This book offers a rich account of how quality improvement agendas, informed by neoliberalism, create contradictory and complex contexts in which teachers produce different types of practices for specific purposes. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analytical tools, archaeology and genealogy, this book weaves together findings from classroom observations, field notes and interviews to explore the dichotomies between practices focussing on day-to-day pedagogies and practices concerned with performance management and accountability initiatives. By attending to a Foucauldian conception of power and counter conduct, it explores new means of defining quality in teaching spaces. After considering existing quality assurance judgements, the book illuminates the significance of moving slightly away from an institutionalised enterprise culture and loosing relations with reductionist approaches as a starting point. While doing so, it reworks the idea of quality by presenting other ways of looking at the complex character of pedagogical real(s) with new insights into an emergentist and process-oriented conception of teaching practices.
The book argues that we need to unlearn our existing knowledge of quality that overlooks contextual constraints and opportunities enmeshed in teaching practices. It questions the assumptions that the existing methods of observation are capable of quantifying the quality of education in a classroom or in a college in toto. By introducing the idea of documentisation, the book breaks new theoretical ground to show that this so-called system of robust accountabilities is not as self-evident as we believe and why we must rethink quality by unthinking our current common sense.
Written for researchers in educational studies, practising teachers and policy makers, this book combines profound insights from theory and contemporary teaching practices with clear guidelines as to how educational policy making should be approached.
Author(s): Zahid Naz
Publisher: Springer
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 226
City: Cham
Introduction
Contents
Chapter 1: Further Education in Transition: Historical Background
1.1 FE History: An Overview
1.2 FE in the Last 5 Years and Now: Is It the Beginning of the End of Neoliberalism in FE?
1.2.1 Area-Based Reviews
1.2.2 From Incorporation to Regionalisation
1.2.3 Skills for Jobs White Paper
1.2.4 The Experiment of Incorporation: Lessons to Be Learnt
1.3 Conclusion
1.4 Key Challenges
References
Chapter 2: Neoliberalism in Education and Complexity of Teaching Practices
2.1 Neoliberalisation of Education
2.2 Links Between Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism
2.3 A Neoliberal College: Neoliberalism in FE
2.4 The Discourse of Teaching Excellence in HE
2.5 Parallels with FE Policy
2.6 McDonaldisation
2.7 Quality Assurance Policies and Practices in FE
2.8 Historical and Sociological Context of Observations: A Brief Overview
2.9 Quality of Education and Critical Pedagogy
2.10 Politics of Accountability and Transparency
2.11 Managing Through Freedom: The Ascendency of the Existing Paradigm
2.12 Governmentality
2.13 The Underlying Rationale of a Neoliberal Logic
2.14 What Is Complexity?
2.14.1 SLA Research, ELT and the Notion of Complexity
2.14.2 Predictability in Lesson Planning
2.15 Limitations of Complexity Theory
2.16 Teacher Education and Professional Development
2.16.1 Craft Model and Contemporary Practices
2.17 Reflective Practices, Embodiment and Materiality
References
Chapter 3: Foucault and Complexity Theory
3.1 Complexity Theory and FE
3.2 Archaeology and Genealogy
3.2.1 Genealogy as a Method
3.3 Affinities Between Complexity and Creativity
3.3.1 Transversality
3.4 What Foucault Offers
References
Chapter 4: Research Design
4.1 The Rationale
4.2 Analytic Framework
4.3 Bourdieusian Theoretical Concepts
4.4 Why Foucault? A Contrast with Bourdieu
4.5 Discursive Practices
4.5.1 The Statement
4.5.2 Limitations and Exclusions
4.6 Data Collection
4.6.1 Participants
4.7 Data Analysis
4.8 Using Foucault to Unpack the Research Question
References
Chapter 5: The World of Northlands College
5.1 Managing My Subjectivity
5.1.1 Reflexivity
5.1.2 The Ever-changing Conditions and Me
5.2 Ethics and Power Relations
References
Chapter 6: Neoliberal Modes of Regulation and Control in FE Inspection Policy
6.1 The 2019 Education Inspection Framework (EIF)
6.2 Business Ethos in the EIF
6.3 Archaeology and Genealogy as Methods of Policy Analysis
6.4 Knowledge Formation
6.5 Disciplinary Power and Politics of Accountability: The ‘Truth’ of Placing ‘Bodies’ into Categories
6.6 The Genealogy of Power-Knowledge
6.7 Technologies of the Self
6.8 Quality of Education: The Underlying Rationale
6.9 Neoliberal Meaning in the Description of Knowledge and Skills
6.10 Behaviour Acquisition in the EIF
6.11 Employability and Transferable Skills
6.12 Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: The Neoliberal College: Policies and Practices at Northlands
7.1 Practices Defined by Precariousness
7.1.1 The Effects of Re-professionalisation: Organisational Structure and Practices
7.2 The Efficacy of the Quality Improvement Agendas
7.2.1 Teachers’ Professional Development, Autonomy and Accountability
7.2.2 The Discursive Practices of FE Teachers
7.2.3 Ranciere’s Critique of Bourdieu
7.3 Reconfiguring the ‘Distribution of the Sensible’
7.4 Deconstruction of the Dominant ‘Real’
7.5 From ‘Skills for Life’ to ‘Functional Skills’
7.6 The Discourse of Employability
7.7 Politics of Changing Vocabularies
7.8 Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Exploring the Complexity of Teaching Practices
8.1 Simultaneities and Polymorphous Connections
8.2 Exploring Transversal Links
8.3 Reimagining Hierarchical Relations: Mixtures of Resistance and Compliance
8.4 Conclusion
References
Chapter 9: The Dispositif, ‘Documentisation’ and Power Relations
9.1 The Dispositif
9.2 Dynamic Interplay of Power Relations
9.3 Conditionality of Inequality and Power-knowledge Relations
9.4 Documentisation
9.5 Shifting Constellations of Power and Resistance
9.6 Governmentality of the Self
9.7 Discourse of Quality: Materialities and Emergence of New Elements and Meanings
9.8 An Atomistic Approach of Labelling Practices
9.9 Genealogy of the Quality Dispositif and the ‘History of the Present’
9.10 Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Recapitulation, Implications and Recommendations
10.1 What I Wanted to Explore and How I Went About It
10.2 Context
10.3 What Has Been Learnt and What this Means for Next Steps
10.3.1 Documentisation as a Mode of Resistance
10.3.2 Use of Foucault as a Complexity Theorist
10.3.3 An Updated Analysis of Knowledge and Power in FE Practices
10.3.4 Destabilisation of Common Sense that Defines Quality
10.4 Where Things Are and How We Got Here in the First Place
10.5 Reimagining Quality – What Made It Possible
10.6 Where to Go from Here: Recommendations
10.7 Future Research Studies
References
References
