Policy matters: de/re/territorialising spaces of learning in Victorian government schools

Abstract

This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enactment theorising, to explicitly consider the role and contribution of materiality in this theorising. Guided by the notion of policy matters, the article takes as its empirical context a major policy initiative, the Building the Education Revolution infrastructure programme, which commenced in Australia in 2009 and saw funding distributed to schools to develop new learning spaces and facilities. Deploying a sociomaterial approach to researching policy, and bringing selected Deleuzian concepts to bear, this programme is traced as it is playing out presently in Victorian government schools. The argument is made that understanding policy objects such as these ‘open’ and ‘flexible’ learning spaces as being in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ is especially useful in the context of education policy where rationalistic approaches tend to prevail. It opens a space for re-imagining education policy and the politics of this policy by crediting the idea that materialising processes such as architecture and facilities matter in education policy. They are performative agents with interventionist possibilities regarding schools’ curricular and pedagogic outcomes and goals.

Keywords:

• Policy enactment
• performativity
• mattering
• territorialisation
• learning spaces

Acknowledgement

The research for this article forms part of a Research Collaboration Grant 2012-2013 provided by the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. I thank this grant-awarding body for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The claimed institutional shift within higher education to ‘the MOOC-driven dispersed learning situation of the Internet’ is a case in point (Scannell 2014, 316). For Scannell, this shift is cause for concern. ‘MOOCs have become … a defining and disconcerting feature of the prevailing neoliberal regime. They provide the means to exploit economic uncertainty to further an economic rationalist agenda’ (ibid., p.317). Potentially, they contribute to the ‘forms of ceaseless control in open sites’ (Deleuze 1995, 175) that Deleuze attributes to the control society.

2. The use of ‘material’ in sociological and policy research is not without its history. Emphasising forces such as the economic system, and focusing up macro structures and super-structures, Marxist historical materialism and structuralist sociology provide ‘classic’ materialist accounts. These accounts have been cast, most particularly by scholars of a poststructuralist persuasion, as determinist and reductionist. The ‘new materialisms’ (Coole and Frost 2010) emphasise the dissolution of boundaries between nature and culture, mind and matter, ‘macro’ and ‘micro’, and are said to include: ‘actor-network theory [ANT], artificial intelligence, biophilosophy, evolutionary theory, feminism, neuroscience, posthumanism, queer theory, quantum physics and Spinozist monism’ (Fox and Alldred 2015 400). In this article, I lead with a sociomaterial rendering of ‘new’ materialism (Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011) or ANT.

3. Here, I draw specifically on the work of Pickering (1995) who coined the term ‘fully performative idiom’ when investigating scientific practice. For Pickering, a constitutive intertwining exists between material and human agency.

4. Commencing in 2003, this programme was established in the UK with the aim of rebuilding or refurbishing England’s 3500 maintained secondary schools. The programme was ‘viewed as an opportunity to create a new vision for schooling and education. It was argued that a vision for twenty-first-century schools should embrace a learner-centred and skill-based perspective, with the idea that newly designed schools would support young people to become lifelong learners’ (Sutherland et al. 2014, 22). The programme was controversially scrapped in July 2010, two months after the general election in the UK and a Coalition win.

5. In a representational idiom of policy, the assumption is made that policy is produced exclusively by human agents and that these agents have the ability to separate themselves from the world, know about (not with) it and act on it.

6. In commenting on the research reported in How Schools Do Policy (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012), Ball (2015b, 308) invokes the idea of policies as ‘discursive strategies – sets of texts, events, artefacts and practices’. Material practice is taken into account. The more than human emphasis of ANT is perhaps, and understandably, a bridge too far: ‘(T)he task for the policy researcher is to find out how a human being is envisaged in our present and the social practices that constitute this human being’ (ibid.). Ontological enactment of a more than human kind is not the focus.

7. Conducting case studies in school settings that vary along the lines of size, sector, geographic location and socio-economic status, opens a space for investigating specific materialising processes through which, it is assumed, policy-making actually works. The design of the study provides for thinking about how policy is practised in all of its material forms (Law and Singleton 2015).

8. In tracing the sociomaterial (Fenwick, Edwards, and Sawchuk 2011) by way of the methodological approach of actor–network theory (ANT), one commonly works with case data, here, observational and interview data as part of the conduct of empirical case-studies. ANT ‘usually makes its theoretical arguments empirically in the form of case-studies’ (Law and Singleton 2015; 7–8). Material relations and materializing processes can be and are traced through interview transcripts (see for example, Bansel 2015). As Law (2010, 171) states, ‘something becomes material because it makes a difference, because somehow or other it is detectable’. In the empirical research reported here, the school leaders, teachers and students interviewed readily identify what makes a difference with regard to new learning spaces.

9. It might be noted that the portable whiteboard not only takes part in pedagogic practice, it takes form too. It assumes the form of a learning object.

10. In the Victorian schooling system, most children in Year 7 are aged from 11 to 13. Year 7 is the year group in which they start secondary school.

11. This policy well illustrates ‘how political negotiations and associations at very particular, everyday material nodes [here, operable walls] work to … reassemble’ (Fenwick and Edwards 2011, 724).

12. A representational idiom of policy plays out in the practice of revealing how schools do policy. Knowledge is treated as primarily referential. A performative materialist enactment approach to policy research addresses ‘emergence’ rather than ‘substance’ (Pottage 1998, 19).