Making sense of the educational present: policy events in post-bureaucratic Italy

The paper proposes a composite approach to education policy analysis that combines the interpretative lenses of Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ with the analytical tools offered by the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986). Such an approach is problem-centred and present-centred (Dean, 2010, p. 3) and aims at exploring the contingencies and singularities of education policy-making in the contemporary ‘eduscape(s)’ (Stronach, 2010, p. 38). In developing our proposal we first draw on the notion of “governmentality” as “analytics of government”, implying the analysis of “the specific conditions under which particular entities emerge, exist and change…” (Dean, 2010: 30), within the singularity of different ways of governing. We consider the regimes of practices where our events are located and analyse the characteristic techniques, instrumentalities and mechanisms through which such practices operate, by attempting to reach their goals, and having a variety of effects. Second, we propose the use of the repertoire of the sociology of translation (Callon, 1986), in order to deconstruct the events and displacements that have occurred and reshape them in a “public storytelling” (Apple, 2005). The lenses of translation enable, we argue, to read policy stories not only as “vicissitudes of war” (Foucault, 1996, p. 239), they make visible the power relations as emerging through the assembling of human and non human actors, in addition to the deployment of tactics and strategies. In order to show the heuristic potentials of the outlined approach, we explore two events that have occurred in the Italian education “policyscape” (Ball, 1999) in 2010-2011, namely the dynamics of the umpteenth national pilot of school and staff evaluation; and the introduction of a new process to select applicants to headship, complementing the longstanding Italian tradition of “open competitions” with multiple choice tests. Presented as the flagship of a new evaluative culture, both events were in fact surrounded by a series of incidents and were challenged by several processes of resistance on the part of unions and individual professionals. They eventually resulted in a complex network of intertwining and shifting power relations which provide interesting opportunities for policy analysis. We read these events as discursive practices, emblematic emergencies of a policy discourse, situated within the Italian longstanding attempt to introduce new evaluation processes and technologies into the education system. Our analysis focuses therefore on slices of “educational present”, in order to deconstruct the development of actions and counter-actions and to unravel the different logics underpinning them. In analysing our policy events as stories of the present, the proposed approach allows us to unravel our “educational present”, problematizing it and making visible the uncertainty and unpredictability of policy processes. Such a problematisation could be considered as a reflexive practice enhancing educational professionals’ awareness about what is happening around them and how they cope with it.