Session Information
SES G 04, Paper Session
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper examines the political discourse in education and the influences that shape the articulation of the educational evaluation discourse. Aims at exploring educational evaluation as discourse and as a policy. Political discourses play an important role in building the social world of meanings, causes and effects, inevitability and needs. It will be argued that educational evaluation is a nodal discourse, a discourse that articulates in a specific form another set of discourses - managerial and accountability discourses. This study focuses on the Portuguese national socio-political context, but also considers international/global influences, their agendas, the interaction, tension and balance of power between internal and external stakeholders.
Through political texts (semiotic dimension) and by building social positions (ontological dimension) certain ideas are naturalized and privileged and others are excluded. Political technologies (Ball, 2008) "install” themselves in this movement of inclusion / exclusion. Technologies in education policies are generic in two ways: as part of a global convergence of approaches to educational reform and its comprehensive use throughout public sector (Ball, 2008:42). Technologies involving the use of calculated strategic processes and organizational forms, disciplines or “bodies of knowledge” to “organize human forces and capabilities in functional systems "(Ball, 2008:41), mechanisms for change both in practice and social relations. Educational evaluation seems to combine all characteristics. It becomes clear that education policies provided ‘reform’ a strong character, i.e., policies are enacting changes and proposals for social transformation. In this sense, mechanisms of political change have also a semiotic and ontological dimension (Ball 2008) that can be captured by the analytical study of dominant and / or peripherals discourses in a given historical moment.
It is apparent that educational evaluation is an element of a particular discourse, associated with a particular perspective on the relationship between individuals involved in social events. The paper adopts the premise of social constructionism that social reality is discursively constructed. From this epistemological perspective individuals are part of communities of discourse, where certain linguistic and cultural systems of intelligibility historically specific prevail (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002). Theories / Discourse Analysis - particularly Norman Fairclough critical discourse - and the analytical / conceptual model Policy Cycle of Stephen J. Ball provide the methodological framework (and theoretical framework as well) of this attempt to present a critical analysis of evaluation discourse linking the power of state and the individual ability to interpret it and act socially (and politically). This approach is based on the idea that the origins and effectiveness of social discourse can be understood through the study of the social practices with which it enacts a reciprocal relationship. Social discourse determines what discourses are present in a given moment and in a given policy text, naturalizes it and makes it acceptable in diverse contexts
This analytical process includes the analysis of the rise and constitution of the discourse of evaluation in political discourse on/in education, its positioning with regard to other discourses, through the identification of key texts and the analysis of the constitution of this discourse articulating the various elements available in the discursive field (intertextuality).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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