Session Information
23 SES 01 B, “Without Data You Are Just Another Person With an Opinion”: Explorations of the Use of Information in Educational Policy
Symposium
Time:
2009-09-28
09:15-10:45
Room:
HG, HS 7
Chair:
Maarten Simons
Discussant:
Eric Mangez
Contribution
Flemish government (Belgium) expects from schools that they operate within an ‘information-rich environment’. In order to achieve this, the Flemish government supplies schools with different kinds of information and with instruments to generate information. Moreover, Flemish government also functions in an information-rich environment. In this paper three questions will be answered: 1) What policy actions involving information does the Flemish government take?; 2) What self-understanding of Flemish government is shown in a policy context in which information apparently plays an important role?; and 3) What rationality is expressed and inscribed in these policy actions and in this self-understanding? We analyse these questions by means of a cartography in a governmentality framework (see e.g. Foucault, 1991; Foucault, 2008) taking several Flemish policy documents as data sources. We will demonstrate that the Flemish government performs three forms of management: information management, performance management and risk management. As such, Flemish government manifests and understands itself as an expert, a coach and an insurer of Flemish education. These actions and this self-understanding in turn give shape to and mirror an educational reality in which activating knowledge, performativity and distrust are prominently present as rationalities.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.