High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a 'good teacher' in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of NAPLAN testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the 'good teacher'. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This paper argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.
This article is an examination of nine pornographic Web sites. Web porn is important because the Internet increases men's access to pornography. The pornography presented on these Web sites is first examined in terms of the way that it manifests important continuities with pornography delivered in other ways. Central to these continuities is the way that pornography manifests the anxiety that is here taken to be fundamental to the acquisition of Western heterosexual masculinity or male identity. An important difference, though, is that this anxiety appears more clearly manifested in these sites than it is elsewhere. In addition, however, these sites appear to intensify this anxiety by making it harder for men to prove that they are truly “man enough.”
(national, regional, school, classroom) forces that operate through the 'system'. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary affects, but in a different way. This new-old disciplinarity, or 'database effect', is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.The increasing utility of topological approaches to understanding social phenomena was clearly demonstrated in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society. For its editors, attempts to understand the emerging social must engage with topology as "surfaces that are spaces in themselves are not only self-organizing and emergent, but their self-organization brings being and knowing, ontology and epistemology, into new kinds of relations" (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012, p. 20). Using a mathematical construct to conceptualize social spaces, which might otherwise be understood discursively, may appear unusual. The metaphysics of mathematics, however, has long engaged with the social, for example in Leibniz's concept of incompossibility (Deleuze, 2006), Hacking's (1990) theorisation of statistics, governance and normalcy and Badiou's (2005) argument that mathematics is ontological and has always been significant for understanding multiplicity, continuity and the changes of forms and figures.While this mathematical turn is important, particularly in the age of big data and the consequent impact of datafication on social ontologies and professional/personal subjectivities, the use of topology as a heuristic for articulating the becoming-self in education surfaces has only recently been used in wider education analysis (Lingard & Sellar, 2013;de Freitas, 2014). Using topology to understand cultures and societies is not new, since Euler's solution to the problem of the 7 Bridges of Konigsberg, theorists have been intrigued by the potential of topology to tell us something about the ways that environments, people and customs/cultures connect in productive ways. For example, Lacan was absorbed by the potential for topological figures to "theorise the relationship of scientific 1 We are very grateful to Sam Sellar and Andrew Murphie for their helpful feedback and suggestions on early drafts of this paper. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.
This article belongs to a series of papers that wrestles with international manifestations of neoliberal education policy reform and its capacity to change and/or reform to school and schooling in latecapitalism. We use the word 'series' in a number of distinct ways: as recognition of work done in the field of education policy and neoliberal critique; as a marker of a significant and useful theorisation of contemporary governance, institutions, power and possibility by Gilles Deleuze; and, lastly, as a particular unfolding of change and continuity in schools and schooling in the new millennia. This paper examines a particular 'machine' of that reform in Australia, the high-stakes testing machine of NAPLAN ii . NAPLAN represents a machine of auditing, that creates and accounts for data that is used to measure, amongst other things, good teaching. This measurement occurs within an international education reform trajectory that aims to promote quality and equity as articulated through a particular logic of good education, good policy and 'good teaching'. By scrutinising NAPLAN through Deleuzian philosophy, the ordering and possibilities of educational reform and change through auditing practices can be re-evaluated.While difficult concepts are necessary for this re-evaluation, this article's logic can be summarised relatively simply: An audit culture has emerged in education policymaking in the UK, USA and Australia.In each of these countries various high-stakes testing machines like NAPLAN are deployed to bring about systemic reform. This education reform aims to improve schools and schooling through collecting and providing data that is used to measure (overtly and covertly) teaching quality. However, we argue that seeing high-stakes testing as enabling a return to those subjectivities and significations discursively associated with 'good teaching' is a misrepresentation. The audit culture actually represents a change in public administration that reflects, or inflects, the current dominance of neoliberal economic ideas amongst those in the public sector. The use of statistical measures, particularly through high-stakes testing machines like NAPLAN, for determining the presence of 'good teaching' results in a revision to logics of 'good teaching' that changes its character. At least, it does so for policymaking -though
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