Running order, lists, ratings and rankings

Although NordSTEP is an open access and exclusively online journal, we still group the articles into issues. When putting together each issue, the journal production team asks us (the editors) to provide a ‘running order’. This may sound innocent, but running orders tend to build on some sort of criterion or principle. Should the order be alphabetical, numerical, or perhaps random? Should it build on our preferences or the number of views, or should it grow, somehow, from the content of the individual articles?

This issue is not a special issue, and the running order of the articles does not build on criteria stemming from the content of the individual articles. We can list three facts about how this running order materialized: 1. the running order was made simply by listing the articles, 2. the listing was a decision, 3. we cannot account for the criteria on which the decision was based.

Lists represent an effective way of dealing with complexity with minimal abstraction. A lot of diverse items can stand next to each other or after each other on a list. ‘Lists allow to generate an order without a genuine ordering criterion’ (Esposito, 2017, p. 356), that is, if the lists are ‘flat’ (like a shopping list or the present ‘running order’ list). ‘Flat’ lists do not have an order or an evaluative component. Lists that take the form of ratings and rankings, however, are quite different (ibid.). Ratings have an evaluative component in the sense that they attribute scores: a film can get four out of six hearts, a school essay can achieve an A or a B, a restaurant can achieve zero, one or several stars in the Michelin guide. Ratings offer a multiplicity of singular judgements, and, if these judgements are combined, it is possible to compare them. This allows otherwise singularly rated items to be ranked. Rankings compare the listed items and thereby establish a hierarchy, often from 1 to 10 or from 1 to 100. Top 10 Universities, restaurants, films, and students.

If we claimed that the running order of this issue was based on a ranking of the articles, it would be obvious that some lists are not innocent (we must immediately clarify that there is no such ordering principle!). Lists imply the possibility of comparison, and they may establish a hierarchy. Lists also connect otherwise disconnected issues. Yet, in connecting them, lists also disconnect these issues in another way – they disconnect them from what they used to be part of. ‘Thus, what a social theory of the list requires us to think about are the acts of separation, practices of interruptions, and modes of producing disconnections’ (Stäheli, 2012, p. 241). An article may be part of a larger project and have to be disconnected from this project in order to be published as a text in NordSTEP. It has to occur as an isolated item, connecting to other articles rather than to the body of knowledge being accumulated by the researcher. It becomes perhaps even more obvious that listing requires disconnecting if we consider the best beach list: ‘A list of the 10 most beautiful beaches of the world relies on disembedding these beaches, making them items which can be distinguished from other items.’ (ibid, p. 241). In order to do this, it is necessary to cut across geographical, territorial and narrative continuities. The users of TripAdvisor have their individual stories and experiences, which leads them to recommend a specific beach as particularly outstanding. Yet, for all these recommendations to result in a list of best beaches, all this context has to be severed. A beach in Hawaii becomes comparable with a beach in Norway, by ignoring and cutting out the beautiful trail, the warm rock or other local narratives and experiences that used to accompany them and maybe was the reason for the recommendation in the first place.

Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy (NordSTEP) is also rated and ranked. Via the Taylor & Francis systems, the knowledge produced within educational research is connected with other journals and research areas. Within education, listing is everywhere, and the articles in this issue reflect the presence of ratings, rankings, connections and disconnections that take place in education in various ways.

In the first article, Åsa Hirsh argues that assessment for summative as well as formative purposes has a serious, negative effect on students’ knowledge development and wellbeing in school. We would add that this might have something to do with the element of comparison involved in assessment and tests. The single student, the single learning process, is disconnected, rated and potentially compared and ranked. Katja Karoliina Vallinkoski and Pia-Maria Koirikivi explore how bullying, school threats, violence and the risk of school shootings can be handled and mitigated. They state, among other things, that schools should work to create a growth and learning environment. If we think of Åsa Hirsh’s analysis of student wellbeing, we might suggest that schools and politicians should take testing and other evaluative practices into account if they wish to create a better learning environment.

Hanne Kvilhauksvik studies the introduction of learning outcomes in Norwegian higher education. She shows that the learning outcomes might ultimately drift apart from teaching and assessment. Listing learning outcomes based on political ambitions may involve a disconnection from teaching.

Carl-Henrik Adolfsson and Daniel Alvunger examine the relationship between local education authorities (LEAs) and principals in a Swedish municipality and identify the tensions between the principals’ autonomy and the LEAs’ responsibility for school results. They argue that the use of benchmarking, where schools are compared and ranked, leads to a normative pressure and involves an element of shame.

Suvi Jokila shows how international degree programmes (IDPs) have moved from the periphery to the centre of commercial attention in Finland. IDPs have become a global phenomenon that facilitates international student mobility flows in higher education in non–English-speaking countries and offers money to universities. Due to financial constraints, universities find it difficult to refuse this offer and thereby become obliged to participate in competitive and commercially oriented global student markets. The international degree programme connects to a global market, and the disconnection it involves has serious consequences for universities.

The last article on the list is both on the list and not on the list. This is because we were not able to read it through the lense of lists. Kasper Lasthein Madsen and Kenneth Aggerholm analyse contemporary approaches to movement integration. Their ambition is to clarify dominant theoretical and didactic ways of working with movement integration and to suggest Klafki’s account of categorical Bildung as an alternative understanding with the potential to integrate movement and academic content.

We have come to the end of the list, having connected these articles to each other with the use of a ‘flat’ list. We hope you will enjoy reading of all the interesting, listed articles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.