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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.

An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation: Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes

An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation: Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes , 2019

An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation: Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes outlines the epistemology of the theories and models that are currently employed to evaluate educational systems, education policy, educational professionals and students learning. It discusses how those theories and models find their epistemological conditions of possibility in a specific set of conceptual transferences from mathematics and statistics, political economy, biology and the study of language. The book critically engages with the epistemic dimension of contemporary educational evaluation and is of theoretical and methodological interest. It uses Foucauldian archaeology as a problematising method of inquiry within the wider framework of governmentality studies. It goes beyond a mere critique of the contemporary obsession for evaluation and attempts to replace it with the opening of a free space where the search for a mode of being, acting and thinking in education is not over-determined by the tyranny of improvement. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of educational philosophy, education policy and social science.

Post-panoptic accountability: making data visible through 'data walls' for schooling improvement

Post-panopticism is aligned with the Foucauldian conception of power and illustrates its apparatuses and mechanisms, for instance the visibility of bodies under the gaze, the facility to mobilise power relations for political purposes, and the capacity to engage self-technologies where there is self-surveillance and surveillance of others. As a concept, it is a confluence of the disciplinary power of panoptic control and the ubiquitous security mechanism of biopower in action. Post-panopticism in the discipline provides a means to identify areas of lack in teacher and student populations. Post-panoptic surveillance in Australian schools is illustrated in this article around the use of data wall displays. Data walls are a collective mechanism that produces biopower through its alignment with panoptic disciplinary power in schools. These data assemblages are an example of a suite of technologies that profile student performance, mould teaching practices, and shape subjectivities of leaders, teachers, and students.