Beyond school: transnational differentiation and the shifting form of education in world society

Inventing other spaces for European education: Summer School in European Education Studies as a laboratory for educational research in Europe

“…Relatedly, educational research is converted into a de-politicized and technicized knowledge endeavour (Fenwick et al, 2014; Thomson, 2006), where the educational researcher ‘is limited to, and by, the agenda of social and political problems defined elsewhere’ (Ball, 1995: 259) and by solutions already embedded in the practices of the sciences of learning and policy (Biesta, 2007; Ozga et al, 2006). Interestingly, this reading of our educational present was also the object of a theoretically informed debate at the SUSEES, with an alternative problematization proposed by Mangez et al (2017) and Vanden Broeck (2019), who framed education as unfolding in a context marked by functional differentiation, the rise of self-referentiality, the pursuit of efficiency and the creation of deterritorialized mechanisms for technical, impersonal coordination, and identified the challenge in the connection of education with values, projects and points of reference, in order to reconstruct universes of reasonable meanings.…”

Worlds apart? On Niklas Luhmann and the sociology of education

“…While acknowledging how Luhmann's own reliance on the distinction between medium and form has not always been unequivocal when applied to the domain of education, Vanden Broeck re-reads his oeuvre to flesh out a formal method that is suited to study education in and beyond school. Such an ambition starts from the observation that if mass schooling is to be understood as a historically contingent answer to education's pedagogical intention, as the realisation of an improbable solution to a general problem, then sociology can see its task as being to look at whether and how other solutions address that same problem (see also Vanden Broeck, 2020a, 2020b. Peering into the suddenly closer horizon of learning platforms, apps and algorithms, Vanden Broeck contends that an endeavour of this type would have to look out for the ways in which these new pedagogical forms attempt to establish education as a self-standing reality, maintain their boundary with the rest of society and seek to balance external demands against internal possibilities.…”

Education in world society: A matter of form

“…The pupil as the centre of the pedagogical intention; his or her asymmetrical relationship with a professional teacher, who mediates autonomously between educational success and failure; an organisational mode that by means of its decisions arranges inclusion and dictates how time and space are to be divided and repeated; and a planned, revisable curriculum, which specifies what is to be taught to the person it wishes to educate, thus closing the circle again -Luhmann advanced the notion of classroom interaction to grasp the ensemble of these re-specifications. As I have elaborated elsewhere (Vanden Broeck, 2020a), this conglomerate term seeks to grasp how the education system creates its form and thus the necessary space to enable an almost infinite range of possibilities for itself, whilst simultaneously avoiding sheer arbitrariness. The school class, Luhmann (2002: 119-121) argued, is the technical invention to improve the odds of an interaction that does not end in a merely pleasant get-together, where anything goes, but results in the much more improbable outcome that the persons involved learn something.…”

“…15 Such a shift of focus towards other forms of education increasingly appears necessary in an era where learning and instruction are put into practice without school or classroom, during today's pandemic more than ever, and indeed do so on a global scale. In an age where these two activities are increasingly entrusted to educational apps and learning platforms (Decuypere, 2019a(Decuypere, , 2019b or to transnational networks of educational and non-educational organisations alike (Vanden Broeck, 2020a, 2020b, it becomes ever more urgent to renew sociology's vocabulary with new terms better equipped to express this new reality.…”