The constitution of East Asia as a counter reference society through PISA: a postcolonial/de-colonial intervention

ABSTRACT

This study examines the dismissive characterisation of East Asian PISA success in Australia to extend the emerging conceptual work on policy learning/referencing, reference society, and projection in comparative and international education. By highlighting the constitutive roles of racialisation and colonial difference in the media construction of East Asian education, I expose the limits of the ongoing conceptual work and problematise its exclusive focus on stereotyping in the negative framing. I argue that the discussion of East Asian education as a policy reference must be placed within a global history of colonial difference and racialisation in Eurocentric imaginaries.

KEYWORDS:

• East Asian education
• PISA
• postcolonial
• racialisation
• reference society
• counter reference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is not to suggest that all of the references to East Asian PISA success were monolithically negative and dismissive. The debate over the appropriateness of East Asia as a reference for Australian education were diverse, including some thoughtful discussion on this topic (e.g. Sellar and Lingard 2013).

2 I use the term ‘coaching’ to refer to private educational service providers specialising in extracurricular academic supports. The term is commonly used in Australia and is interchangeable with ‘tutoring’ which is more commonly used in other contexts.

3 Commissioned by the Government of Australia in 2010 and chaired by businessman David Gonski, the Review of Funding for Schooling or the so-called Gonski report, was touted as the biggest review of funding for Australian schools in more than 30 years (see Waldow, Takayama, and Sung 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This paper draws on research funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project [DP150102098].