueze and Parnet, 1987).
Third, international research entails a comparative reasoning. The comparative qualities embody double gestures: the hope of making kinds of children simultaneously generate images and narratives of dangerous kinds of children who do not fit and excluded; the child who lacked motivation and self-esteem, and who is not hardworking.
The analysis is drawn from OECD reports, and national research and McKinsey reports drawing on PISA data. The method is diagnostic, to examine the rules and standards of the reason that give these documents intelligibility. It analysis is related to how new conditions for telling the truth about people and society emerge.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1977/1987). Dialogues (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

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