Policy Futures in Education: From critical research to policy (original) (raw)
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Educational researchers doing research on educational policy: Heroes, puppets, partners, or…?
It is argued that it is essential for researchers to understand their relationship with policymakers if they are to act with what Aristotle identified as phronesis or practical wisdom (Aristotle, 1980). In order to do this, it is necessary to reflect on experience. It is further argued that the representation of that experience is itself at issue. Practical knowledge is not only situated and contextual. It is also provisional, perspectival and dependent on the form of the narrative (Stronach and MacLure, 1997). The discussion takes as its starting point a series of articles that have appeared in recent issues of the British Educational Research Journal (Brown et al, 2003; Torrance, 2003; Beard, 2003; Wyse, 2003; Lather, 2004; Saunders, 2005). The stories of research told in these articles are also stories of the researchers’ identities: identities with strong value positions attached. In some accounts researchers appear as equal partners with policy makers. In others they struggle against becoming mere tools of the system, browbeaten by the powerful funders. Sometimes they are heroes -- maybe tragic heroes -- defending their principles against the odds. This presentation tells contrasting insider stories of an evaluation carried out for the DfES of the Intensifying Support Project. It focuses particularly on the most recent part of the evaluation, completed earlier that year (2006).
European Educational Research Journal, 2010
This article outlines and discusses a set of related developments in the governance, reform and privatisation of knowledge production in the field of education policy. It argues that knowledge about, performative knowledge, and knowledge for leadership knowledge are key facets of the new governance and ongoing reform of public sector education but increasingly are created and sold to governments by private sector and philanthropic organisations. In all of this public sector higher education institutions are being displaced as knowledge brokers, and at the same time ‘enterprised’ and ‘hybridised’, in a new education policy knowledge market. Increasingly the idea of a public/private divide in education is redundant.
Bruno Latour famously asked " Why has critique run out of steam? " (2004). In this paper we draw on his ideas to present some resources for " gathering "-for doing education policy research with others-which we are calling 'critical-dissensual collaboration'. We think that our education policy research 'critique from afar' may have run out of steam and we make some proposals for doing critical research, but with (a diversity of) others. We offer resources for undertaking critical-dissensual, collaborative education policy research – where 'realities are not secure but instead they have to be practised' (Law, 2004, p. 15). This extends the conceptualisation of enactment that Stephen Ball and colleagues have made; from focusing on 'how schools do policy' (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012), to how researchers and schools (re)do policy together. This article is part of our attempt to underpin this redoing of policy with a politics of dissensus (Verran, 2015) and to develop alternative resources to those that enable a 'god's eye view' of policy research (see Haraway, 1988). As critical education policy researchers we have collaborated as policy actors with others in schools and this article forms out of this work. We discuss what we are calling 'starter' concepts as a contribution toward elucidating resources for a dissensual politics of 'gathering' in critical collaborations. 2
Critical Policy Scholarship in Education: An Overview
Education Policy Analysis Archives , 2021
This paper presents an overview of critical policy scholarship (CPS) in education. Historically, policy research has been dominated by what is commonly referred to as the policy science tradition, which is positivist in its philosophical stance and instrumentalist in its purpose-it focuses on producing knowledge relevant for policy decisions. However, with the rise of interpretive social inquiry in the 1970s and against the backdrop of unique political developments in the 1980s, CPS emerged as an alternative policy research perspective. This review discusses the scope and foci of CPS in education under four themes: methodological assumptions, interdisciplinary roots, enduring analytical goals, and emerging empirical contexts. Implications of the prevalence of inequality, Big Data and digital panopticon for educational policymaking and policy research are also briefly discussed. The paper concludes that although its foci of analysis have shifted considerably in the last four decades, analytical interest and tools of CPS remain largely unchanged.
'Scientists have a culture. They have beliefs. They have practices. They work, they gossip, and they worry about the future. And, somehow or other, out of their work, their practices and their beliefs, they produce knowledge, scientific knowledge, accounts of reality. So how do they do this? How do they make knowledge? (Law, 2004, p. 19)