Symposium II: Interactional acts of education 

The symposium raises questions about how science and technology coexist in educational activities. At this education agora (cf. Nowotny, Scott, Gibbons, 2003), educational activities navigate between the natural and social order of things. Here, the co-production of educational knowledge takes place as constitutive acts, with a focus on the emergence, stabilization and framing of knowledge, or as interactional acts, with a view to solving controversies around what knowledge is and how it should be understood (Jasanoff, 2004). In these activities, educational knowledge is constructed as intelligible and portable across various boundaries for fostering civil deliberation and providing democratic education. Hence, we provide a widened frame of how educational knowledge is constructed for use in public education and illuminate aspects of knowledge production that are not necessarily based on democratic ideas of openness and transparency.                                                                                                        

Educational data influences our lives and beliefs on a daily basis, just as results and rankings manufacture new desires and aspirations. Data comparisons reduce the educational world by using restricted narratives as representations of education. As such, international comparisons of performances collapse time and geographical distances to provide an illusion of universal connectivity. Here, we discuss how comparisons transform our way of reasoning (cf. Hacking, 1992) about education and how best to educate.

The focus is on activities relating to the fear of being left behind in times when statements about being educationally modern and successful are connected to a specific reasoning about knowledge and expertise based on numbers and comparisons. One contemporary trend is that knowledge expertise has outgrown the national environment by instead welcoming international expertise located in international organizations and companies to frame what national education is and should be. As such, we are dealing with the reasoning of quantification instituted in different educational activities. How we contribute to a broader description of activities that provide and frame the educational knowledge used in the governing of education is significant. The specific research questions for the symposium are:

• Which activities arise from a fear of the being left behind, i.e. not being able to compete in the measurable and comparative society?
• What kinds of knowledge do these activities produce and how?
• How does this specific knowledge production frame education?

The empirical data used in the symposium consists of documents analysed by historicizing and qualitative document analysis.

The symposium is organized in two 90 minute sessions: the first on how an international use of data collapses time and geography and creates a common educational language that is instituted and inscribed in different organizations and activities (as constitutive acts), and the second on how comparisons and numbered data promote specific activities as an educational technology (as interactional acts). Each presenter will have 20 minutes for their presentation and each session will end with a discussion lead by a discussant. 

Hacking, I. (1992) “Style” for historians and philosophers. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 23 (1) p. 1-20. Jasanoff, S. (2004) States of Knowledge: The co-production of science and social order. Princeton: Harvard University. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2003). Introduction:Mode 2'revisited: The new production of knowledge. Minerva, 41(3), 179-194.