Policy subjects and policy actors in schools: some necessary but insufficient analyses

Abstract

This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects – as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the hermeneutics of policy, that is the ways in which policies in schools are subject to complex processes of interpretation and translation. We suggest that both views are necessary to understand the work of policy and ‘policy work’ in schools but that neither view is sufficient on its own.

Keywords:

• policy work
• subjects
• policy actors
• teachers
• Foucault

Notes

1. Although one might want to see forms of ‘gaming’ and ‘fabrication’ around performance measures as a kind of creativity and resistance.

2. This is an education for an imaginary fordist, basic skills economy perhaps?

3. The ‘achieving’ or strategic approach to learning can be summarised as a very well-organised form of surface learning, and in which the motivation is to get good marks. The exercise of learning is construed as a game, so that acquisition of technique improves performance. (See http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm, retrieved February 16, 2010, and Marton and Saljo, 1976).

4. This is education for a post-fordist economic imaginary perhaps?

5. Two contrasting master narratives of teaching are embedded here, distinct groupings and specific regularities of statements.

6. And we must keep reminding ourselves that we did not speak to everyone and everyone did not speak.

7. That is ‘the set of rules which at – a given period and for a given society define the limits and forms of the sayable’ (Foucault, 1991, p. 59). The term ‘archive’ is used by Foucault to refer to the unwritten rules which lead to the production of certain types of statements. ‘Foucault also focuses on expelled and forgotten discourses that never happen to change the discursive formation. Their difference to the dominant discourse also describe it’ (Mills, 2003, p. 65). In Foucault's words, ‘our task consists of treating discourses … as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (1972, p. 118).

8. Such assignments can become parts of ‘policy careers’.

9. In our schools some forms of practice which were discursively peripheral to policy – like special educational needs – were literally ‘hidden away’ in special rooms or basements.