Schools in the making: Mapping digital spaces of evidence

Author(s):

Carlijne Ceulemans(presenting / submitting)Mathias Decuypere(presenting)Maarten Simons

Conference:

ECER 2013

Network:

28. Sociologies of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

28 SES 07, The Making of New Spaces of Education and Learning

Paper Session

Time:

2013-09-11

17:15-18:45

Room:

D-305

Chair:

Eszter Neumann

Contribution

Evidence-based policy practices have become increasingly popular in education over the last decades. In Flanders (Belgium), for instance, performance measures, standards and examples of good practice increasingly function as a common ground to talk about education today. These measures, standards and examples are, however, not just collected in order to create an evidence base for policy preparation and political decision making. Rather, through instruments such as feedback reports, publically consultable audits and good practices, the distribution of evidence becomes part of Flanders’ educational governance. Such tendencies and developments do not apply to Flanders alone, but have been broadly recognized in the research literature on education policy. The same applies to the instruments and conceptual tools (European as well as international) that assist in shaping and conducting policy founded on sound evidence, such as standards, benchmarks, examples of good practice, international comparable databases and concomitant global assessment tests such as PISA and TIMSS, and so forth.

Drawing on some conceptual underpinnings of socio-technical approaches, this contribution investigates how precisely data, information and knowledge are elevated to the status of evidence. The objects of analysis consisted of three websites, each exemplifying a specific type of governing by evidence as it is conducted in Flanders nowadays: a website of a policy initiative of bottom-up innovation by means of the provision of examples of good practice; the official website of the inspectorate; and a website promoting school feedback as incentive for school improvement. In line with this socio-technical approach, each website was approached as an active device not only doing things itself, but also making the visitors of these websites perform particular actions. In this contribution, we attempt to map the assemblages of these three different websites and, in so doing, to address the following research interests: Which operations does each website, as particular heterogeneous assemblage, perform? How are data and information being staged as evidence? How does each website address its visitors? In sum, we argue that on each website, different social and technical operations are performed that turn information into evidence, and, at once, stage different modes of schools to exist.

Method

In this contribution, we adopt a sociotechnical approach to evidence-based policy. This implies the focus not to be on evidence-based policy practices as such, or on the epistemological denomination of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ evidence. Rather, we focus on the status of evidence – that is, on what could be called evidence ‘in the making’. Indeed, in order for information and knowledge to work as evidence, a chain of actors must be mobilized, not only to fabricate this evidence, but also to enact and stage specific material as being evidence. Furthermore this evidence is to be distributed to render it consultable for interested actors. Thus, the studied websites are approached and mapped as socio-technical devices: technical in as far as they perform particular operations and enactments (each website performs particular operations that render information the status of evidence); and social in as far as they constitute specific interactions and patterns of action and meaning that install a particular self-understanding of the person visiting the website (each website addresses its visitors in a particular way and hence urges them to understand themselves in a particular way).

Expected Outcomes

In a conclusive section, the three different analyses are compared and common and differing patterns highlighted with a focus on spaces (of equivalence, of meaning, and of action) that correlate with each website. Finally, some critical remarks are formulated on the impacts of these digital spaces of evidence. As such, the objective of this study is not to render the evidence on schools more weak or less valuable and powerful, nor to cause doubts regarding the existence of the evidenced schools. Displaying the socio-technical operations and showing different modes of existence hopefully opens up a space in order to put them side by side, that is, reassemble these practices and to re- or undo some of their operations. Thus, this contribution is aimed at giving opportunities to discuss the very constitution of these assemblages and transform them, in Latour’s (2004) parlance, from matters of fact into matters of (public) concern. The staging of different modes of schools to exist and to become evidence is perhaps a good antidote to, or at least a first step in the struggle against, those regions with imperial ambitions which claim their evidence to speak for itself.

References

Callon, Michel, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. 2002. The economy of qualities. Economy and society 31 (2): 194-217. Davies, Philip. 1999. What is evidence-based education? British Journal of Educational Studies 47 (2): 108-121. Desrosières, Alain. 1998. The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Fenwick, Tara. 2010. (un)Doing standards in education with actor‐network theory. Journal of Education Policy 25 (2): 117-133. Grek, Sotiria. 2009. Governing by numbers: the PISA 'effect' in Europe. Journal of Education Policy 24 (1): 23-37. Gorur, Radhika. 2010. ANT on the PISA trail: Following the statistical pursuit of certainty. Educational Philosophy and Theory 43(1): 76-93. Higgins, Vaughan, and Wendy Larner, eds. 2010. Calculating the Social. Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Koyama, Jill. 2011. Generating, comparing, manipulating, categorizing: reporting, and sometimes fabricating data to comply with No Child Left Behind mandates. Journal of Education Policy 26 (5): 701-720. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network-theory. Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press. Law, John. 2009. Actor network theory and material semiotics. In The new Blackwell companion to social theory, edited by Bryan Turner, 141-58. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Nimmo, Richie. 2011. Actor-network theory and methodology: social research in a more-than-human world. Methodological Innovations Online 6 (3): 108-119. Rose, Nikolas. 1991. Governing by Numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting, Organizations and Society 16 (7): 673-692. Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. The cosmopolitical proposal. In Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Author Information

Carlijne Ceulemans (presenting / submitting)

University of Antwerp

Institute of Education and Information Sciences

Antwerp

Mathias Decuypere (presenting)

Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

Maarten Simons