Experiences, contexts and data use: Revisiting the study of education policy implementation in comparative and international education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The study of education policies is at the centre of the field of comparative and international education. It is well known that this field of study focuses on the circulation of policies through diverse temporalities and spatialities (Nóvoa, 2017) including the global, regional, national, subnational and institutional scales. Each one may be considered as a locus of analysis in itself, or as part of an exchange movement where both educational policy regulation and programme design and practice take shape.
Concepts such as policy borrowing and lending, policy formulation, diffusion, reception, interpretation and translation, or the research on global governance, epistemological governance and the critical grammar of education policy have laid the basis for the study of the dynamics in education policy formulation and development (see among others Carney, 2012; Grek, 2014; Louis et al., 2005; Phillips & Ochs, 2003; Robertson & Dale, 2014; Rizvi & Lingard, 2009; Steiner-Khamsi, 2016; Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2018; Verger & Skedsmo, 2021).
Specifically, Stephen Ball’s work has remarkably contributed to renewing the studies on education policies by developing conceptual tools that have enabled to overcome static views on the policy formulation and implementation processes: it is in the logic of dynamism, flows and movement that we should analyze educational policy, and the new spaces and times in which education policies are produced. To that end, Ball and his colleagues have developed concepts such as the policy cycle, the polycentric state, governance, heterarchies and policy networks (Beech & Meo, 2016).
Comparative studies on education policies have taken particular interest in their contributions to the theory of policy enactment, in a bid to complexify the analysis of policy implementation: the circulation of norms and programmes into educational practices (Ball et al., 2011; Braun et al., 2011). For the authors, the policy cycle is continuous, and its complexity lies in the need to analytically articulate the micro-political processes, inherent to the actions of school actors, with those at the macro-political level. This approach allows moving away from linear perspectives of policy implementation and highlighting the contentious and dialectical nature of policy processes (Verger & Skedsmo, 2021).
This session is located at this analytical intersection between micro- and macro-processes of education policy, processes that involve the different actors participating in the development of education policies: from the influences of international organizations to individual and collective decision-making that gives meaning to actions in schools. Therefore, this session has two intertwined purposes. The first is to present different approaches and scales to analyse education policies. The approaches include i) the review of some of the aforementioned concepts and their application in diverse geographical contexts; ii) the consideration of technological objects such as data production and their central presence in the development of education policies; iii) the reconsideration of training processes related to policy implementation. The scales refer to the analysis of different forms of circulation in the implementation and policy enactment processes: between national and subnational governments, between top-level political decision-making and technical bodies, between intermediate bureaucracies and educational institutions, and between principals and teachers in schools.
The second purpose of the session is to offer a reflection on how the study and analysis of education policies are carried out. The different approaches and objects of the presentations aim to generate a conversation between contexts that have been studied more and less: Norway, on the one hand, and Argentina and Peru on the other, and technologies such as data production, which hold a central role in education policies and lead to a reconfiguration of meanings and purposes. The exchange of specific experiences is expected to allow, for example, reflecting on how data production permeates the development of policies in diverse contexts. Finally, the reflection on training oriented towards policy implementation is relevant, as it is a nearly absent object in analytical studies.
This session offers five presentations. The first one aims to understand the enactment of education policies oriented to secondary education in Argentine provinces by looking into how provincial ministers and high-level policymakers in secondary education negotiate, contest and struggle with different groups within and outside the formal machinery of official policymaking in an interplay between subnational and national power configurations. The second presentation moves to a completely different context, Norway, to analyze how regional educational authorities (at the county level) and school leaders in upper secondary schools interpret and translate policy interventions to prevent dropout into practice. The aim is to examine the role of subjective variables and processes of meaning-making in mediating such interventions. Continuing with mediation processes at the school level, the third presentation introduces the failed development of a State programme to reform pedagogical practice in primary schools in Peru; through the lenses of the political economy of educational policy implementation, it focuses on the challenges posed by the politics of education reform in countries with weak states and institutions. The two final presentations move away from experiences in particular contexts and focus on objects relevant to the study of policy implementation. One concentrates on tracing development trends concerning data sources and purposes of data use across country contexts – a key issue considering that data production appears as a central technology in educational policy for monitoring results but also as a contestation site for negotiating problems and solutions. The fifth presentation deals with an object that rarely engages with analytical studies on education policies: the role that faculties of education can play in preparing professionals to succeed in the face of the complexities inherent in educational policy implementation.
All in all, the session seeks to offer a better understanding of how policy endeavours aimed at changing practices, regulations and conceptions in education are subject to complex and unstable relations between actors, texts, talks, technologies and objects (Ball et al., 2011): that is to say, how to capture the complexities underpinning the articulation of policy texts, ‘things’ and discourses in education policies. In this way, the panel results also shed light on the forms of knowledge production regarding the implementation of education policy in comparative and international education.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Chair

• Felicitas M Acosta, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento & NORRAG

Individual Presentations

• Secondary education reforms in Argentina’s provinces: between big mottos and daily policy-crafting - Delfina Garino, IPEHCS CONICET UNCo; Ivan Matovich, Monash University; Felicitas M Acosta, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento & NORRAG

• Reforming pedagogical practice in Peruvian schools: the promise and downfall of a whole school intervention - Maria Balarin, GRADE

• Data use in Education: new trends and emerging issues. A mapping review. - Giulia Montefiore, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Guri Skedsmo, Schwyz University of Teacher Education

• Preparing Implementers for Complexity –Perspectives from a Higher Education Collaborative - Tamo Chattopadhay, American University of Central Asia; Jorge G Baxter, Universidad de Los Andes

Discussant

• Chanwoong Baek, Geneva Graduate Institute & NORRAG