Session Information
23 SES 10 C, Constructing And Diffusing Knowledge For European Education Policy
Symposium
Contribution
There is no shortage of academic material on the making of education policy in the EU. The Open Method of Coordination and the Bologna Process are both major areas of policy study. There has, though, been a tendency towards a concentration on issues of process, somewhat abstracted from issues of structure, apart from extended discussions of jurisdiction, subsidiarity, etc. The main aim of this Symposium will be to try to reintroduce elements of structure, such as structural limits and shaping, and structural and strategic selectivity into discussions of how policy-directed and –relevant knowledge is constructed and diffused in the area of European education policy.
Structural selectivity may be found at the level of the Lisbon agenda. ‘Knowledge’ that falls outside the Lisbon agenda can scarcely be considered knowledge for policy. This provides a framing for the Symposium, whose immediate focus will be on strategic selectivity, here, the frameworks within which education policy has to be made. These have three major components—the European Education Space, the possibilities of European education policy, and the chronic lack of capacity of the Commission in this area (Lawn).
The papers in the Symposium adopt variants of this framework in describing the construction and diffusion of policy knowledge for education. They are also linked by the membership of authors of all the papers in NESSE, which, as perhaps the group most directly charged with providing policy relevant advice on education to the Commission, provides a useful basis from which to study the operation of processes within structures.
The assembled papers offer a range of approaches and areas of topical interest to develop these somewhat abstract conceptions. Palle Rasmussen’s paper looks at the construction of evidence, especially on progress towards the E+T 2010 targets., with a particular focus on what is meant by "evidence", and the tension between local and national policy contexts and generalisation of research results.
Ides Nicaise argues that the link between the knowledge-based society, competitiveness and social cohesion has never been adequately elaborated. He asks in particular how growth is translated into employment and wages, and how these are distributed, and hypothesises that ‘knowledge-intensive’ approaches have thus far boosted rather than reduced inequalities. He considers available means of addressing this problem through education, and concludes that ‘soft’ OMC methods may help reconcile growth and cohesion.
Jean-Louis Derouet and Romuald Normand use ActorNetwork Theory to analyse the work of the networks of experts involved in the fabrication of indicators and benchmarks supporting theOMC. This enables them to locate the processes of dissemination and circulation of knowledge and tools, and the operations of translation from the scientific area to the policy area.
Roger Dale and Fumi Kitagawa draw on their study of the activities of ‘Bologna Experts’ in the UK to open up questions of translation/brokering and diffusion/transfer in the embedding of the Bologna process in the inimical and resistant territory of the UK.
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