Researching global education policy: Diverse approaches to policy movement

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel presents original research contained in the forthcoming book, Researching global education policy: Diverse approaches to policy movement (Policy Press). As does the book, this panel seeks to contribute to the literature on global education policy by unpacking, theorizing, and problematizing different approaches to understanding policy movement. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion, and mobility have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across territories, levels, or scales, usually from the global to the local (and vice versa). These concepts represent different theoretical traditions and sometimes conflicting epistemological and ontological orientations that focus on different aspects of what can be considered ‘policy movement.’ In this panel, we purposely use the term ‘policy movement’ as an umbrella concept under which the cognate scholarship drawn from various theoretical orientations are accommodated and put in dialogue with each other.

The proposed panel takes up this focus on policy movement both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, the panel brings together a diversity of approaches, clarifies their foundational assumptions and insights, and puts them into dialogue in order to draw attention to the way that these approaches—and the phenomenon of policy movement itself—can also be seen as problematic (e.g., in terms of whose knowledge, politics, or worldview is being advanced). These goals are accomplished by including papers that can be situated in relation to four different paradigms, which can be characterized as: (a) cross-scalar, (b) discursive/normative, (c) topological, and (d) decolonial.

Empirically, although much literature has been produced related to the movement of education policies globally, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of authors frequently remain unaddressed or insufficiently discussed. This panel is a response to this gap in the literature in that it is based on papers which take a particular theoretical approach to policy movement and then apply that approach to a particular case in order to demonstrate the kinds of insights that can be generated. Moreover, and importantly, these papers show the ways in which policy movement paradigms are evolving and, indeed, being combined to form new and hybrid approaches. In what follows, we briefly summarize the approach and focus of each of the papers on this panel.

In the first paper, the authors apply the cultural political economy approach to a context that has received minimal attention in the policy movement literature: federal states. Through a comparative case study, they explore the selective adoption and uses of accountability policy solutions in two regions of two different federal countries (Minas Gerais, Brazil and Madrid, Spain). In doing so they undertake a multi-scalar comparison of two accountability policy reforms. The results indicate that the decentralized nature of quasi-federal States facilitates the adoption of standardized tests whereas the administrative traditions of different states acts as a hindering factor for the long-term retention and institutionalization of such accountability approaches.

The second paper departs from a stance that is typical of World Culture Theory. In examining the diffusion of migrant and refugee education, they assume, based on World Culture Theory premises, first, that international organizations (IOs) contribute to setting global normative standards and, second, that states must adhere to global norms if they are to be seen as modern, that is, as members of global society. However, interestingly, this study goes beyond a look at how IOs promote migrant and refugee education; the study also draws on the theoretical frameworks of Sociological Institutionalism (SI) and Historical Institutionalism (HI) to assess why IO policies have changed or remained stable.

Papers three and four reflect topological approaches. Paper three highlights topology as a particular conceptual focus in policy mobilities work, and through a topological lens, examines other key concepts in policy mobilities research—namely, networks, place, time, and assemblages. Example studies are also included that suggest how policy mobilities are multidirectional, with movement happening not only from global spheres to the local, but also with policy developed in specific places initiating global movement of policy ideas and models.

Paper four looks at the roles of transnational-national actors and national policy-makers in mobilizing and activating global education policies on social and emotional learning (SEL) in Lebanon. Informed by policy mobilities approaches, the authors focus on the multiscalar governance of education, and in particular the increasingly powerful role of international and civil society organizations in influencing policy movement. The authors overview how SEL has come to prominence globally, some prevalent critiques of it as a mobile policy framing, and detail how it was mobilized as a global policy solution for Lebanon. They investigate the underlying mechanism, macro factors, and power dynamics of the various policy actors who influence Lebanese policy-makers in their decision to adopt SEL policies at the national level. The paper thus draws from not only policy mobilities approaches, but also cross-scalar and discursive frameworks to analyze global policy movement.

The fifth paper draws on decolonial literature to provide an alternative historiography of the madrasa (higher learning centers for Islamic sciences) and modern higher education institutions in Turkey. This investigation uncovers how the legacy of colonial time, or the Eurocentric, historicist, linear and progressivist notion of time, has guided the existing historiography of educational institutions in post-Ottoman Turkey. Aided by the recent revisionist scholarship, the author shows how secular historiography has contributed to the flattened ontology of the globe; how the uncritical deployment of the modernist temporal frame has fabricated the ‘organic connections’ between madrasas of the fifteenth and sixteenth century and modern higher education institutions modeled after modern European universities. In so doing, the scholarship has erased from its historiography the fact that madrasas and modern universities belonged to two different discursive systems and two different temporal logics. The significance of this paper for studies of global education policy movements is that it cautions us about the roles researchers play in constructing and naturalizing the flattened ontology of the globe.

Following the papers, a discussant will offer analysis that further puts the papers into conversation, highlighting the benefits and limitations of the respective approaches.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Organizers

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Chair

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii

Individual Presentations

• Exclusive inclusion: How international organizations frame policies of migrant and refugee education - Dennis N. Niemann, University of Bremen; Kerstin Martens, University of Bremen

• A Complex Global Governance of Education: Multiscalar Social and Emotional Learning Policy-Making in Lebanon - Jisun Jeong, American University - School of Education; Laura C. Engel, The George Washington University

• Dismantling colonial time as the order and condition of comparison: A critique of modernist secularist historiography of higher education in Turkey - Yasin Tunc, Portland State University

Discussant

• Robert L Lingard, Australian Catholic University