Governing the academic subject: Foucault,governmentality and the performing university

Drawing on research conducted at National University of Ireland, Galway, this paper explores how senior managers at an Irish university are seeking to measure and facilitate academic performance in the context of national and global competitiveness and a higher education landscape that appears firmly inflected by neoliberal ideas of rankings, benchmarking and productivity. I draw upon Michel Foucault’s writings on governmentality and biopolitics, in particular, and I utilise findings from a range of in-depth interviews with central university managers, with a view to critically interrogating the envisioning of what is undoubtedly a new academic subjectivity in the Irish higher education sector—a subjectivity that is being progressively planned for and regulated.     

Foucault and the use of critique: breaching the self-evidence of educational practices

This paper poses methodological questions about the role and limits of Foucault's concept of governmentality in education research. Firstly, it argues for the utility of governmentality as a means of exploring questions of power regardless of domain or scale. Secondly, it explores the boundary between the tasks of formulating critique and articulating reform agendas while working within the Foucauldian ethos. It does this via the examination of a research project which used Foucault’s concept of governmentality to observe the ways young people are regulated and shaped through education and training at a senior college in Australia. The goal of the examination is to shift the focus from the original findings, which highlighted the powerful effects of governing agendas, to a closer examination of their points of failure in local contexts. This shift takes up Foucault’s idea that government is unpredictable and that within the complexity of the assemblages which make government possible, the possibility for unanticipated outcomes and indeed points of failure, is always present. The paper argues that the change of focus is productive and provides a more complex understanding of the interplay between government and resistance. A focus on points of failure of the regulatory and normative aspects of government is taken up with a view to considering the possible links between this aspect of governmentality critique and the development of emergent rather than imposed reform agendas, inspired by local examples of resistance and transgressive practices.     

Teachers as change agents in making teaching inclusive in some selected rural schools of Limpopo Province,South Africa: implications for teacher education

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on teachers as change agents to implement inclusive education in some rural secondary schools in South Africa. The study followed a qualitative case study research methodology. Eight teachers were recruited to form part of the study through a purposive sampling strategy. Data were collected through interviews, observations and document analysis. The study found that: (a) teachers were resilient in the face of lack of resources to implement inclusive education, (b) teachers did their best despite lack of capacity to implement inclusive education, (c) teachers showed the willingness to effect change, and (d) when they collaborated with others, they achieved more. These findings have at least four implications for teacher education: One that institutions should train teachers to survive with meagre resources. Two, professional development initiatives should be planned to capacitate teachers on inclusive education. Three, teacher education institutions should develop programmes that include models of teacher agency such as the one displayed by these teachers. Four, teacher education should develop programmes that teach teachers how to collaborate with parents and other stakeholders to make inclusive education possible.     

Academic perceptions of higher education assessment processes in neoliberal academia

Neoliberal higher education reforms in relation to quality assurance, managerialist practices, accountability and performativity are receiving increasing attention and criticism. In this article, I will address student assessment as part of the technologies that increasingly govern academics and their work in universities. I will draw on Foucault’s theories of governmentality and subjectification, and discourse analysis that have framed the research conducted with 16 academics in one university in the UK. While academics in the study expressed frustration with neoliberal reforms in general, and assessment policies in particular, they tended not to demonstrate overt resistance within their university systems. The reasons for this will be questioned and analysed in relation to a neoliberal mode of government where power relations shaping academic subjectivities are diffuse and pervasive. I will discuss the ways in which academics understand and act within these power relations, and I will also demonstrate a variety of covert practices that academics tend to apply when coping with the neoliberal technologies of government such as assessment.     

WTO与中国成人教育改革

中国加入WTO确实给中国社会的各个领域带来诸多的机遇,但同时也提出了新的挑战。为此,中国成人教育应当继续完善终身教育的理念,并形成成人教育的服务观、法制观、全球观和个性化观念;调整成人教育培养目标;优化课程结构,调整课程内容;革除陈旧的办学观念,形成科学合理的管理模式。     

Conceptualising the compulsory education policy apparatus: producing and reproducing risky subjectivities

A governmental research inquiry was conducted into the policy to raise the school leaving age in Western Australia. The study aimed to problematise the policy so as to identify and examine the rationale and intervening practices with young people who were deemed to be at-risk of not meeting the new school leaving age requirements. Drawing on interviews and policy documents, this paper elaborates the concept of ‘apparatus’ as defined by Foucault and Agamben to identify the contexts and consequences of the way the policy produced and reproduced an ‘at-risk’ youth subjectivity. The paper shows how a binary between school completers and non-completers emanated from a context about a crisis in falling retention and early school leaving, myopically focusing on NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) subjectivities as both the cause and solution to the policy objectives. Consequently, the policy apparatus is productive of the very circumstances it seeks to address, and therefore it recursively cycles around a problem it does not solve.     

Unsettling orthodoxies: education for the environment/for sustainability

In this paper I employ Foucault's notion of governmentality to reflect on a debate that occurred in the pages of this journal some 10 years ago. I argue that their exchanges indicate ways in which various positions are engaged in a struggle for dominance in this field, and how particular strategies are used to legitimate and maintain these positions. My purpose is not to propose a new orthodoxy – or even to critique those we have – but rather to raise questions about how the unquestioned ‘that‐which‐is’ of orthodoxies comes to be, and their effects. I also suggest that as environmental educators and researchers, we need to work harder to unsettle more often the taken‐for‐granted in environmental education so that we remain alert to our own easy acceptance of orthodoxies. Without this, we risk our exhortations to those we seek to educate – to think critically, to question assumptions, and so forth – becoming empty rhetoric if we are not practising these ourselves – examining our own, as well as others', assumptions and practices.     

‘Observation’ as China's civic education pedagogy and governance: an historical perspective and a dialogue with Michel Foucault

ABSTRACT

This paper examines China's civic education discourses from a historical and cross-cultural perspective. It unpacks observation as a political–cultural–spatial pedagogy, underpinning Confucius’ educational envisioning, Mao's domination in the Cultural Revolution Movement, and Xi's China/ese Dream propaganda. Drawing upon Foucault's provocation of the Western gaze, this paper historicizes Confucius, Mao, and Xi's discourses to explicate a Chinese observation diagram. With Confucius, observation works as an onto-hermeneutic principle, grounding China's cosmology and sovereign-subject governance. With Mao, observation becomes a panoramic domination-surveillance mechanism, which, coupled with a Confucian punitive shame, empowers the proletarian mass in excluding-purging the bourgeois as class enemies. With Xi, observation turns into a symbolic governing technology of self, subjecting its citizenry to re-branded Confucian values toward realizing a participatory China/ese Dream. In so doing, this paper shows the parallels and contradistinctions between the Chinese observation and the Western gaze in historically and structurally ordering knowledge production and social-educational governance.     

Actors and ideology for educational policy transfer: the case of education reforms in the two Koreas during the Soviet and US military occupation

This paper critically considers the notion of educational policy transfer by addressing the roles of significant actors, based on an analysis of educational reforms made during the Soviet and US military occupation in the two Koreas. Using evidence from the Korean cases, the paper challenges the state-centric, linear, and static views of educational policy transfer, and proposes a new conceptualisation which involves multiple actors from different levels including international, domestic, and individual players. While the educational reforms in the two Koreas were developed by the Soviet and US military in order to maximise their long-term security interests in the Korean peninsula, the key actors who implemented the reforms were Korean policy-makers, who had been appointed to key positions of the educational administrations through the bureaucratic politics between the military authorities and the Korean polity. Thus, specific programmes and policies for implementation of the reforms depended on the Korean policy-makers’ understanding and interpretations of the different ideologies of the Soviet Union and the USA.     

The tension in turkish teacher education: Conflict and controversy during the transformation from an academic approach to a professional approach

Most of the reforms, which have been undertaken in the last 30 years in the Turkish educational system, are about teacher education. When we examine the teacher education curriculum from the perspective of these reforms, it has been observed that there is a controversy between the academic and professional approaches used in these curricula. While the reforms undertaken in 1982 and 1997 were in favor of the academic approach, the latest reform undertaken in 2006 was made to strengthen the professional aspects of teacher education curriculum. In this paper, Turkish teacher education reforms are introduced in the light of the professional and the academic approaches, which have always been the topic of discussions about teacher education.     

Critical considerations in becoming literacy educators: pre-service teachers rehearsing agency and negotiating risk

This article looks closely at the talk of two pre-service teachers over time to examine how they used language as a way of rehearsing their evolving agency as literacy educators. Drawing on critical sociocultural theory, I use Agency Tracing to highlight how pre-service teachers’ agentic actions are not isolated phenomena but ones developed and planned with others in language. Through rehearsals, they considered possible options and outcomes of actions before taking risks, therefore bolstering their confidence to act and resist individual and institutional Discourses of literacy. Analysis reveals that because pre-service teachers rehearse agency over time via language, such agency can be developed in teacher education coursework and field experiences. Findings indicate four recommendations to foster agency: rehearsals over time, dissonance to the point of frustration, observations and approximations in field experiences, and interactional spaces for critical reflection.     

Changing green subjectivities in outdoor and environmental education: a qualitative study

This article draws on a longitudinal qualitative study of Australian tertiary students studying Outdoor and Environmental Education. It draws on the work of Foucault and Darier to consider how ‘environmental governmentality’ shapes the conduct, desires and attitudes of these students over time. Attention is drawn to normalising and disciplinary effects of mainstream environmental discourse alongside an exploration of some of the inconsistencies and ruptures in how participants interact with discourses of environmentalism.     

高等教育强国建设与我国高等教育改革的政策走向

新中国成立以来,特别是改革开放以来,我国高等教育事业取得了巨大的历史性成就,成为名副其实的高等教育大国,为高等教育强国建设奠定了坚实的基础,但是与世界高等教育强国相比仍然有较大的差距。《国家中长期教育改革和发展规划纲要(2010-2020年)》明确提出了建设"高等教育强国"的战略目标,实现从高等教育大国向高等教育强国的转变,将是未来很长一个时期内我国高等教育改革与发展政策的基本走向。     

Negotiating teacher professionalism: governmentality and education reform in Hong Kong

This research investigates how the Hong Kong state controls and disciplines the education sector through the regulation and manipulation of discourses. The authoritative narratives are that some schools are failing the students and parents for not being able to provide quality education, and that these schools are not subject to public scrutiny while spending public money. This article seeks to understand the role of such narratives in neoliberal politics and the marketisation of education which lead to governance in the form of initiatives in school quality assurance mechanism; how different actors (Education Bureau, Professional Teachers' Union and individual teachers) are involved in the process; how they negotiate this governance of education; how such governance transforms the self-perception of teachers as well as the perception of teachers by others; and how teachers interpret, appropriate and resist such discursive power.     

公平而卓越:新世纪美国基础教育改革面临的挑战

随着后工业社会和经济全球化时代的到来,公平而卓越已成为当今世界教育新的发展趋势和追求.各国政府都在从政策法案到具体实践关注并努力迎合这一发展趋势.在这种背景下,布什签署<不让一个孩子掉队>法案.试图通过教育立法和针对性措施使美国教育摆脱"平庸"与"差距".奥巴马新政府出台了<美国全面教育改革计划>,继续追求实现NCLB法案的既定目标,保持政策连续性的同时,对NCLB法案的实施策略进行调整.美国的很多措施对我国基础教育改革具有启发性.     

Conflicting goals of educational action: a study of teacher agency from a transactional realism perspective

This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relate their situational agency and professional assignment to the national curriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds theoretically on transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviews with teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during the enactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dual perspective of teachers’ relation to the curriculum as both collectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal and realistic–practical relation, we term the future as ‘projective experiences’, the presence as ‘practical-evaluative experiences’ and the past ‘iterational experiences’ in relation to agency. Especially, we are interested in the ‘what’ in the curriculum – what the teachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affects how they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensional structures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that the crucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse on knowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity of assessment and its pedagogical consequences.     

Philosophy,philosophy of education,and the education of teachers

The role of philosophy of education has become seriously blurred with constant cries for practical and immediate answers. The nature of the discipline is such that when practical solutions are demanded of it, it loses its vitality. Philosophy is an intellectual and contemplative exercise; it is a true activity of leisure, one which needs to be enjoyed for its own sake. This intellectual and contemplative activity is of service to the practical concerns of education because choice, action, and judgment — the concerns of the practical realm —depend upon intellectual knowledge. Philosophy of education is, therefore, an essential discipline in the education of the student-teacher.     

Michel Foucault: liberation,freedom, education1

This article is a critical examination of practices and representations that constitute international education. While international education has provided substantial contributions and benefits for nation‐states and international students, we question the discourses and practices which inform the international education export industry. The ‘brand identities’ of receiving or host countries imply that they are welcoming, respectful of multiculturalism and have a well established intellectual history, in contrast to international students' embodied experiences. There is also a tendency to represent and regard international students as disembodied learners. We conclude that these disjunctures between disembodied representations and embodied experiences are undermining the kinds of cosmopolitan sensibilities that international education claims to provide.