Accountability instruments, performativity and affects: A qualitative analysis of teachers’ interpretations and responses to accountability demands in Chile and Norway

• In Event: Autonomy and Accountability: Instruments, Data, and Governance

Proposal

Performance-based accountability is a key component of the global education agenda. While usually introduced with the ambition of encouraging or forcing educational actors to assume responsibility for centrally-defined learning goals, research shows that the impact of performance-based accountability (PBA) instruments on school organization and teachers’ instructional practices varies significantly. In this sense, a number of studies show how educators tend to hold rather critical attitudes towards performance-based accountability, and undertake efforts to negotiate, avoid or resist accountability demands (e.g., Müller & Hernández, 2010). Other studies, in contrast, report how some educators have come to embrace and even embody performance metrics, and align their daily practices to accountability expectations (e.g., Holloway & Brass, 2018). Nevertheless, a limited understanding prevails of how to explain different interpretations, lived experiences and responses to performance data in different contexts. With the aim of contributing to the understanding of how factors of different nature influence the enactment of PBA, this paper reports on a comparative study on the policy interpretations and translations of primary school teachers in Chile and Norway. Theoretically speaking, this study is informed by the policy enactment perspective (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2011), which provides a useful heuristic device to examine how policy demands are put in practice and understand how variation in policy outcomes comes about. In explaining potential systematic effects of PBA reforms, scholars have pointed towards the ‘power of numbers’ (cf. Espeland & Stevens, 1998), and the relationship between data and affect (Sellar, 2015). More specifically, Sellar (2015) has argued that performance comparisons and metrics can shape actors’ experiences and behavior and trigger emotional effects. Methodologically speaking, we selected the cases of Chile and Norway following a most-different-systems design approach (MDSD). The analysis relies on qualitative data derived from semi-structured interviews with primary school teachers in the capital cities of both countries (n=40). The findings highlight that in Norway positive opinions and beliefs about PBA instruments predominate, while in the case of Chile most teachers express critical opinions and views on these instruments. This difference might be partially explained by the distinct rationales of adoption and uses given to PBA instruments in each country. However, despite diverging accountability instruments designs, levels of marketization and school choice regulations, similar emotional and felt effects of performance data are reported in both contexts. In this regard, our study shows that, regardless of differences in accountability instruments design, teachers can internalize new values and understandings aligned with the culture of performativity and experience similar reputational pressures. Still, teachers in Norway seem to experience more room to negotiate PBA expectations when they conflict with teachers’ ideas of good teaching compared to teachers in Chile.

Author

• Lluís Parcerisa, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona