Session Information
23 SES 03 B, New Forms of Governing in School Education (Part 3)
Paper Session continued from 23 SES 02 B
Contribution
The education policy turn to marketised and neoconservative directions, at the European and global levels, has been discussed at length by critical scholars. Many of them recognise a convergence of policies, with different nation states embracing a neoliberal political agenda, developed under the influence of international and supranational agencies (Ball, 2003, Robertson, 2013). As a result, there has been a weakening of educational agents and actors, since the control over pedagogy and assessment has been defined elsewhere (Singh, 2015). Furthermore, new forms of knowledge and new power relations have eroded the boundaries of educational administration (Tsatsaroni et al., 2015), allowing new actors to enter the field and instituting new models of governance of schools and teachers.
The dominant discourse about governance in the European Union (EU) seems to retain its basic characteristics and expressions even in the context of generalised adverse economic and political conditions. The framework of the European Commission's priorities continuous to be shaped in market and security terms deemed to be appropriate for confronting the challenges EU educational systems are presented with, in the globalised and extensively denationalised landscape (Junker, 2014). The governance mechanisms (e.g. the Open Method of Coordination, Quality Assurance and Evaluation methods) that operate in the EU context favour the dominance of a neoliberal discourse in education and the promotion of policies for the administration of education in terms of market principles and performativity (Grek et al., 2009, Rönnberg, 2015, Tsatsaroni et al., 2015). These methods, implemented in the education administration field, are linked to changes in regulation processes in general but also establish a new global panopticism within national school systems (Lingard et al., 2013). However, critical scholars provide evidence of interesting instances where school leaders and teachers actively resist market forces of governance (Gillies, 2013).
Neoliberal policies form the context for the surveillance and disciplining of professionals in education, steering them to (re)constitute themselves to meet demands for good governance. Policy practices, such as governance, in their concrete materiality, operate to fashion individual and collective subjectivities (Foucault 1988, 1991, Haahr 2004). In this paper we utilise Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality in order to explore the ways in which educational professionals govern themselves in the context of marketisation and performativity. Furthermore, we use Bernstein’s (2000) theory on pedagogic device which provides a language of description that helps to relate different levels of analysis down to the micro level of educational practices.
In Greece, with a prolonged period of financial crisis, causing chains of social and political reactions, the educational policy has been formed as part of the so called ‘memoranda’. Recent education reforms (Ministry of Education, 2009) had focused on the reorganisation of the educational system, the restructuring of its administrative framework as well as describing a new role for education administrators.
The economic and political developments in Greece and the associated austerity measures have obviously affected the ‘modernising’ project (Tsatsaroni et al., 2015). Presently, the Greek Ministry of Education, with a left party in government, in order to meet the requirements of the third memorandum designs policy interventions that maintain the main features of the dominant discourse on governance; though they use new expressions and interpretations. In the present study we examine the influence of the education reforms within this adverse context on the professional identities of the executives in the educational administration field.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, S.J., (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terror of performativity. Journal of Educational Policy 18(2):215–228. Bernstein, B., (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, research, critique. Rev.ed. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Foucault, M., (1991). Governmentality. In: G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds. The Foucault effect. Studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 87–104. Foucault, M., (1988). Technologies of the self. A seminar with Michel Foucault. L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. Hutton, eds. London: Tavistock. Gillies, D., (2013). Educational Leadership and Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. Grek, S., Lawn, M., Lingard, B. & Varjo, J., (2009). North by northwest: quality assurance and evaluation processes in European education, Journal of Education Policy, 24(2):121-133. Haahr, J.H., (2004). Open co-ordination as advanced liberal government. Journal of European public policy, 11(2):209–230. Juncker, J.-C., (2014) A New Start for Europe: My Agenda for Jobs, Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change. Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/docs/pg_en.pdf. (accessed on 10/1/2016). Lemke, T., (2001). ‘The birth of bio-politics’: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality. Economy and society, 30(2):190–207. Lingard, B., Martino, W. & Rezai-Rashti, G. (2013). Testing regimes, accountabilities and education policy: commensurate global and national developments, Journal of Education Policy, 28:5, p.p. 539-556. Ministry of Education, (2009). New School: The Student First. (in Greek). Available at: http://1dim-aei-thess.thess.sch.gr/neo%20sxoleio.pdf (accessed 30 September 2013). Robertson, S.L. (2011) The new spatial politics of (re)bordering and (re)ordering the state-education-citizen relation, International Review of Education, 57:277–297. Robertson, S.L., (2013). Teachers’ work, denationalisation and transformations in the field of symbolic control. In: T. Seddon and J. Levin (eds) Educators, Professionalism and Politics. Global Transitions, National Spaces and Professional Projects. World Year Book of Education 2013. London: Routledge, pp.77–96. Rönnberg, L. (2015). Marketisation on Export. Representations of the Swedish free school model in English media. European Educational Research Journal 14(6):549-565. Sifakakis, P., Tsatsaroni, A., Sarakinioti, A. & Kourou, M. (2015). Governance and knowledge transformations in educational administration: Greek responses to global policies, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 48(1):35-67. Singh., P., (2015). Performativity and pedagogising knowledge: globalising educational policy formation, dissemination and enactment. Journal of Education Policy 30(3): 363–384. Tsatsaroni, A., Sifakakis, P. & Sarakinioti, A., (2015). Transformations in the field of symbolic control and their implications for the Greek educational administration. European Educational Research Journal 14(6):508–530.
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.