Comparisons, numbers and nations: exploring national policy responses to international data via a postfoundational imagining of the policymaker

ABSTRACT

The article seeks to refine two central concepts in scholarly accounts of national policy responses to international data: ‘selectivity’ and ‘instrumentalisation’. It does so by broadening, firstly, the empirical focus of research to include forms of international data other than the performance data of global learning metrics and international large-scale assessments, and secondly, its case-studies focus to embrace the Republic of Cyprus as an understudied and uniquely situated case within international power structures, but mostly, by reimagining the national policymaker as a postmodern subjectivity rather than a sovereign, fully cogitative and conscious individual. From this theoretical point of view, selectivity is conceptualised as an unintended consequence of the ambivalent attitudes of policymakers towards comparison and numbers, while instrumentalisation as a frequently problematic and ambiguous praxis. To test these two arguments, the article analyses why and how and to what extent statistical averages of teaching time allocations to curriculum subjects from EU and OECD countries are valued and integrated into the 2015 school timetables reform initiative of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus.

KEYWORDS:

• Selectivity
• instrumentalisation
• postmodern subjectivity
• ambivalence
• ambiguity
• positions of identification
• averages from EU and OECD
• school timetables
• Cyprus

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eleftherios Klerides

Eleftherios Klerides (PhD UCL Institute of Education) is the Secretary of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE). He is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Education at the University of Cyprus, an Adjunct Faculty Professor at the Open University of Cyprus, and a Honorary Research Fellow of North-West University in South Africa. Dr. Klerides has published widely; two books (‘Identities and education: comparative perspectives in times of crisis’, Bloomsbury 2021, with S. Carney; ‘Governing educational spaces: teaching and learning in transition’, Sense 2015, with H.G. Kotthoff), one special issue of Comparative Education (‘Mobilities and educational metamorphoses: patterns, puzzles and possibilities’, 2009, with R. Cowen), three special issues of European Education (‘Governance, the nation state and the new global order in education’, 2020, with S. Carney; ‘Governing educational spaces: historical perspectives’, 2015, with H.G. Kotthoff”; ‘Neo-empires of knowledge in education’, 2014, with M. Pereyra and H.G. Kotthoff), and over 40 articles and chapters in the fields of comparative education, education policy, and history of education.