The phantom national? Assembling national teaching standards in Australia’s federal system

Abstract

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia's federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on 'policy assemblage' within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant 'component parts' in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests 'the national' is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflect transnational traits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems.

Towards a topological re-assemblage of education policy? Observing the implementation of performance data infrastructures and ‘centers of calculation’ in Germany

“…Against this backdrop, the recent turn towards performance data and (digital) data infrastructures in German education policy can only be understood as the result of complex interactions between 'catalysing' events and power shifts among policy actors at transnational, national and subnational scales around the turn to the twenty-first century (see for similar findings in the Australian standardisation movement Savage and Lewis 2016). Unsurprisingly, one of the most important 'catalysers' was the PISA-'shock' in 2001, whose wide-ranging effects have been examined within a large body of research (e.g., Hartong 2012;Niemann 2010;Tillmann et al 2008).…”

Curriculum Policy Enactment and Spaces of Change: A Bourdieuian Field Analysis

“…While analysing the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) in Australia, Savage and Lewis (2017), argue that when one goes 'looking' for the national, it is difficult to find. In other words, when the national policy is broken down into its component parts, there is no inherent essence to the policy at the national level, beyond the written document itself.…”

Calculating the Professional: Standards and the Government of Professional Practice

“…In contrast to both the progressivist and critical research on teacher professional standards, research by scholars such as Bourke, Lidstone, andRyan (2015), Fenwick (2010), Fenwick and Edwards (2010), Mulcahy (2011), O'Brien (2012), O'Brien and Osbaldiston (2010), and Savage and Lewis (2017) may be considered more 'problematising' (cf. Dean, 1994, p. 4;Hunter, 1994, pp.…”

“…43 While more post-realist than not in terms of its (somewhat remote) connection with the intellectual heritage of Deleuze and Guattari and with the (acknowledged) Foucaultian concept of 'problematisation' (Savage and Lewis, 2017, p. 8), Savage and Lewis' (2017) notion of 'policy assemblage' can be said to fall neither within the ANT nor governmentality perspectives. As Savage and Lewis (2017), themselves, point out, they 'build on emerging research in the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, which uses the concept of assemblage to analyse policy' (Savage and Lewis, 2017, p. 2).…”

“…As Savage and Lewis (2017), themselves, point out, they 'build on emerging research in the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, which uses the concept of assemblage to analyse policy' (Savage and Lewis, 2017, p. 2).…”