‘Becoming European’ or ‘phasing out’ culture: New modes of topological governance and knowledge mobilization

• In Event: Knowledge mobilization practices and problems from the global to the local level

Proposal

Purpose
This paper examines the OECD’s PISA for Schools to demonstrate the implications of such global accountabilities to contemporary processes of policymaking and governance in the transnational European Schools System (ESS). Specifically, I show: 1) how PISA for Schools constitutes new relational policy spaces that cut across traditional political boundaries; and 2) the potential impacts of mobilizing such emergent forms of educational knowledge and evidence on school and system-level educators.

Theoretical framework
Increasingly, governing is now ‘accomplished through the “informal authority” of diverse and flexible networks’ (Ball & Junemann, 2012, p. 3). These new actors and relationships facilitate a variety of ‘flows’, which in education encompass large amounts of data, both in schools and at the system level. This broadly reflects the relevance of numbers (Lingard, 2011; Ozga, 2016) and data (Selwyn, 2016) for purposes of measuring, comparing and governing schooling performance, even when these numbers are ‘elastic’ (Piattoeva, 2015) or ‘invalid’ (Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017), rather than somehow being objective depictions of reality.

At the same time, non-State actors have also taken on an increasing role in terms of schooling governance and policy (Lewis, 2017; Verger, Lubienski, & Steiner-Khamsi, 2016), offering services related to the collection, analysis and management of such schooling data. This helps to open up new ‘profitable’ policy spaces for new knowledge and influence to be exerted across the policy cycle.

Data and methods
Drawing suggestively across new relational thinking around globalization (Amin, 2002; Lewis, Sellar, & Lingard, 2016; Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012) and the sociology of numbers, I examine the competing rationales associated with employing PISA for Schools in the ESS. My analyses are informed by interviews with 33 key actors from across the policy cycle, as well as relevant PISA for Schools and ESS-related documents and online media.

Results
Examining the enactment of PISA for Schools and related forms of global schooling evidence in the ESS, I reveal how such testing and knowledge mobilization affords opportunities and spaces with which new modes of educational knowledge and evidence can influence local schooling policy and practice. I show how PISA for Schools is valued by ESS actors for providing globally referenced, and hence ‘objective’, facts that are used to mitigate the complicating role of local context, even when these are inherently, and problematically, embedded in national schooling trajectories.

Significance
I argue that PISA for Schools represents a distinctive shift towards the local (i.e., the school) as the most significant schooling policy space. In light of my topological theorising, PISA for Schools helps de-couple schools from more traditional geographies of power (i.e., the nation-state) and establishes instead direct power-relations with new policy actors, such as the OECD. This reflects the contradictory logics of the ESS, in which the stated goal of ‘becoming European’ is seemingly contested by the decontextualized use of international evidence. The perceived need for such data, associated with the global authority of the OECD, thus produces a problematic focus on numbers at the expense of other more educative and social considerations.

Author

• Steven Lewis, Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre, Deakin University