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In the context of rising fundamentalism, urgent threats to the environment, and the persistence of poverty and deep inequities in the world, 193 nations have pledged to work towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) crafted by UNESCO in 2015. Education is seen as key to attaining all the other SDGs. Within the 'education goal' (Goal #4), there is an explicit target, SDG 4.7, which focuses on 'sustainable development and global citizenship'. Nations are expected to incorporate a focus on SDG 4.7 into their curricula, policies, teacher education programs, and student assessment. PISA has now developed an assessment of 'global competence,' which is presented as a way to assess SDG 4.7. Through this assessment, it seeks to inform policy, curricula, and pedagogies and catalogue 'best practices' for developing students' 'global competence'. Given this ambition and the centrality of 'sustainable development and global citizenship' within the globally endorsed SDGs, it is important to analyze the extent to which the PISA assessment of global competence is usefully able to inform policy and practice and contribute to fulfilling SDG 4.7. We build upon the work of other scholars examining this question, taking a material-semiotic approach inspired by Science and Technology Studies. Empirically, our study is based on documentary analysis, interviews, and 'survey encounters' in which we administered a curated part of the assessment to 15-year-olds and followed this exercise with interviews. We explore how the hard-won stability gained around the notion of 'global competence' through its inscription into the standardized survey instruments is again threatened when the survey instrument encounters diverse 15-year-olds. The survey encounters provide an opportunity to 'test the test', and we conclude that the PISA test of global competence is not as yet in a position to provide useful direction to policy or practice in the promotion of SDG 4.7.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on all facets of international education. Not only has it highlighted the inadequacy of existing care arrangements but it has also created new care needs. There is increased recognition among policy makers and education providers that they need to understand and support the wellbeing of international students more effectively -- and indeed with greater care. Drawing on sociomaterial theories of care, this article considers the possibilities of care as a guiding principle for orienting the transformation of international education in more productive directions. Its central contention is that a focus on care will be vitally important for fostering the wellbeing of international students and for creating an institutional environment that more successfully attracts, retains, and supports them. Yet more than this, it will be crucial for redefining and realising the ambitious aims of international education itself. This article substantiates these claims by offering three 'sketches' of how a focus on care might reframe international education policy, institutional support, and point to new directions in research on international student mobility.

In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India's experience with the Right to Education Act to consider the challenges that nations face in attempting to regulate private sector participation in education. Using the concept of 'modes of ordering' from Science and Technology Studies, we explore how attempts to impose this rights-based, government-centred order have fared against resistance from the market-based order of the private sector. As more countries express a commitment to a rights-based order, the Indian case study and the concept of 'modes of ordering' could help in anticipating and countering the challenges they might face.

In this paper, we explore the improvisations made in examination practices in higher education during the pandemic of 2020. Drawing on STS, we start from the theoretical assumption that examinations constitute an obligatory passage point in universities and colleges: a sacred point which students need to pass if they want to gain recognized qualifications. We base our analysis of higher education examinations on cases from six countries around the world: Australia, Belgium, Chile, India, Sweden and the UK. We use the analytical heuristic of choreography to follow the movements, tensions and resistance of the 'emergency examinations' as well as the re-orderings of actors and stages that have inevitably occurred. In our analytical stories we see the interplay between the maintenance of fixed and sacred aspects of examinations and the fluidity of improvisations aimed at meeting threats of spreading COVID-19. These measures have forced the complex network of examinations both to reinforce some conventional actors and to assemble new actors and stages, thus creating radically new choreographies. Although higher education teaching and didactics are being framed as a playground for pedagogical innovation with digital technologies, it is clear from our data that not all educational activities can be so easily replicated.

Mapping India's vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India's Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India's 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to "be" 'user friendly', but also engage in efforts to "make the user friendly."

Despite mixed results in research on student learning from drawing in science, there is growing interest in the potential for this visual mode, in tandem with other modes, to enact and enable student reasoning in this subject. Building on current research in this field, and using a micro-ethnographic approach informed by socio-semiotic perspectives, we aimed to identify how and why student drawing can contribute to student reasoning and learning. In our study, secondary school students were challenged to explore and collaboratively create explanatory representations of phenomena including through drawing. Data were generated using multiple wall- and ceiling-mounted cameras capable of continuously tracking groups of students negotiating these representational challenges. Our analysis proceeded through active and iterative viewing of the extensive video record, and the identification of themes to establish possible relationships between drawing and reasoning. Through this process, we (a) identify multiple necessary conditions and varied opportunities for student drawing to enact and enable reasoning, and (b) extend current understandings of how the particular affordances of this mode interact with these conditions to contribute to student learning in science.

While the use of numbers in governance has a long history, the kinds of numbers we now produce enable a range of new possibilities for monitoring, regulation and policy decision-making. Global policy actors are now calling for a steep increase in investment in education data. The growing trust in numbers has been critiqued by education policy scholars and social scientists, who have pointed to the reductionist nature of numbers and the dangerous decontextualisation of information which are leading to detrimental policies. The entry of big data poses even more complex epistemological and ontological challenges, many of which we do not fully understand as yet. This paper acknowledges these challenges, and at the same time speculates that big data might afford unique possibilities for new relational theories that may lead to better policy decision-making.

The OECD is extending the participation of low- and middle-income nations in its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). To explore how PISA can be made more relevant to these contexts, a pilot study, PISA for Development (PISA-D), was launched. Translating PISA into PISA-D required the development of instruments that had relevance to the new contexts while maintaining comparability across all PISA participants. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Callon et al's theory of the three stages of translation of research, and based on detailed empirical data, this paper describes how the technical and the political, and the material and the semiotic, work together to make PISA 'fit' new contexts, while at the same time making the new contexts 'fit' PISA. This paper demonstrates how international comparisons demand profound changes in the ways countries come to know, represent, and act upon their education systems.

This paper maps the emergence and consequences of automated Algorithmic Performance Management (APM) in the context of higher education. After reviewing the evolution of productivity management in academia, it argues that surveillance via APM shifts expectations not just about effectiveness at work but also about how work, and the good worker, come to be defined. In our paradigmatic case study of Office 365, we specify how the automated surveillance of workforce practices are deployed to redefine productivity in higher education: productive workers become good data subjects as well as producers of papers, grants, and other traditional outputs of success. Our analysis suggests performing well at work is managed in and by the platform via logics of the surveillance of wellness, time-regulation, and social connectivity to influence, manage, and control workers. We critique these automated performance measures in terms of platform capitalism, noting Office 365's Viva Insights function as a telematic device of surveillance. The final section of the paper places these trends in Australia's socio-legal context by showing how Viva is insufficient for considering performance given the range of practices that constitute "academic work," including but not limited to the need for unmonitored activity. Yet, we observe that currently little can be done about Office 365's surveillant presence given a regulatory regime that by and large excludes productivity surveillance from the scope of regulated surveillance activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International large-scale assessments and comparisons (ILSAs) in education have become significant policy phenomena. How a country fares in these assessments has come to signify not only how a nation's education system is performing, but also its future prospects in a global economic "race". These assessments provoke passionate arguments at specialist conferences and in scholarly journals and they are just as passionately debated in the media. Within academe, ILSAs are researched by sociologists and psychometricians, policy experts and statisticians. This multidisciplinary, multi-voice discussion has not always served to highlight the complexity of the issues involved. Instead, discussions across various groups of actors have often led to a polarisation of views and a hardening of stances. Large-scale comparisons have deeply divided academic opinion with regard to their validity, usefulness and use. The divergence in ontological commitments, methodologies and paradigms of research makes discussions among one set of scholars almost incomprehensible to another. New theories, concepts and vocabularies are urgently required to engage productively with this important phenomenon. Borrowing concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the history and sociology of numbers, I argue that understanding such comparative exercises as socio-technical assemblages would move the critique of large-scale comparisons in education in more productive directions.

PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its "policy lessons" are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that "seeing like PISA" is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education administration is now characterized by an intense focus on output measurement, a highly competitive environment heightened by national and international rankings, and an economic and instrumentalist approach to education and education reform. Using James Scott's account of 18th Century German forestry practices as a parable, this paper suggests that "seeing like PISA" could have far reaching and damaging effects. The paper proposes the following: first, understanding PISA as a "project of legibility" enhances our appreciation of its purposes and possibilities. Second, PISA is much more than a "representation" of existing conditions, but is creating new conditions--in other words, it is not descriptive but performative; and, finally, "seeing like PISA" is bringing about deep-rooted changes, and it is likely that the effects will be very long-term. Some of these effects may only manifest themselves in the next fifteen or twenty years; and, by then, the possibilities of redressing some of the ill effects may be very limited.

The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of "Education at a Glance," the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, trust, pragmatism and other resources. This paper traces the ways in which varied constraints were addressed, interests translated, categories defined, classifications negotiated, frameworks agreed upon, choices made, methodologies established and protocols developed, as the indicators exercise moved from being nearly impossible to becoming routinely produced. Using resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS), it demonstrates that the work of making such assemblages is both instrumentalist and performative, and argues for an undertaking of critique as a moral enterprise.

Australia has declared its ambition to be within the "top five" in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) by 2025. So serious is it about this ambition, that the Australian Government has incorporated it into the "Australian Education Act, 2013". Given this focus on PISA results and rankings, we go beyond average scores to take a close look at Australia's performance in PISA, examining rankings by different geographical units, by item content and by test completion. Based on this analysis and using data from interviews with measurement and policy experts, we show how uninformative and even misleading the "average performance scores", on which the rankings are based, can be. We explore how a more nuanced understanding would point to quite different policy actions. After considering the PISA data and Australia's "top five" ambition closely, we argue that neither the rankings nor such ambitions should be given much credence.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the bases for significant, high-stakes policy and reform decisions. This article traces how international comparability is produced, using the example of equity measurement in OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It focuses on the construction of the objects of comparison and traces the struggles to produce equivalence and commensurability across diverse and complex worlds. Based on conversations with a number of measurement experts who are familiar with the OECD and PISA, the article details how comparability is achieved and how it falters and fails. In performing such an analysis, this research is not concerned with "exposing" the limitations of comparison or challenging their validity. Rather, based on the work of Steve Woolgar and other scholars, it attempts to mobilise a "sociology of measurement" that explores the instrumentalism and performativity of the technologies of international comparisons.

This paper engages with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's response to the recent special issue of "Discourse" (Vol. 34, No. 2) that examined evolutions of markets and equity in education. We welcome Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's supplementation of the special issue with the genealogical analysis they provide of private school funding in Australia and the attention they draw to elisions of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity and whiteness in contemporary framings of equity in policy and research. We also clarify and expand on some of the aims and arguments that framed the special issue. However, we feel that any response adequate to the "event" that Morsy, Gulson and Clarke hope to stage--that is, a "debate redux" and politics of dissensus in education as an antidote to depoliticisation--must extend beyond the rehearsal of pre-existing positions; it cannot stop at endorsing or critiquing the points raised in their paper, or reiterating the rationales and arguments of the special issue. We therefore respond by gesturing towards possibilities for "disagreement", in the sense that Jacques Ranciere gives this term, about the political vocation of critical policy sociologists, and the modes of doing and being that can be seen as "critical" and "political" in academic education research. We do not disagree with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke in the usual sense; for that reason, we engage seriously with their call for a politics of dissensus in education.

In contemporary education policy, simplified technical accounts of policy problems and solutions are being produced with the use of numeric calculations. These calculations are seen as clear and unbiased, capable of revealing "what works" and identifying "best practices." In this piece, the authors use resources from the material-semiotic approach of actor-network theory to discuss how calculations have begun to serve as a subtle infrastructure underpinning the way we understand and organise our world. They demonstrate the usefulness of the approach in tracing the technicisation of policy by deploying it to qualitative studies of like-school comparisons in the two unexpectedly linked locations--New York City and Australia. The authors reveal how technical accounts are precarious and need constant maintenance to endure, even as they increasingly becoming routine, curtailing the policy imagination and limiting the spaces of contestation. It is for this reason, they argue, that a deeper understanding and sustained critique of such accounts is of pressing importance.

In education, contemporary discussions of standards and standardisation often appear incidentally, as part of the critique of particular standardisation projects, such as national or international assessments and comparisons. This review essay focuses not on particular standards but more broadly on how standards develop, how they participate in our world and how we might understand, study and put them to work. The three books reviewed here, between them, represent some of the most important interdisciplinary research and commentary on standardisation. Although the books are not recent, and none of the books deal with education as a main focus (it gets a mention in Lawrence Busch's book), they have been chosen for review here because standardisation plays a central role in contemporary education policies and practices. The books reviewed are: (1) "Standards: Recipes for Reality," by Lawrence Busch, Cambridge and London, The MIT Press, 2011; (2) "The Gold Standard: The Challenge of Evidence-Based Medicine and Standardization in Health Care," by Stefan Timmermans and Marc Berg, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003; and (3) "Standards and their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life," edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2009.

In this article, the author tells the story of her search for appropriate tools to conceptualise policy work. She had set out to explore the relationship between the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Australia's education policy, but early interview data forced her to reconsider her research question. The plethora of available models of policy did not satisfactorily accommodate her growing understanding of the messiness and complexity of policy work. On the basis of interviews with 18 policy actors, including former OECD officials, PISA analysts and bureaucrats, as well as documentary analysis of government reports and ministerial media releases, she suggests that the concept of "assemblage" provides the tools to better understand the messy processes of policy work. The relationship between PISA and national policy is of interest to many scholars in Europe, making this study widely relevant. An article that argues for the unsettling of tidy accounts of knowledge making in policy can hardly afford to obscure the untidiness of its own assemblage. Accordingly, this article is somewhat unconventional in its presentation, and attempts to take the reader into the messiness of the research world as well as the policy world. Implicit in this presentation is the suggestion that both policy work and research work are ongoing attempts to find order and coherence through the cobbling together of a variety of resources. (Contains 3 figures and 2 notes.)

The article presents the discussion on COVID-19 and various policy responses in communities across the world not relating to health and economic issues. Topics include rethinking the basic purposes of education and the pedagogic models better suited to the ever-present possibilities of insecurity, risk, and relentless change; and COVID-19 pandemic offering the opportunity for rethinking not only new digital, online, and pedagogical possibilities but also the basic purposes of education.

Inspired by Stuart Hall's work, Bob and Fazal introduced the subtitle that now gives the journal its distinctive and broad mission: the study of education from the perspective of the cultural politics that shape it and it shapes. The standing of the journal across these fields reflects the sustained commitment of the previous editors to publish the highest quality and most innovative academic work exploring the cultural politics of education today. January 2021 As the new editorial team of I Discourse i , we are very pleased to publish our first statement concerning the direction of the journal. [Extracted from the article]

The Discourse Editorial Team wishes to extend our sincere gratitude to the following academics who have refereed articles for the journal. All research articles undergo rigorous double-blind peer review, based on initial Editor screening and review by at least two anonymous referees. [Extracted from the article]

Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and institutions; and classrooms, pedagogy, teaching and learning. Most importantly, it provides a fresh perspective on how power operates in ordering societies, disciplining actors and promoting ideas and practices. In this paper, we provide an introduction to STS and elaborate what it offers education scholars. Using examples from the emerging body of STS work in the field of education, and in particular from the papers in this special issue, we argue that STS is not only useful, but an exciting and generative form of critique - one that is especially suited to investigating contemporary issues in education policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen a significant rise in the use of numeric evidence in education policy and governance. Using the case of the Education Revolution in Australia, this paper explores the processes by which both 'distant accounting' and 'intimate accounting' were made possible by new national assessments and a public website which published comparative information about schools' performance on these assessments. Building on concepts proposed by Kristin Asdal (2011) on intimate actions in accounting, the paper elaborates how Australian regulating authorities created new intimacies by compelling schools to reveal details they might have preferred to keep private. Parents, and the public in general, came to be seen as deserving of such intimate information, and as capable of using such information appropriately. The resulting 'informed publics' then played a significant role in the productions of authority and non-authority. Various efforts unfolded to challenge the authority of numbers and to escape being governed by them, by subverting the efforts of quantification and refusing the numbers that were produced. Tracing the story of the Education Revolution affords an opportunity to elaborate the processes of 'accounting intimacy' suggested by Asdal (2011) and to examine the relationship between 'the production of non-authority' that she described, the production of 'non-calculation' suggested by Callon and Law (2005), and the concept of 'informed publics' conceptualised by Callon et al. (2009). The paper proposes that 'distant' and 'intimate' forms of accounting are not mutually exclusive, but can operate simultaneously and even reinforce each other, and it describes how this was achieved in the Education Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's Education Revolution, launched in 2008, emphasised equity as a key reason for reforms. It identified ‘pockets of disadvantage’ as one of the main problems that needed to be addressed through its reforms. Through a series of translations, the problem of ‘pockets of disadvantage’ was converted to one of a lack of information, a lack of comparable metrics and the absence of an informed public, leading to a number of solutions such as the development of a national assessment scheme and theMy Schoolwebsite. In this paper, using the theoretical and methodological resources of actor-network theory, I argue that these translations were also, simultaneously, the processes by which the Australian education space was further ‘marketised’. These marketisation processes involved homogenisation, whereby schools were rendered comparable through the development of common evaluation and common metrics; the development of informational resources that enabled parents to function as economic agents and exert ‘market forces’; and coordinating the activities of the actors through theMy Schoolwebsite. The paper concludes with a discussion of how such descriptive analyses might serve as critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of marketisation, equity is evolving and being enacted in new ways across education sectors. Different conceptions of equity are considered, including the increasingly influential human capital perspective promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We argue that, separate from critiques of neoliberalism and its deleterious effects on equity in education, it is necessary to analyse carefully the increasing rationalisation of equity agendas in economic terms, the associated effects on education governance and policy-making, as well as on the work of educational institutions and educators. Providing an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue, we direct particular attention to the multiple, complex and often contradictory effects of the current education reform agenda in Australia, which has prioritised equity objectives and intensified performance measurement, comparison and accountability as means to drive educational improvement and reduce disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]