How reforms morph as they move. Performative approaches to education reforms and their un/intended effects

The purpose of the special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education is to contribute with conceptualization on how reforms change educational organizations and subjectivities, and how educational organizations change reforms (Cuban, 1998). Thereby we aim at giving an account of the power of conceptual endeavors with close readings of empirical material. Our intention is to elaborate this basic idea through empirical investigations of the intertwinement of different educational reforms, of policies, standards and everyday educational lives across the globe. As well as telling stories of reforms and how they transform and are transformed by the educational organizations and subjects they engage, we highlight how a careful enactment of methodologies and critiques might assist us in tracing not only intended but also unintended effects of reforms and the ‘worlding’ they shape (Brøgger, 2014). In other words, engaging with performative research approaches allow us to follow and scrutinize what happens when reforms are borrowed, translated and taken up in a range of ways. Or as Robert Cowen (Cowen, 2009) poetically and with a jazz vibe in mind so beautifully has formulated it; how reforms morph as they move. This theme issue takes on the task of demonstrating how a wide range of performative effects are at stake at many different levels according to various dynamics in different countries and regions.

Performative approaches

By engaging with performative approaches the special issue attempts to nuance the idea of causality and linearity in the implementation of education reforms. Realist approaches tend to examine how reforms meet a world already structured and categorized in certain ways, whereas performative approaches tend to center on the ways in which reforms are involved with the creation and shaping of the world (Brøgger & Staunæs, 2016). The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism in the humanities and social sciences shifts the focus from correspondence between description and reality to practices and doings (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1993b, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010; Gay, 2010).

The neologism ‘performativity’ is launched as an influential theory in Judith Butler’s work Gender Trouble from 1990 (Butler, 1999). Among others, Butler draws on Derrida and his modification of Austin’s speech act theory (Miller, 2007). The concept is used moderately and infrequently before Butler’s work; for example, in Lyotard’s work from 1979 La condition postmoderne (Lyotard, 1979/1996). As outlined in Brøgger’s article in this special issue, the performative turn is propelled by Butler’s notion of performativity as a ‘reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ on one hand and additional re-workings and expansions of this notion suggested by scholars of the material turn, such as Karen Barad, on the other hand (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1993a, p. 2). Barad widens the concept of performativity by emphasizing the agency of matter. In this way, Barad enables a distributed notion of agency including both human and non-human agency. In this way, the notion on performativity provides an opportunity to explore how elements of a reform may take a quantum leap and change register as part of its morphing, for instance the ways in which particular material follow-up mechanisms such as scorecard and graphs create performative effects in an affective register of envy, shame or fear as displayed in the articles by Staunæs, Brøgger, Krejsler, Lingard & Sellar.

The special issue highlights and presents different versions of performative approaches. This may be approaches focusing on how reforms are enacted discursively, affectively or/and materially. In that sense, performative approaches are deeply entangled with what is termed the discursive turn (Foucault, 1979; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998), the affective turn (Ahmed, 2010; Clough & Halley, 2007; Wetherell, 2012) and the material turn (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010; Haraway, 2008). Turns of which there are of course many versions. Analyzing the performative effects of reforms through the lenses of these different, however intersecting conceptual frameworks makes us able to showcase the character and quality of the morphing and how this morphing may take place at different levels and include various human and non-human actors. By exploring the performativity of reforms, the special issue brings attention to the ‘how’ – and not ‘why’ – reforms are enacted the ways that they are. The first part of the special issue demonstrates how reforms come into being through particular modes of ‘soft governance’, negotiations, interests, material instruments and governmental devices. From these policy-based articles (see the articles by Brøgger, Lingard & Sellar, Krejsler and Steinar-Khamsi) that mainly center on the character and impact of transnational and national education reforms the special issue moves further into policy ethnographies examining local translations of reforms. Here, the reader is invited to engage with reforms lived and experienced through researchers, teachers and students’ engagement with the reforms. This part offers insight into local adaptations, rejections and negotiations of education reforms taking a special interest in in/consistencies and contradictions between policy ambitions and local translations (see the articles by Staunæs, Vaaben and Juelskjær, Falkenberg & Larsen).

Finally, performative approaches may assist us to reformulate a different kind of critique of reforms. When using a performative approach and exploring how reforms are enacted, transformed and translated it becomes possible to transgress critiques shaped in accordance with top-down perceptions of implementation processes leaving out possibilities of (non)human agency. In this sense, a performative approach may also open up new possible future avenues for action and engagement in reforming processes, which, however, need to be discussed in a transnational context as this special issue offers (see specifically the articles by Brøgger, Juelskjær et al. and Staunæs).

A topology of policy reforms

Bringing together empirical work from across the globe, each article in this special issue offers a window onto a reform process. In this way, this special issue consists of topological articulations of reforms in the making, including various policy levels, ways of practicing and enacting reforms and geographical spread. Let us expand a bit on the intertwinement of reform and topoi. Since the 1990s education policy reforms have become an increasingly global endeavor. Policy reforms have become embedded in larger global/transnational contexts (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010).

National education systems have been undergoing extensive reforms worldwide. The ascendancy of the Knowledge Economy discourse (OECD, 1996) has put education higher up on government agendas and consequently this policy area has become increasingly important to govern in order to be successful. Comparative templates have been established in order to make education systems comparable in ways that will supposedly make it possible to identify best practices in order that national policy-makers may know where to go in order to look for inspiration to reform just their particular national system and make it fit for competitive global knowledge economy. Standardization has played a major role in producing the templates to making education systems comparable across countries (Brøgger, 2016; Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). This takes place according to different dynamics in different parts of the world. But transnational organizations like the OECD and UNESCO have played a large role in bringing together an increasing number of countries around the development and dissemination of templates that make countries comparable according to common agreed templates. The most well-known and agenda-setting of these templates, PISA, was launched by the OECD in 2000, and have since then had impressive performative effects in producing so-called PISA shocks in countries such as for instance Germany, Denmark and Sweden to recently worrying Australian and Canadian provinces as well as many other nations and their perceptions of their national school systems (Hopmann, 2008; Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Pereyra, Kotthoff, & Cowen, 2011). As John Krejsler reminds us of in this special issue, becoming measurable and comparable at national and state level has thus brought with it the performative effects of producing ‘a fear of falling behind’, in producing a crisis awareness of lacking student competences in literacy, numeracy and science disciplines, supposedly pointing to lacking preparations for successful lifelong learners in the 21 century.

In the first part of this special issue the policy-based articles center on an Anglo-American and European context. In the United States the process of aligning and making 50 states’ school policies increasingly comparable (in what used to be one of the most decentralized school and education systems among OECD countries) took off in the 1960s with the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), and in earnest with the proverbial ‘A Nation at Risk’ report (1983). These moments were instrumental to brokering an alliance between an equity discourse and an accountability or standards-based education discourse that would result in the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act that privileged high-stakes testing and accountability. This process was associated with pressure on the OECD to establishing PISA in efforts to identifying by comparability which nations harbored best school practices in order to making students ‘college- and career ready’ for twenty-first century knowledge economies (Haraway, 2008; Krejsler, forthcoming; McGuinn, 2006; Rhodes, 2012). In Canada and Australia fall-backs on PISA scores create concern and fear in different manners (see Lingard & Sellar in this issue). In the United Arab Emirates they contract Western style schooling businesses with differentiated tuition fees for students in order for their national level of schooling achievement to become fit for global knowledge economies (see Steiner-Khamsi in this special issue). In Europe, the transnational or supranational organizations of the European Union, the OECD, IEA and the Bologna Process have been the key forums in brokering collaborations that would make highly differing national school and education systems increasingly comparable and malleable to complying with their standard-setting agendas such as the implementation of qualifications frameworks and new formats for higher education. Subsequently, the possibilities of practicing traditional national education policies have radically changed (Krejsler, Olsson, & Petersson, 2014; Lawn & Grek, 2012; Rinne, 2008).

In the second part of this special issue, the ethnographically inspired articles dive deeper into a specific selected European trope, the Danish case, understood as a European national case, and how trans-national virtues of becoming lifelong learners and construing accountability systems for schools that ensure optimization of students bodies, minds and affects are enacted in local school life. The performative effect of the Danish School reform 2014, which covers public and compulsory education (in the ‘folkeskole’ or state school system) for six- to 16-year-old students, encompassing pre-primary, primary, and lower secondary education, is interesting for a broader audience. In the decade leading up to the 2014 reform policy actors from governmental as well as local municipal and school level had a busy ‘policy pilgrimage’ to first East-Asian destinations (Singapore and Shanghai), secondly to Anglo-Saxon sights (Ontario/Canada, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand) and finally Nordic journey-ends (Norway, Finland) and brought back home inspiration on educational accountability and teaching systems. Specifically, elements fitting into an outcome-based rather than an input-based way of steering were appreciated. The borrowed elements are in resonance with what may be termed the GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement (Sahlberg, 2011; Sellar & Lingard, 2013) and merge with more local and Nordic traditions of education. Supported by the EU qualifications framework for lifelong learning and in line with curricular reforms in other European and Anglo-Saxon countries, the Danish reform aims to enhance academic performance, social equity, and student well-being while at the same time focusing upon measurable and comparable versions of educational quality and student-learning outcomes. What happens when this agenda is enacted? Implementing a reform is not only a matter of revising organizational diagrams, structures, and objectives; it also means reforming subjectivities, mindsets, feelings, affective states of mind, and beings. In other words, educational policy and management become highly acquainted with affective processes and identity politics. the Danish case is exemplary in showing how the performative effects of educational reforms jumps and make quantum leap from one register, the legislative, to another, here the affective, when translating standards.

Affected by policy reforms

Education systems and their institutions have long been marked and shaped by certain standardization processes (let us bear in mind William Bagley’s layout of the classroom representing the factory of the day (Bagley, 1912) or the new standardized research university polemically criticized for being ‘factories of science’, by Nietzsche (1874/1999), however they have not always been subject to transnational governance and globe-crossing policy borrowing. Through borrowings, connections, collaborations and rekindled (governmental and institutional) anxieties and joys to perform and compete, globalizing processes now seem to propel the traveling of reforms and new education standards even further and opening up new ways of governing affective intensities (Bjerg & Staunæs, 2017; Brøgger, 2016; Brøgger & Staunæs, 2016; Brunsson & Jacobsson, 2000; Juelskjær & Staunæs, 2016; Krejsler, Olsson, & Petersson, 2012). Such processes and their actual coming into life are in dire need of eye-opening qualitative analyses and conceptual refinement that may turn things a little on the head and make possible new understandings. This theme issue has the ambition to show how these developments criss-cross education policy and practice in still more pervasive ways, including not only legislative and implementing practices and problems, but the entire register of affective aspects in order to ensure that national education systems are optimized from policy and all the way to lived lives of school students, teachers, and principals (Brøgger, 2016; Grek, 2009; Massumi, 2010; Sellar, 2014; Staunæs, 2011; Staunæs & Pors, 2015).

However, the affective register is already involved, in the making of a reform policy. While the reform acts and the ‘policy tourism’ leading up to the reform were packed with feelings of optimism and hope, and while the policy documents are filled with words of trust and motivation, we wonder how come uncomfortable affects dominate many analyses of the translations and enactments of policy reforms, and what happens in the shift from the positive repertoire in the policy rhetoric to register of uncomfortable affects felt in the reformed educational tropes? Across the articles in this special issue, we hear of fear, shame, envy, mistrust, and pessimism. Is it the applied methodologies, the performative approaches, which allow us access these more uncomfortable sides of reforming education? Are melancholia and feelings of loss and despair attuning the writing? Or is it the empirical material kicking back? Or both-and? While the reform act and the political rhetoric carry hope, motivation and will, many of the steering mechanisms are inflected by control and surveillance. While some affective response such as shame and depression, on one hand turn inwards and calls for self-improvement, if not self-torture, resentment and envy on the other hand, turn outwards and encourage anger and rage. Envy is a critical force, involving as admiration as well as the violent fantasies. It involves a forceful externalizing, which seems to be turned off in for instance depression and shame. Envy is natured in the educational system of competition and optimization, and it is an affect emerging as the micro-level, as inherited in a Sputnik Chock, sending invidious feelings toward other parts of the globe, as in the corridors of secondary school. The question is if it is possible to use drivers as incentives and motivational technologies, as Brøgger writes about, without staging envy as the premise as well as the outcome. Is there, one could ask, a topology of educational affects? Is it a coincidence that the affective complexes as shame, envy, despair, mistrust, fear and, however, a kind of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) appear in a collection of articles on European, American and Australian soil and being? How would the affective economy, to use a term from Sara Ahmed (Ahmed, 2004) look different at other time-space-coordinates? The articles do not answer this question but together they may pose it.

Presenting the articles

In the article ‘The Performative Power of (Non)human Agency Assemblages of Soft Governance’ Katja Brøgger argues that the governing modes of European education have multiplied making space for a powerful incentive-based governance. In order to capture the proliferating regime of governance through incentives, Brøgger provides an overview of the performative turn in policy studies. Drawing on new materialism in particular, she demonstrates how the European Bologna Process for making a European Higher Education Area is produced through assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies, including intra-active entanglements of complex technologies that work to motivate by faming, naming and shaming participating countries by means of, among other measures, data visuals. Brøgger further demonstrates how these motivating technologies, such as league tables and scorecards, permeate governance of education also at national level through the digital tool ‘Education Zoom’ as an example. Brøgger concludes by offering an empirical and theoretical repertoire for thinking about the entanglement of data visuals and affects.

Bob Lingard & Sam Sellar continue exploring the performative effects of PISA as a transnational regime in the article ‘International Large-Scale Assessments, Affective Worlds and Policy Impacts in Education’. Focusing on comparing different federalisms they explore the case of Australia at a federal level and Alberta as a Canadian province, and their mutual concerns and worries of falling behind in comparisons where they used to do better. Referring to Lauren Berlant they explore how the ‘cruel optimism’ of a game where the fear of falling behind is inscribed as a condition for managing becoming winners among competing knowledge economies. They identify considerable differences between a more ‘local’ province in a Canadian system that does not have a federal ministry of education and a federal strategy as such up against an Australian federal model that is considerably more interventionist with different performative effects and affects as consequences.

From a post-Foucauldian perspective John Benedicto Krejsler sets his focus upon yet another federalism, that of the United States under the headline of ‘The “Fear of Falling Behind Regime” Embraces School Policy’. By scrutinizing how K-12 school policy was handled in California and Texas, two widely differing influential states, Krejsler maps how the federal turn in US school policy progressed, from the 1990s onwards in particular, in complex relations to dynamics in different states. He identifies the performative effects of a ‘fear of falling behind regime’ and its associated political technologies of high-stakes accountability. A regime that succeeded in gathering bi-partisan support, albeit according to a plethora of varying arguments, by merging the two most dominant discourses in US K-12 school policy, i.e. an equity or civil rights discourse and an accountability or standards-based education discourse, the ‘No Child Left Behind’ act probably being its most emphatic institutionalized expression.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi carries the performative effects of the transnational turn in education further by problematizing how state and business interests increasingly merge. In the article named ‘Businesses Seeing Like a State, Governments Calculating like a Business’ she draws on Niklas Luhmann inspired systems theory in her scrutiny of how education businesses increasingly see like the state and the state increasingly calculates like businesses. When business and state interests increasingly merge, however, equity issues arise. Steiner-Khamsi shows how international edu-business introducing schooling in the United Arab Emirates with differentiated tuition fees undermines ideas about equal opportunities for schooling. This is, however, hardly surprising in knowledge economy times where the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) becomes the most privileged producer of truths about education.

Following these four articles that mainly focus on (trans)national policy, the special issue now moves into three articles that each in their ways problematize how education reform hits daily school and education life. All three represent reform in Denmark, understood as a European national case. Denmark is a small country of 5.5 million people with a strong welfare state and equity traditions in relation to school and education like the other Nordic countries Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland (Krejsler et al., 2014; Telhaug, Mediås, & Aasen, 2006).

Since the 1990s even the Nordic countries were strongly affected by the neoliberal turn toward New Public Management, accountability, school choice and other associated issues. Disappointment over mediocre IEA and PISA surveys shattered Danish self-confidence in having world-class schools. And subsequent OECD country reports about allegedly unsatisfactory evaluation culture in schools and educational research that was of too little utility for policy-makers and practitioners helped to widen the doors even more for introducing national testing and other accountability measures in a school where testing had hitherto been taboo. The three articles take up how performative effects have gone far further in exploiting the potentials of affects, management of time and how data expand what a student can be, for better and worse.

In the article ‘Green with envy. Affects and gut feelings as affirmative, immanent and trans-corporeal critique of new motivational data visualisations’, Dorthe Staunæs argues that envy, once perceived as a deadly sin, is becoming integral of an ambiguous affective economy of the Danish school reform of 2014. In order to enhance the student outcome motivational technologies are activated and students sense and are touched by the affective atmosphere established by particular data visuals and through their own handcrafted datafication of progress. To look for envy as a possible affect is an analysis of the affective life of governance and a methodology of attending to the differentiated ‘capacities to affect and being affected’. Grasping and following the invidious complex as performative effects of intra-actions of motivational technologies and student bodies goes beyond the already designed celebratory tales or criticisms of the reform. Instead, the article offers an affirmative and trans-corporeal critique that re/centers gut-feelings.

In ‘Reforming Time in Danish Schools. Unintended performative effects of working hours legislation’ Nana Vaaben analyzes the performative effects of a law governing working hours for teachers in the Danish ‘folkeskole’. The law marked a shift from paying teachers WITH time to paying them FOR time, in line with OECD’s shift from an input to an outcome oriented understanding of public sector performance. The law is thus seen as part of a globalized reform of education in a neoliberal direction, and the implications are analyzed by drawing on psychoanalytically inspired theories, as well as anthropological theories of ritualization.

In the final article ‘Students of reforms. Investigating and troubling the enactment of student voices in research on reform’ Malou Juelskjær, Helene Falkenberg and Vibe Larsen demonstrate through close readings how the voices of students concerning reform issues are deeply entangled with the research apparatus, data and methodologies. Using the conceptual framework of performativity and onto-epistemology, they work with three different cases on student voices in Danish primary and secondary school, each with a different data-set, and analyze how research methodologies and findings in the field of reform research constitute ‘the student’ and ‘student voice’. The article demonstrates how reforms shape and change what counts as voices, but furthermore how voices change and shape reforms. Ending the special issue of QSE with this article, we hope to emphazise how the performative approach is indeed a matter of critical performativity. Though contributing with troubling results, the text manages to deliver a critique that goes beyond pure criticism (Foucault, 1997) and deliver hopeful insights into alternative reforms effects and research approaches.

In many ways, this special issue explores the performative effects of transnational reform processes and movements. Meanwhile, these may be last minute observations. Thinking of the Trump-(regime?) or the EU identity crisis in the wake of Brext, future avenues may lead us to examine the (unintended) performative effects and affects of globalization in the shape of new nationalisms, neo-mercantilisms, populisms and various versions of anti-globalization.

Dorthe Staunæs
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6554-6632
Katja Brøgger
[email protected]
John Krejsler
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6471-2723