Showing papers by "Thomas S. Popkewitz published in 2018"

Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance; Elisabeth Hultqvist, Sverker Lindblad, Thomas S. Popkewitz -- First section: Studies of transnational governance of education -- 2. Narrating and relating educational reform and Comparative Education; Robert Cowen -- 3. Reforming Education: The Spaces and Places of Education Policy and Learning; Bob Lingard -- Second section: Educational reforms and transnationalization -- 4. Education Governance by Results? On communication in a performative turn in Swedish Education; Sverker Lindblad -- 5. Educational restructuring and social boundaries – School choices and consumers of education; Elisabeth Hultqvist -- 6. Becoming Fit For Transnational Comparability. Exploring challenges in Danish and Swedish teacher education reforms; John Benedicto Krejsler, Ulf Olsson and Kenneth Petersson -- 7. Killing two birds with one stone: Globalizing Switzerland by Harmonizing the Cantonal Systems of Education in the Aftermath of PISA; Daniel Trohler -- Third section: Making Kinds of People as the Imperatives of education: The practice of Governing the Educational Subjects -- 8. Reform and Making Human Kinds: The Double Gestures of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Practice of Schooling; Thomas S. Popkewitz -- 9. The transnational phenomenon of individual planning in response to pupil diversity: a paradox in educational reform; Ines Alves -- 10. Re-figuring the European student: Mixed transnational feelings; Maarten Simons -- 11. Student Centeredness and Learning from a Perspective of History of the Present; Ulf Olsson, Kenneth Petersson and John Benedicto Krejsler -- 12. Governing the intermediary spaces. Reforming school and subjectivities through liminal motivational technologies; Helle Bjerg and Dorthe Staunaes -- 13. Digital Technologies in the Classroom: A global educational reform?; Ines Dussel -- Fourth section: Migration and population flows -- 14. When the Other Arrives at School; Fernando Hernandez-Hernandez and Juana M. Sancho-Gil -- 15. A Manifestacion to Disinvent Mundus’ Authoritarian Regimes and The Categorial Imperative of Hospitality; Ligia Lopez Lopez -- 16. Migration as a method: Deterritorializing the “floating children” in contemporary China; Lei Zheng.

Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society: The Expertise of International Assessments

Abstract: International statistical comparisons of nations have become commonplace in the contemporary landscape of education policy and social science. This book engages the emergence of these international ...

What Is 'Really' Taught As The Content of School Subjects?: Teaching School Subjects As An Alchemy

Abstract: There is general belief in current reforms that a teacher cannot teach a school subject unless she has adequate knowledge of the disciplinary field of that teaching. Coinciding with this belief is the emphasis in teacher education reforms and research on pedagogical knowledge teachers need for children to learn the content knowledge. The identification of “the best practices” and “the core” teaching knowledge to enact the curriculum exemplifies this belief. “Benchmarks” or standards are indicators of whether the teacher has mastered the core or best practices. The professional, highly skilled teacher is one who exhibits the benchmarks and classified as “effective” and “authentic” in classroom teaching.

Calculating the Future: The Historical Assemblage of Empirical Evidence, Benchmarks & PISA,

Abstract: Purpose—Prominent at the intersections of national educational agencies, higher education, and international educational performance assessments are two reform standards: “benchmarks” determining o...

Reform and Making Human Kinds: The Double Gestures of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Practice of Schooling

Abstract: The chapter considers the globalization and transnational through examining reform as embodying standards. My use of standards is not in the publically stated goals of policy. They are in the principles generated in the making of the objects of reflection and administration of children. These standards relate historically to the rules and standards about who the child is and should be and who is “different,” abjected, and thus excluded. The chapter begins with interviews of American urban teachers, with urban as a phrase used to talk about teachers of children of the poor, racialized, and ethnic groups that are marginalized in educational settings. This child is called “the child left behind” in American legislation designed to improve schools for a category in education that refers to children considered socially disadvantaged, marginalized, and associated with problems of low achievement in school. The chapter proceeds to historicize how differences and divisions are established to make “the urban” teacher and child as different in American social and education sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that the sciences of teaching and learning embody cultural theses about kinds of people. These cultural theses involve double gestures: the hope of schooling in making kinds of people whose modes of living embody collective moral values and with this hope of inclusion are simultaneous fears of the dangers and dangerous populations. The thinking about reform is a historical method to study what schools do, how reforms function, and educational research. My concern with the double gestures of reform is to explore the limits of contemporary frameworks that define the subject of school reform and its research programs.

Critical Analyses of Educational Reform – Writing a Title and Editing a Book

Abstract: This book is based on a set of critical analyses of ongoing changes in education where issues of transnational governance are of vital concern. In the analyses, the authors focus on different aspects of and practices in educational reform making, with a special interest in governing techniques and the working of new agents such as supranational organizations and multinational organizations. In doing so, the contributions present theoretical insights considering critical relations between knowledge and power, governance and governmentality, and notions concerning educational systems and how these are compared. Since we are working with topics of transnational governance, the content of the book is international in terms of authorships as well as in research issues.

Producing the ‘right kind of people’: the OECD education indicators in the 1960s

Abstract: In general, research findings on the emergence of international assessments focus on the time period after 1990. Indeed, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the internationalization of education policies and particularly the inclination for assessment by so-called international experts became dominant, symbolized not least by the OECD’s publication of the first issue of Education at a Glance 1992: OECD Indicators (OECD, 1992). This is an indication of a ‘comparative turn’, based on international indicators that allow evaluation of the individual educational systems (Martens, 2007). However, this chapter argues that what becomes visible after the end of the Cold War is less the emergence of something new—brainchild of a neoliberal ideology of globalization, for instance—but more a materialized expression of a Cold War grid of thinking. In support of this thesis, after providing some contextual information, the chapter identifies three stages in the development of international education indicators in the 1960s—namely, first, the idea and vision of forecasting (largely quantitative description), then, under the catchwords of development and growth, the commitment to planning with regard to defined (quantitative) benchmarks, and, last, the idea of management, meaning fundamentally changing the whole school systems on all levels, foremost its quality, leading eventually to a quantification of school quality, and by that contributing to overall attempts at social engineering, based upon defined indicators.

The Humanist Important to Our Times

Abstract: This essay is to honor a wonderful colleague and friend over many years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It is an ode that moves between poles of friendship and the academic. I being with two stories about Andy, alias Andreas; or is it the other way around? One could spend time with the Greek persona, aka Andreas, or one could engage with the American side, aka Andy. I gravitate toward “Andy,” as the name “Andy” has an endearing quality with my American sensibility, while Andreas appears as too formal for the American part of me. The personal moves easily into Andy’s academic achievements. In many ways, his intellectual curiosity and professional identity are a mode of living. First, to my stories. The first is the beginning of the world as we know it! Civilization begins with Greece, with human dignity and our destiny following the paths provided through the virtues of Paideia. All academic work that is serious begins with this origin story. When I talk with Andreas (the Greek part), I know this is where we start our conversation! I will joke about it with him, yet at the same time recognize it is a serious gesture about how to think about the obligations and responsibilities of academic work and educational research. The return to Greek literature and ideas is to continually remind us of the serious philosophical questions and historical understandings that require increased vigilance in the present, where the technical and the instrumental seem to overtake us. I return to this theme a bit later. The second story is “pure” Andy (the American part). If you want to talk with Andy, even if the world is on fire or some catastrophe is happening, it cannot be on an America football weekend. If the University of Wisconsin football team (“the Badgers”) or the Wisconsin’s professional football team, the Green Bay Packers, are playing, Andy disappears in front of the television, not too emerge until games are finished. And I hope the local teams won, to catch him in a good mood. Andy is the most Americanized sport junkie (from Cyprus) that I know. The origin of the world in its Greek heritage and the Sunday disappearance to watch American football serve as an exemplar right out of classic postmodern theories about the complexities of identity. Who will you meet? Andreas, Andy, or both? Fluid and mobile identities navigate seamlessly in him. Without any hesitation, Andreas/Andy moves easily between his past/present Greek heritage and his adopted (first and second) homeland of America (more adequately, the Madison Midwest). It is though his life resembles wearing a T-shirt with imprints on both sides. One is a “Badgers” sports emblem and the other is the image of the Parthenon. I can see Andy sitting on a swivel chair, going back and forth to show the most none defined