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International large-scale assessments meeting educational policy-making in a restructuring Nordic welfare state.

Wed, April 17, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Street (Level 0), Plaza

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In focus for this session is the dynamic interplay between international comparative research and national educational policy-making. Our case is Sweden – a Nordic welfare state under restructuring. This case is analyzed as a cased of changing relations between science and society (Nowotny, Scott & Gibbons, 2001). Vital is to capture dynamics of coproduction of science and society – symbolically located at an “agora” (a square or a marketplace in ancient Greece) – where actors with different resources and interests are meeting, and where change processes are displayed, such as contextualization of research or as transitions into a knowledge society (Stehr, 2012). Such a dynamic understanding is contrasted to linear and unidirectional conceptions of science application or contextualization. It is furthermore hypothesized that such coproduction at the education agora is having consequences for education as well as for education research. International large-scale assessments (ILSA) are here very interesting to study as research putting national education in a globalizing context (Sellar & Lingard, 2014).
Our case works is interesting as an agora problematic, given its trajectory from a centralized welfare state education system focused on reformistic education of democratic citizens, towards a restructured system – decentralized and marketized – emphasizing efficiency and education for an internationally competitive economy. Here, international large-scale assessments (ILSA) provide a kind of governing at a distance which have turned to be of vital importance for policy discourses the last decade. Decentralization within nations continues but now with references to supra-national organizations such as the OECD, which have transformed ILSA research into a testing system (PISA) organized to provide evidence and policy advices based on international comparisons and standards.
Given the theoretical stances presented above we turn to our case with a set of questions considering the education agora: How does ILSA perform as a knowledge system in transition towards e.g. a knowledge society? How is educational research (here especially ILSA) translated into and assemble the agora? What positions are developed and which strategies are at work by different agents at the agora? What are the implications for new arenas in coproduction of science and society and what does this mean for the truth generating systems of scientific knowledge production?
Our approach to these questions is empirical and comparative, we combine an ongoing set of research inquiries on ILSA as systems of reason and education discourses (Lindblad, Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2018; Pettersson, Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2018) at the agora of today, with results and data from a previous ten-country study (1999-2001, including Sweden) researching educational governance and knowledge problematics (Lindblad & Lundahl et al, 2002; Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2001).
Based on this we will present and discuss four papers that are working with the following inquiries on the education policy agora:
- Theoretical and historical analyses of the trajectory of ILSA as a science-society study embedded in national and international contexts.
- Perspectives and practices among policy-makers and top administrators on education problematics and ILSA research contextualisation for these problematics.
- Perspectives and practices of educational researchers on ILSA research and research relevance for education problematics.
- Revisiting previous studies and comparing perspectives and problematics at education policy agoras researched around 2000 and 2018.
As discussants we have internationally recognized researchers in comparative education – one from Australia and one from the US.
The session presented here has the ambition to cast new light on changing relations between knowledge and policy in education with its focus on the dynamic interplay between science and policy-making. In this interplay international comparative studies are vital ingredients. Discussions based on historical comparisons to previous international research on knowledge politics in education will deepen our understanding of education knowledge in local and global contexts. Realizing these ambitions will hopefully increase our understanding of the education agora and improvement of the interplay at the agora – towards more sustainable relations between science and society.

References:
Lindblad, S. ; Pettersson, D. ; Popkewitz, T. (2015). International Comparisons of School Results: A Systematic Review of Research on Large Scale Assessments in Education. Stockholm: Vetenskapsrådets rapporter.
Lindblad, S., Lundahl, L., Lindgren, J. & Zackari, G. (2002). Educating for the New Sweden? Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, vol 46 nr 3, s.283-303
Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D. & Popkewitz, T. (Eds), (2018): Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society: International Assessments and its Expertise. Routledge.
Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2001). Rethinking Science: Power and the public in an age of uncertainty.
Pettersson, D., Popkewitz, T. S., & Lindblad, S. (2017). In the grey zone: large-scale assessment-based activities betwixt and between policy, research and practice. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 1-13.
Rip, A. (2002). Reflections on the transformation of science. Metascience, 11(3), 317-323.
Sellar, S., & Lingard, B. (2014). The OECD and the expansion of PISA: New global modes of governance in education. British Educational Research Journal, 40(6), 917-936.
Stehr, N. (2012). Knowledge societies. The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization.

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