The OECD Program TALIS and Framing, Measuring, and Selling Quality Teacher™

Global transformations of the state, governance and teachers’ labour: Putting Bernstein’s conceptual grammar to work

“…In this case the good teacher was strongly classified, but weakly framed, and this resulted in considerable diversity of practice, and thus of identities and voices, across different national education settings, because teachers, their unions and national governments had degrees of autonomy as to how to implement the ‘good teacher’. What we might now add to this reflection is that neither UNESCO nor the ILO, as global agencies, dominated the field of symbolic control regarding the good teacher during this period, leading us to describe it as a period of ‘thin globalisation’ (Sorensen and Robertson, 2017); governing rested essentially with sub-national and national scales which were the nodal points in regulating teachers’ work. Using Bernstein’s insights, what is at issue, however, is that teachers also have some autonomy over the resources that shape their pedagogic identities (the therapeutic/professional) in turn limiting the intrusion of the official state’s control in this arena.…”

“…We will suggest that the OECD is not only a nodal agent of symbolic control that has acquired for itself state-like functions at the global level, but also one seeking to use programmes like TALIS strategically as a pedagogical device to transform teachers’ contemporary identities toward being a part of, and producing, competitive knowledge economies. We draw on empirical work, some of which has been reported more generally (see Robertson, 2012; Sorensen and Robertson, 2017; Sorensen, 2017), to develop our analysis below.…”

“…The teaching profession has been the subject of international political debates for decades, though until more recently this was largely with regard to teachers’ conditions of work in sub-national and national settings and in relation to those agencies which might ensure their claim to teacher professionalism (ILO–UNESCO, 2008; Papadopoulos, 1994). Over the past fifteen years, however, this has changed dramatically, and teachers have been placed under what might be broadly called the ‘quality’ spotlight concerning the nature of their knowledge-base, their pedagogical practices, and whether or not they add value to their students’ learning (Connell, 2009; MacBeath, 2012; Robertson, 2012; Sorensen and Robertson, 2017; Tatto, 2007).…”

“…This paper engages with Basil Bernstein’s (1990, 2001; Bernstein and Solomon, 1999) rich conceptual grammar in order to generate a sociological account of the outcomes for teachers’ work, identity and social class as a result of strategic shifts in governance to the global scale. In doing so it builds on earlier published work (Robertson, 2012, 2013; Sorensen and Robertson, 2017) on the global governance of teachers, where we drew upon aspects of Bernstein’s rich corpus of work on pedagogic governance to examine transformations in teachers’ work over time. However, the lines of argument in our previous papers were suggestive rather than systematic, and in need of fleshing out and filling in.…”

Evidence and its consequences in educational research

“…Recent research that has investigated the redefining of teacher professionalism highlights historically new trends such as: (a) the increasing control of teachers’ work by influential international bodies like the OECD and the World Bank (Robertson, ; Sørensen & Robertson, ; Robertson & Sørensen, ); (b) the ‘remaking of the professional teacher in the image of data’ (Lewis & Hardy, ; Lewis & Holloway, ); (c) the use of value‐added measures in making appraisals of teachers’ work (Berliner, ; Amrein‐Beardsley & Holloway, ; Greene, ).…”