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- Elde Mølstad, Christina, et al.
(författare)
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Comparative reasoning: curriculum making in the 'grey zone
- 2017
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Ingår i: The 45th Congress of the Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA), 23-25 March 2017, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Curriculum making concerns the possibility to decide and prescribe purposes, aims, and contents of schooling, but also how these purposes, aims and contents are legitimized. As such, we see curriculum making from the ‘wide’ interpretation of curriculum. We are in relation to curriculum making especially interested in investigating how some important international actors interact with educational purposes, aims, and contents on a world scale level affecting national level, as well as the very local of educational activities. Hence we are interested in investigating curriculum formulation based on comparative statistical reasoning. The actors we are most interested in are those that have been characterized as ‘grey zone’ actors (Lindblad, Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2015). The idea (and term) of the ‘grey zone’ emerged from a previous review of research and organizations using data from international largeVscale assessments (ILSA) (Lindblad et al., 2015) for comparing education systems. These ‘grey zone’ actors have only at best an indirect mandate in education systems, however they still make explicit statements on how to improve schooling and students’ performances; i.e. a form of curriculum making. It is the indirect mandate combined with relatively strong impact on the governing of education that place these actors in the ‘grey zone’. There are at least three important actors that stood out in terms of activities spread to a world scale level; the McKinsey, the OECD and the Pearson Company, which all have arisen as important nodes for knowledge on what education is perceived as and maybe more importantly, should be. Their position within education is further reinforced by the comparative and data driven aspects of the contemporary society (cf. Pettersson, Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2016). We examine, three, what we call ‘grey zone’ activities involved in curriculum formulation and how a specific reasoning (cf. Hacking, 1992) is used and evolves in these activities: i) the McKinsey producing international reports on educational improvements and developments. Within the terminology of McKinsey recommendations are produced for these purposes: ii) the OECD not only producing ILSA and recommendations, but also producing newsletters where the results of ILSA are mediated and communicated to policy, research and practice: iii) the Pearson Company not only the winner of the open tender to perform PISA 2018, but also the producer of a vast amount of websites for school development within the frameworks of The Learning Curve (TLC) and The Efficacy Framework as well as producing school textbooks. Hence we investigate how these activities frame education defining what content curriculum making should focus on and as such making prerequisites on what education is and should be perceived as. All three of these agencies can be discussed in terms of producing activities important for curriculum making in the ‘wider’ sense of the concept. By analyzing products by the agencies we are in a position to highlight them as important sites for curriculum making on an international level. In our study we especially highlight these products in terms of producing a specific reasoning about education, which creates narratives framing curriculum making on a national as well as on a local school level
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- Elde Mølstad, Christina, et al.
(författare)
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Douce Infusion: ”Fabriquer” des Enseignants dans la sphère du PISA
- 2020
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Ingår i: <em>Les politiques de restructuration des professions de l’éducation. Une mise en perspective internationale et comparée.</em>. - Quebec : Presses de l'Université Laval. - 9791037004734
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)
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- Elde Mølstad, Christina, et al.
(författare)
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Scientific Framing of Curriculum Research : Experts or Algorithms?
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Mapping research in relation to research interest is a common act of performing a research review. This kind of activity is an important part of being a researcher both to portray the competence of knowing a field and to frame specific research theoretically and analytically. The act of showing belongingness and relationship to different paradigms and thinkers (Kuhn, 1962) or various epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) has over time been given different forms within the community of research. In relation to the act of framing research by different systematic research strategies we raise questions on: who inhabits and cultivates the field of curriculum research according to different strategies for scientific communication? Our theoretical framework is based on an argument that acknowledge the importance of investigating scientific reasoning (Hacking, 1992) and epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) for understanding the intellectual organizing of knowledge, and by that exemplify how scientific ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ are constructed and legitimized, which is knowledge perceived as ‘common sense’ (cf. Gramsci 1992) within different scientific fields.We investigate four common systematic research strategies for performing research reviews, most used and reproduced within the community of researchers. We have first the handbooks where experts of a specific field are given the legitimacy to portray a specific field of research; second, the systematic search strategies performed with the help of various databases such as e.g. Web of Science, Scopus or ERIC; third, the investigating act of systematically browsing through research journals of special interest within a specific field, and fourth, the systematic research reviews performed by special institutes set up for performing these tasks, such as e.g. Danish Clearinghouse or EPPI centre, which in turn are used as a source by some researchers for illustrating the findings of more restricted and specific research questions.Focusing on four different forms of performing systematic research reviews we describe, analyze and compare the various forms with regards to:how knowledge of/in a research field is constructed,what kind of research that is selected and privileged In particular, we are interested in the potential movement of research reviews from an act of collective ‘intellectualizing’ among ‘experts’ to an act of ‘technologizing’ dependent on algorithms and terminology embedded in various databases, in which the amount of data is more important in ‘evidence-making’ than the perceived expertise of the source. To put it differently, the databases with their vast aggregation of data, organized by algorithms and terminology, are perceived as the authority and not the authors or the epistemic cultures in which the authors are embedded.We use the field of curriculum research to elaborate on the different forms of research reviews and their consequences for knowledge produced. Within the field of curriculum research, handbooks have had a dominant position in describing the field. Also, explicit research reviews within different journals have been important among researchers in the framing of the field of curriculum. However, in the contemporary, bibliometric analyses grounded in database searches and systematic research review performed by special institutes are more and more employed. MethodDependent on which strategies used by researchers for framing different research fields we especially hypothesize on the importance of epistemic cultures and how these epistemic cultures historically have transported research, and how this is transformed, or even disappeared, with the entrance of various databases. First, we chose the collaborative act of ‘experts’ producing handbooks as an example of ‘intellectualizing’ dependent on that some researchers are given, or have taken, the role of ‘experts’. Second, we perform bibliometric searches, for reason of illuminating variances, by using Web of Science and Scopus as examples of ‘technologizing’, where databases more than individual researchers or research groups have transformed into the epistemic culture per se. Third, we will systematically browsing through research journals within the curriculum research field using explicit research reviews, within different journals (e.g. Journal of Curriculum Studies, Curriculum Inquiry, Educational Reviewer). This has been an important practice among researchers within the field of curriculum and hence it is important to capture this approach for framing the field. Fourth, we will analyze some systematic research reviews from special institutes (e.g. Danish Clearinghouse or EPPI centre) addressing curriculum research questions This has to a growing extent become a regular way to produce research reviews. Consequently, we are in a position to elaborate on how the field of curriculum research is portrayed by using different strategies for framing a research. This is most important for understanding how the field of curriculum research today is reproduced in various research settings.Expected OutcomesThe preliminary results indicate that for example the use of handbooks portrays the curriculum field by mostly internationally well-recognized curriculum theory researchers, with resembling results for the use of review articles. The use of Web of Science and Scopus to map the curriculum field portrays both a broader and a narrower picture of the field, where more subject specific topics are included while some research is excluded as a consequence of the character of the corpus of journals and data in the databases. This leads to a picture of the curriculum field where actors are publishing on topics and journals more loosely connected to the core for what can be called curriculum research, this since subject specific topics are not in the same way highlighted in the handbooks. The findings of the reviews from the institutes are still to be elaborated. However, the findings so far indicate that there are important differences in the way a field is portrayed depending on which approach is applied. In sum, the results indicate that the approaches we apply shape how a field is portrayed, and by that also how a specific research field can be interpreted and understood. This is important knowledge and should have consequences for example in the way we guide PhD candidates for performing a systematic research review, as well as adding to researchers’ knowledge of the complexity and challenge of the task. It also indicates notions on how a research field is framed in the contemporary, is it made by ‘experts’ of the field or by algorithms and database specific terminology, which is situated outside well-recognized epistemic cultures? What are the consequences of this movement from defining frames of a research field among peers into a technologizing of this act?ReferencesGramsci, A. (1992) Prison Notebook. G. Lawrence & Wishart: London.Hacking, I. (1992). 'Style' of historians and philosophers. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 23(1), 1-20.Knorr Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Science Make Knowledge. Harvard University Press.Kuhn, T (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
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| 6. |
- Elde Mølstad, Christina, et al.
(författare)
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Soft Infusion : Constructing 'Teachers' within the PISA sphere
- 2018. - 1
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Ingår i: Education policies and the restructuring of the educational profession. - Singapore : Springer. - 9789811082788 - 9789811082795 ; , s. 13-26
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since their inception, international large-scale assessments introduced by the OECD, such as PISA, have been widely discussed and disseminated in various social fields, e.g. policy, research, practice and the media. Administrative and political actors have responded to PISA and taken part in discussions about the results (e.g. Pettersson in Internationell kunskapsbedömning som inslag i nationell styrning av skolan. Uppsala University, Uppsala, 2008; Hopmann in European Educational Research Journal 6:109–124, 2007, 2015; Ozga in Fabricating quality in education: data and governance in Europe. Routledge, New York, 2011; Ertl in Oxford Review of Education 32:619–634, 2006; Grek in Journal of Education Policy 24:23–37, 2009).
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| 8. |
- Elde Mølstad, Christina, et al.
(författare)
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Who Governs the Numbers? : The Framing of Educational Knowledge by TIMSS Research
- 2018
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Ingår i: Education by the Numbers and the Making of Society. - New York : Taylor & Francis. - 9781138295834 - 9781138295827 ; , s. 166-184
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In contemporary society, different tests of educational performance have been given importance in educational research, policy initiatives and curriculum change as well as in media. Consequently, performance in schools has been increasingly judged on the basis of effective student learning outcomes. One of the most active agencies in performing international comparative tests is the IEA—International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. The IEA has a history dating back to the 1950s (for a discussion on the history of the IEA see, e.g., Pettersson, 2014), and since 1995 an international large-scale assessment with the acronym TIMSS repetitively has been launched. TIMSS, together with other tests staged by either the IEA or other international organizations, has gradually transformed into reference points for general economic and social policies (Pettersson, 2014). In this context, the phenomenon of international large-scale assessments (ILSA) are serving a global governance constituted by a specific reasoning (cf. Hacking, 1992) connected to the use of numbers. ILSA research, for example, studies using data or results from TIMSS, is based on numbers constructed for partly governance reasons and is a growing interdisciplinary and increasingly international field of study (Lindblad, Pettersson, & Popkewitz, 2015). Hence, the scientific development of the field is highly relevant to analyze. However, it is surprisingly few educational studies that have made use of the data rapidly accumulating with the development of various databases and software. Given the importance of this numbered educational discourse as a social and scientific practice, we propose that it is crucial to take into account how this discourse is framed through different written formats.
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| 9. |
- Faldet, Ann-Cathrin, et al.
(författare)
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Jeg, du, meg och deg : Hva kan vi egentligen lære av PISA?
- 2019
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Ingår i: Norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift. - 0029-2052 .- 1504-2987. ; 103:1, s. 42-52
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Tidskriftsartikel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- I presentasjonen av PISA-resultatene kan vi se visse mønstre i hvordan debatten konstrueres, og vi kan se visse mønstre i hvordan deltakende aktører opptrer i media og på den politiske og administrative arena (Pettersson, 2008). Studien synliggjør hvordan PISAs rangeringslister fremkaller bestemte handlingsmønstre og rasjonalitet, der rasjonaliteten er basert på en bestemt tankestil (Fleck 1997). Disse strukturelle handlingsmønstrene har vi valgt å benevne for something-else-ism og someone-else-ism, og med det gå bakover i historien for å se hvordan denne situasjonen kunne oppstå, og løfte fram enkelte utfordringer knyttet til disse to fremstilte handlingsmønstrene.
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| 10. |
- Johansson, Urban-Andreas, Universitetsadjunkt, 1991-, et al.
(författare)
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School certification : marketing schools by appearance
- 2019
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Ingår i: New Practices of Comparison, Quantification and Expertise in Education. - London & New York : Routledge. - 9781138612853 - 9780429464904
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter explains an activity that can be classed as a technology of appearance in Sweden – namely different kinds of certification. It demonstrates that the activity of certification has been established as a way for schools to become visible in a competitive field of free school choice. The chapter describes the process of LGBTQ certification and examines how it is used in the larger Swedish educational discourse. Acquiring LGBTQ certification is a one-year process that is divided into different steps and has two parallel parts: education in LGBTQ issues and anti-oppressive education and change management. The purpose of certification often seems to be to visualise the school as modern and keeping up with what is perceived as the most important social areas of development. The process of obtaining certification is followed by means of data obtained from websites, social media accounts and interviews with school actors published in local and national newspapers.
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