Providing a platform for ‘what works’: platform-based governance and the reshaping of teacher learning through the OECD’s PISA4U

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses emerging modes of educational governance constituted through new online platforms for teacher professional development. Specifically, I focus here on the OECD’s PISA4U (‘PISA for you’), an online professional learning platform comprising structured assignment modules and peer-to-peer collaborative activities based on PISA insights. I critically explore how the PISA4U platform, as both a data infrastructure and a new organisational form, forges new relations between otherwise unconnected schooling spaces and actors, and creates new markets and users for the OECD’s educational testing, data and professional development services. Rather than simply providing an online forum for teacher dialogue, collaboration and learning, I conclude that PISA4U problematically enables the OECD to consolidate their status as the global expert in education by providing a technical and discursive platform from which to speak to the teaching profession, which risks displacing more professionally oriented forms of teacher knowledge and expertise.

为“有效政策与实践”搭建平台：经合组织通过PISA4U实现基于平台的治理和对教师学习的重塑

本文探讨由新的教师专业发展在线平台所构成的新兴教育治理模式。具体来说，我关注的是经合组织的PISA4U（即“PISA 为你”），这是一个线上专业学习平台，其内容包括结构化的学习模块以及基于PISA见解的同行协作活动。我批判性地探讨了作为数据架构基础和新的组织形式的PISA4U这个平台，如何在原本不相关联的学习空间和参与者之间建立新的关系，并为经合组织的教育测试、数据和专业发展服务开拓新的市场和用户。我的结论是，PISA4U并非仅是一个为教师们提供对话、协作和学习的在线平台，它能够巩固经合组织作为全球教育专家的地位，为其搭建一个能够与教学从业者进行对话的平台，实现其技术与话语支配式的治理，然而，这样有取代更加专业导向形式的教师知识和专业技能的风险。

KEYWORDS:

• PISA4U
• platform
• platform-based governance
• OECD
• PISA
• teacher learning
• professional learning communities
• ‘best practice’

关键词:

• PISA4U
• 平台
• 基于平台的治理
• 经合组织
• 国际学生评估项目
• 教师学习
• 专业学习社区
• “最佳实践”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr Steven Lewis is an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow at the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre at Deakin University, Australia. His current research project, entitled ‘Globalising School Reform Through Online Teacher Professional Learning’ (2019–2022), investigates how school reform, teacher learning and educational governance is being reshaped by new forms of international evidence, data infrastructures and relational policy spaces, including online platforms such as the OECD’s PISA4U. He has recently published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Cambridge Journal of Education, Critical Studies in Education and Journal of Education Policy. His forthcoming monograph, entitled ‘PISA, Policy and the OECD: Respatialising Global Educational Governance Through PISA for Schools’, is due for publication with Springer in 2020.

Notes

1 We can also see a shift towards ensuring PISA impact – that is, from merely identifying what the features of ‘high-performing’ systems are to actually suggesting how such reform measures should be enacted – through the emergence of certain organisational units within the OECD Education and Skills Directorate. One such example is the Policy Advice and Implementation Division, whose stated purpose is to provide ‘timely and tailored advice to better design and implement reforms’ (OECD 2019d, np).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DE190101141].