School Improvement and the New ‘Truth’ on Italian Education

Author(s):

Roberto Serpieri(presenting / submitting)Emiliano Grimaldi

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

28. Sociologies of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

28 SES 09 A, Recomposing School by Standards, Accountability and Improvement

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-10

11:00-12:30

Room:

106.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Eszter Neumann

Contribution

This paper deals with the general issue of knowledge production in the changing landscape of European education. It aims at contributing to the scholarly debate on what are the ‘truth-telling’ discourses on education (and what are the excluded ones), what are the technologies which forge the education field, its practices and subjects, and what are the new authoritative subjects who have the legitimate power to tell and disseminate the knowledge(s) that counts as educational truth.

Drawing on Ball and colleagues works (Ball, 2012; Ball and Junemann, 2012; Olmedo, 2013), we will adopt a policy sociology approach to study the above research objects, combining the sensibilities of the Foucauldian studies on governmentality (Foucault, 1991; Rose and Miller, 1992; Dean, 2010) with the mapping of policy mobilities and assemblages as a way to analyse in details policy flows, processes of translations and recontextualisations within the European eduscape.

In particular the work will focus on School Improvement (SI) as an assemblage of discourses and technologies of management, evaluation and accountability that represents one of the main building-blocks of Europeanization in the field of education. The dynamics of the entering in and the colonisation of the Italian education space by SI discourses and technologies will be analysed. In defining our focus of analysis and choosing our interpretative toolbox, we were aware of Rose and Miller (1992: 174) claim that in advanced liberal societies ‘political power is exercised today through a profusion of shifting alliances between diverse authorities in projects to govern a multitude of facets of economic activity, social life and individual conduct’. This creates ‘mobile mechanisms’ of political power (Rose and Miller, 1992: 174), whose analysis requires to shift the attention to the proliferation of complex bodies of knowledges and ‘know-how’ about government, the means (both human and non human) of its exercise (e.g. policy networks) and the performative powers of these new assemblages of knowledges, actors and technologies.

Thus, we will analyze the embedding of SI in the Italian education space and its power of colonization, giving specific attention to three strictly intertwined points:

a) a genealogy of the entering of SI, or more precisely of new discourses on organisational improvement, effectiveness, quality, evaluation and accountability and the related educational problematisations, which in turn produce the ongoing re-structuring of the fields of truth that define Italian education, its organisations, its subjects and its processes;

b) the role played by specific SI technologies which are increasingly becoming Obligatory Passage Points in the assemblages which govern educational conducts;

c) the enunciative modalities which are entitled to tell the new truth on education, that we interpret both as vehicles and carries of SI discourses and as subjectivated speakers.

Method

We have chosen a dual research strategy. First, we adopted discourse (Foucault, 1972) as heuristic device to explore the ongoing organising of School Improvement ‘statements […] slogans, recipes, incantations and self-evidences’ (Ball, 2007: 3) into discursive formations that provide ‘possibilities of political thought’ and make ‘policies accumulate credibility and legitimacy’ (ivi: 2). In this respect we have attempted to realize a genealogy of educational problematisation(s). Second, we have engaged in the re-construction of the heterarchical policy networks (Jessop, 2002; Ball, 2009; 2012; Grimaldi, 2011) whose actors, technologies and devices acted as relays of School Improvement knowledges, programmes, practical know-how and strategies. In our view, this is a key analytical move in the analysis of contemporary education policy-making, that occurs more and more ‘in spaces parallel to and across state institutions and their jurisdictional boundaries’ (Skelcher et al., 2005: 3). In doing so, we carried on an activity of ‘network ethnography’ (Wittel, 2000; Howard, 2002; Ball, 2012; Ball and Junemann, 2012) to identify key actors, relationships, assemblages, network nodes, policy programs and experiences that ‘populate’ the new heterarchical terrain of the Italian education policy-making. The ethnography field was re-conceptualised as a time-space made of interlocked multiple socio-political sites and locations (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 37), becoming ethnography an activity of tracing of the connections and flows between the networks or assemblages nodes. Our archive has been composed by multiple and heterogeneous data sources: web searches, social networks explorations, academic literature and policy document analysis. In particular, the starting point was the identification of a key set of discourses, technologies and actors playing a relevant role in the process of modernization of Italian education.

Expected Outcomes

The paper offers both an analytic and substantive contribution to the unravelling of the complex issue of Europeanisation in the field of education. On the analytic side, it builds on a relevant bulk of previous works (Ball, 2012; Ball and Junemann, 2012; Olmedo, 2013) to show the effectiveness of a composite toolbox that combines network ethnography with the Foucauldian governmental perspective in studying the dynamics and the varieties of Europeanisation. On the substantive side, it contributes to the scholarly debate on the ongoing construction of a EES showing the increasing pervasiveness of European neo-managerialist discourses and technologies such as SI also in national fields like Italian one, where a welfarist and professional understanding of education still perform a relevant capacity of resistance. Borrowing Rose and Miller (1992: 176) words, this is a humble contribution to the understanding of ‘the multiple and delicate networks that connect the lives of individuals, groups and organisations […] to the aspirations of [new] authorities’ that project to govern Italian education through a governmental frame whose regimes of truth and ethics imply a determinist and causalistic understanding of organizational reality, an economicist anthropological vision, a neoliberal view of the role of the state and the invincible faith in the role of competition as a mechanism of coordination/regulation and a technological understanding of educational professions.

References

Ball, Stephen J. (2007). Education plc. London: Routledge.  Ball, Stephen J. (2009). Privatizing Education, Privatizing Education Policy, Privatizing Educational Research: Network Governance and the ‘Competition State. Journal of Education Policy, 24(1), 83_100.  Ball, Stephen J. (2012). Global Education Inc. New policy networks and the neo-liberal imaginary. London: Routledge.   Ball, Stephen J. & Junemann, Carolina (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol: Policy Press.   Dean, Mitchell (2010). Governmentality. Power and rule in modern society. 2nd Edition. London: Sage.  Foucault, Michel (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Random House.  Foucault, Michel (1991). Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), 87_104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   Gupta, Akhil and Ferguson James, eds. (1997). Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.  Howard, Philip N. (2002). Network Ethnography and the Hypermedia Organization: New Media, New Organizations, New Methods. New Media and Society, 4(4), 550_-574.  Jessop, Bob (2002). The future of the capitalist state. Bristol: Polity Press.  Olmedo, A. (2013). Policy-makers, market advocates and edu-businesses: new and renewed players in the Spanish education policy arena. Journal of Education Policy, 28(1), 55-76.  Rose, Nikolas & Miller, Peter (1992). Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government. The British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), 173_205.  Skelcher, Chris, Mathur, Navdeep & Smith, Mike (2005). The Public Governance of Collaborative Spaces: Discourse, Design and Democracy. Public Administration, 83(3), 573_96.  Wittel, Andreas (2000). Ethnography on the Move: From Field to Net to Internet. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(1).

Author Information

Roberto Serpieri (presenting / submitting)

Università Federico II Napoli, Italy

Emiliano Grimaldi