Selectivity and instrumentalization or attraction and repulsion? A postcolonial/decolonial analysis of the uses of international data in Cyprus school timetables reform

• In Event: "Teachers, Schools, and Data: Regulating Quality, Autonomy, and Reform in globalised times"

Proposal

The paper explores the uses of international data in the 2014-15 reform of school timetables in Cyprus. The use of such data to inform national policy is not a new phenomenon. Its origins are traced back to the growth of mass schooling where education comparisons and the uses of numbered data on schools have co-developed into a system of scientific reasoning about education (Pettersson, Popkewitz & Lindblad 2016). With the rise of the neoliberal dogma of evidence-based policy, this system has gained hegemonic prominence to the point that international data are seen today as a powerful tool for steering education systems from distance and through denotations of objectivity. This is captured in the idioms of ‘governance through comparison’ (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal 2003) and ‘governing by numbers’ (Grek 2009). Despite the pervasive use of international data in national policy – often associated with the Europeanisation (Lawn & Grek 2012) and globalization (Rizvi & Lingard 2010) of education – national values and norms are still important in education (Tröhler, Piattoeva & Pinar 2022) and are held to shape national responses to such data. They are specifically seen as playing a crucial role in determining decisions about which data are adopted by governments and which are ignored and why, as well as how the select data are instrumentalized to promote certain ends (Klerides 2022; Addey and Sellar 2018; Verger 2014).

Using the Cyprus school timetables reform as a case study, this paper seeks to problematise the global-local nexus in education as an allegedly neutral interpretative device. It adopts a postcolonial/decolonial lens (Takayama, Sriprakash & Connell 2017; Silova, Rappleye & Auld 2020) seeing this nexus as problematic not just because it prevents decolonial protest and prospect as it silences the continuity of coloniality in Cyprus education in the context of current membership in western formations. It is also problematic on the grounds that it obscures the protest of the colonized against the colonizer who tried to implant mass schooling on the island in the 1930s. British efforts to wrestle the control of schooling from the Orthodox Church and give it a multicultural flavour, generated a mood of ambivalence towards education in Cyprus. On the one hand, education was embraced as crucial in the realisation of identity; on the other, it was rejected as a tool of denying identity. This mixture of attraction and repulsion is still evident today in the ways in which international data are used in the school timetables reform of 2014-15. While such data are admired as a hope of advancement and salvation from local troubles – especially the dominance of client politics in policymaking – they are simultaneously feared as a threat to the continuous existence of the Greco-Orthodox community and their historic identity.

To unveil persistent coloniality, the paper offers a brief analysis of Cyprus education during the colonial encounter first and then it focuses on the school timetables reform of 2014-15, collecting and analysing data from three different sources. A content analysis of the 2015 reform proposal was applied, aiming at unfolding how and why data from the EU and OECD are used in this policy text. For a deeper grasp of the affects and logics shaping the ways in which these data were used, semi-structured interviews with the six members of the scientific advisory committee that had prepared the proposal, were conducted. As the interviewees were academics, teacher unions leaders and top-level officials of the Ministry of Education, parameters necessary for conducting elite interviews were taken into consideration during the development of the interview protocol. To further unfold the personal views of the six committee members about education and society that may have shaped the specific uses of these data, opinion articles published by them in the popular press within a period of five years before the reform, were also compiled and scrutinised. Equally important for understanding the uses of these data in the reform text, was a close examination of official announcements of the various stakeholders in Cyprus education, especially the teaching specialties associations that would have been affected the most by changes in the timetables. These announcements, putting pressure on the advisory committee for certain policy options, were also made public in the popular press during the workings of the advisory committee.

Author

• Eleftherios Klerides, University of Cyprus