Edinburgh Seminar
Education Governance and International Assessments
School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 11/12 December 2014
Convened by Dr Sotiria Grek, Edinburgh University <Sotiria.Grek@ed.ac.uk>
The first seminar in the ESRC series focused on a critical discussion of the state of governing education after the ‘data’ turn –what are the implications of international comparative testing and the data they are producing for education governance in Europe and globally? How can we best understand governing education by comparison and how has the politics of ‘doing’ education policy changed after the spectacle of PISA and the increasing domination of discourses of performance and effectiveness for education systems around the world? How is mutual surveillance now organised, and how is it used as an organizing and ordering tool in constructing these new spaces of practice? Finally, how can we most productively approach and study this emerging picture when the politics of monitoring and measurement are determining not only education but global governance more broadly?
The Public Lecture was given by Professor Jennifer Ozga on ‘Governing by comparison’.
Plenary presentations in the invited seminar included: Edinburgh Seminar agenda and abstracts
Professor Luís Miguel Carvalho on ‘Organized – and organizing – Mutual Surveillance: on PISA, knowledge-policy instruments and educational governance’
Professor Kerstin Martens on ‘Worldwide convergence through homogeneous measurement? A plea for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of international testings’
A video of the participants at the seminar is available here.