Session Information
23 SES 10C, Policy Scholarship (Singh 1)
Symposium to be continued in 23 SES 11 C
Contribution
Critical policy researchers have spent considerable energy describing the performativity agenda of the de-centred market (DCM) pedagogic identities constructed by the state (national, supranational, international), and the affect/effect of these policy discourses on teacher and student identities and pedagogic practices (see Ball, 2012; Power & Frandji, 2010). Bernstein’s (2000) unique contribution to this scholarship is his concept of the pedagogic schizoid position, a pedagogic identity position ‘forced to project [itself] into the values of the market’ (Lapping, 2011: 168). This is a decentred, de-stablising pedagogic identity position, which constantly needs to be re-centred and re-established through the ‘revival of forms of the sacred external’ to the market, namely retrospective and prospective identity positions (Bernstein, 2000: 78). The de-centring tendency of the DCM position is in tension with re-centring policies projecting retrospective (imagined nostalgic pasts) or prospective (fictional futures) identities or again further de-centred by well-being policies around therapeutic identities. In this paper, I revisit Bernstein’s work on pedagogic identities and his appropriation of psychosocial analytic concepts to explore the ways in which institutional anxieties are enacted when neoliberal education policies are recontextualised in schools situated in vulnerable, high poverty communities. In terms of Bernstein’s notion of recontextualisation, psychosocial concepts enable me to focus on something other than policy as discourse realised in specific texts and practices. Bernstein’s (2000: 65) work in this area offers only a ‘sketch’, an ‘embryonic outline’, and also remains focused on textual rather than affective dimensions. By contrast, I propose that developing psychosocial concepts, particularly Bernstein’s (2000: 77) notion of a pedagogic schizoid position, allows me to think about the emotional, affective dimensions of policy recontextualisation, the excess which cannot be captured in written texts. Such work offers potential for exploring ‘the growing pathology in educational institutions’ (Bernstein, 2000:78) produced by the terrorizing affects of data performativity, as well as the ways that these affects may be re-circuited so that school staff develop more ambivalent relations to data. I draw on data generated from two large scale research projects funded by the Australian Research Council and undertaken in Queensland, Australia. The first project (2009-2013), involved twelve schools (nine primary and three secondary) working with university researchers in joint problem-solving dialogues around student literacy achievement data and instructional innovations. The second project (2016-2018) involves four primary schools, including some that participated in the first project, and aims to explore the enactment of critical collaborative inquiry research partnerships.
References
Ball, S. (2012). Global Education Inc. New Policy Networks and the Global Imaginary. London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity. Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. (2nd ed.). Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Power, S., & Frandji, D. (2010). Education markets, the new politics of recognition and the increasing fatalism towards inequality. Journal of Education Policy, 25(3), 385-396. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930903576404
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