An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation

Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes

Emiliano Grimaldi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351337809
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation: Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes outlines the epistemology of the theories and models that are currently employed to evaluate educational systems, education policy, educational professionals and students learning. It discusses how those theories and models find their epistemological conditions of possibility in a specific set of conceptual transferences from mathematics and statistics, political economy, biology and the study of language.

The book critically engages with the epistemic dimension of contemporary educational evaluation and is of theoretical and methodological interest. It uses Foucauldian archaeology as a problematising method of inquiry within the wider framework of governmentality studies. It goes beyond a mere critique of the contemporary obsession for evaluation and attempts to replace it with the opening of a free space where the search for a mode of being, acting and thinking in education is not over-determined by the tyranny of improvement.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of educational philosophy, education policy and social science.

Chapter 1

Governmentality, evaluation and education

An archaeological gaze

In the introductory chapter, I have framed this book as an experimental and emancipatory exercise to question educational evaluation as a form of knowledge production and the limits it imposes on us, locating it as a contribution to a critical ontology of ourselves as contemporary educational subjects in our relation to government. In the chapters of the book, I will engage with educational evaluation as a key form of knowing in the governing of contemporary education and will analyse it searching for a set of rules for the production of truth about the value of education, its objects, aims and subjects. In focusing on the effects of educational evaluation as a form of truth production, my analysis will address the nexus between truth and subjectivity and its relation to the ways in which we are governed and govern ourselves as educational subjects and, within this, we are constituted and constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge. As emphasised in the outline of the book, the aim of the analysis will be to highlight the political paradoxes produced by the contemporary hegemonic modes of educational evaluation and the epistemological ruptures to be practiced in order to imagine and inhabit other evaluative spaces. This requires to address the complex tangle between educational evaluation as a scientific domain, political technology and moral practice, reflecting on how educational evaluation is implicated in the ways in which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge, as subjects acting on others and as moral agents (Foucault 1982a: 237). Before entering the main body of the book, in this chapter I present the key concepts and theoretical resources that I mobilise to problematise educational evaluation. Specifically, I attempt to explain how and why this book can be conceived as genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method (see Foucault 1997a: 315).

Educational evaluation as a governmental practice

This book is located within the tradition of the governmentality studies (Foucault 1991; Barry et al. 1996; Peters et al. 2009; Dean 2010), and its overall aim is to push further our understanding of the governmentalisation of education. Its ambition is to reflect on educational evaluation as part of the ‘ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of a [governmental] form of power’ (Foucault 1991: 103), where:

• the targets are educational professionals and students;
• the forms of knowledge and the techniques of the human and social sciences play a major role in defining the entities to be governed, the means to be employed and government's ends and goals;
• the disciplinary techniques and institutions are re-inscribed within an art of government where the objects are ‘the forces and capacities of living individuals, as members of an [educational population], as resources to be fostered, to be used and to be optimized’ (Dean 2010: 29).

Analytically, the work moves from a definition of government as:

any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seek to shape conduct by working through the desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs of various actors for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes. (Dean 2010: 18)

Such a definition has some conceptual implications and will shape much of the analytical moves in the book. First, government is conceptualised as activity that is as the set of organised practices through which we are governed and govern ourselves and the others in a specific domain, which in turn involves the production of knowledge and truth, the exercise of power through ordering and calculation and the establishment of norms and ends. In what follows I will refer to this set of organised practices as a regime of government. ¹ Second and consequently, regimes of government are conceived as assembling processes that involve the mobilisation of multiple and heterogeneous elements that vary from routines, technologies, ways of doing things and agencies to theories, programmes, knowledge and expertise. Thus, the analysis of regimes of government is a materialist analysis that looks at practice and assumes the co-constitution of the material and the discursive, but which is profoundly concerned with thought as a non-subjective, technical and practical domain (Rose 1989; Olssen et al. 2004; Olssen 1999). In fact it places particular emphasis on the ‘forms of knowledge and truth that define [the] field of operation and codify what can be known’ within each regime (Dean 2010: 41). Third, government can be interpreted as an intentional and yet non-subjective attempt to direct human conduct, which is conceived as ‘something that can be regulated, controlled, shaped and turned to specific ends’ (ibid. 18). As an attempt to direct human conduct, government is intimately linked to ethics and has ethical effects in so far as its practices and knowledge assume a definition of what constitutes a desirable, responsible and valuable conduct.

Such a conceptualisation of government as the field for investigation of a materialist and thought-concerned analysis invites to think about the connections between questions of government, authority and politics and those of identity and self. Relatedly, it looks at government as involving a complex interplay between regulation and self-regulation and thinks at governmental practices as making human life a domain of power and knowledge. It brings to the forefront how there is an invariable evaluative and normative dimension implicated in the processes of government, that is embodied in ‘set of standards or norms of conduct by which actual behaviour can be judged, and which act as a kind of ideal towards which individuals and groups should strive’ (Dean 2010: 17–18).

But how to approach the analysis of regimes of government as practical systems and fields of possible experiences? How to carry on a materialist analysis of practices of government as assembling processes that involve multiple and heterogeneous elements that vary from routines, technologies, ways of doing things and agencies to theories, programmes, knowledge and expertise? Following Dean (2010: 40–41; see also Rose 1999; Miller and Rose 2008), it is possible to disentangle the assemblages of government activities isolating four different foci of an analytics of government (Dean 2010; see also Lemke 2007), that is a perspective that engages with examination of the conditions under which regimes of government ‘come into being, are maintained and are transformed’ and ‘particular entities emerge, exist and change’ (Dean 2010: 30–31). Regimes of government as historically constituted assemblages of governmental practices can be known through a set of analytical cuts focusing on their:

• forms of rationality, that is of ‘distinctive ways of thinking and questioning’ that mobilise specific ‘vocabularies and procedures for the production of truth’ (Dean 2010: 33) in a regime of government. The analytical focus here is constituted by those thoughts, forms of knowledge, expertise, strategies, programmes and means of calculation that are employed in and inform the practices of government. The examination of forms of rationality develops through the analysis of scientific, policy, narrative or juridical texts, regulations, graphic formalisations, images and any other material form assumed by thought in space and time. The key question in this examination relates to how these material forms of thought are involved in rendering governable a specific domain of practices through the production of ‘specific forms of truth’ (ibid. 42). Regimes of truth, in relation to government, imply the intentional but non-subjective formation of distinct ways of ‘viewing institutions, practices and personnel, of organizing them in relation to a specific ideal of government’ (ibid. 43).
• fields of visibility, that is ways of seeing and perceiving that are characteristic of a regime of government and are necessary to its operation. The focus here is on those governmental practices through which light is shed on certain objects, meanings and understandings whereas ‘darkness obscures and hides others’ (ibid. 41). The creation of fields of visibility unfolds, for instance, through the mobilisation of models, tables, figures, charts, maps and graphs as ways for visualising fields to be governed. These tools for visualisation establish spaces where what becomes visible are entities (substances and subjects) to be governed, relations of authority, connections between locales and agents, problems to be solved, objectives to be pursued and solutions to be adopted. What is at stake here is the analysis of the ‘visual and spatial dimension of government’ (ibid. 41).
• the distinctive forms of ruling of a regime of government, that is its peculiar modes of ‘acting, intervening and directing’ that combine distinct practical rationalities, expertise and know-how and rely on ‘definite mechanisms, techniques and technologies’ (ibid. 33). The concern here is with those modes of operation of the means, mechanisms, technologies, procedures and vocabularies that define and limit the possibility of acting, thinking and being. The analysis aims at shedding light on how these modes of operation constitute authority and guarantee that rule is accomplished (ibid. 42). In this respect, it is important to distinguish between ‘techniques of government’ and ‘technologies of government’. Techniques of government are, in fact, those modes of intervention (e.g. systems of accounting, methods of the organisation of work, forms of surveillance, methods of timing and spacing of activities in particular locales, etc.) that are and can be assembled through particular governmental programmes in diverse ‘technologies of government’ (e.g. types of schooling, forms of administration and ‘corporate management’, systems of intervention into various organisations, and bodies of expertise) (Dean 1994: 187–88).
• identity formation, that is those ‘characteristic ways of forming subjects, selves, persons, actors or agents’ within a regime of government (Dean 2010: 42). The practices under investigation here are those that form the individual and collective identities assumed of those who exercise authority and are to be governed (in terms of forms of person, self and identity, related statuses, capacities, attributes and orientations, expected forms of conduct and set of duties and rights) through which government operates. In the examination of identity formation, a particular attention is directed to classificatory and grouping practices that ‘elicit, promote, facilitate, foster and attribute various capacities, qualities and statuses to particular agents’ and the ways in which capacities and attitudes can be and have to be fostered, duties enforced and rights ensured (ibid. 43–44).

Table 1.1 presents the four set of governmental practices that can be addressed as potential foci of a materialist analysis of regimes of government.

Table 1.1 Four modalities to interrogate regimes of government

The analytics of government	Focus	What is	What to look at
A materialist analysis of practices of government as assembling processes that involve multiple and heterogeneous elements that vary from routines, technologies, ways of doing things and agencies to theories, programmes, knowledge and expertise	Forms of rationality	The distinctive ways of thinking and questioning that mobilise specific ‘vocabularies and procedures for the production of truth’ in a regime of government	Thoughts, forms of knowledge, expertise, strategies, programmes and means of calculation that are employed in and inform the practices of government
	Fields of visibility	Ways of seeing and perceiving that are characteristic of a regime of government and are necessary to its operation	Models, tables, figures, charts, maps and graphs that are mobilised as ways for visualising fields to be governed
	Techne	Peculiar modes of acting, intervening and directing that combine distinct practical rationalities, expertise and know-how and rely on definite techniques and technologies in a regime of government	Techniques of government', conceptualised as modes of intervention (e.g. systems of accounting, methods of the organisation of work, forms of surveillance, methods of timing and spacing of activities) that are and can be assembled through particular governmental programmes in diverse technologies of government (e.g. types of schooling, systems of intervention into organisations).
	Identity formation	Characteristic ways of forming subjects, selves, persons, actors or agents' within a regime of government	The forms of person, self and identity presupposed by practices of government, the ‘statuses, capacities, attributes and orientations’ assumed of those who exercise authority and are to be governed, the expected forms of conduct and the set of duties and rights associated with those identities.

Source: Adapted from Dean 2010; Grimaldi and Barzanò 2014.

What emerges is a set of modalities to interrogate a regime of government, directing the analysis on how such a regime works in practice in the very production of truth, in the visualisation of a world made of entities and substances, in the production of an order and the creation of ethical subjects. It is an invitation to both rejecting any a priori distribution of knowledge, power and ethics, and assuming a dynamic perspective. This involves analysing government in terms of regularities and changes in its mundane functioning because of shifts and contingencies in the very processes of assembling of its constitutive heterogeneous entities.

There is of course a mutually constitutive relation between the subsets of governmental practices in each regime of government. Forms of rationality and fields of visibility represent the forms of knowing and visualising that inspire the activity of governing, make distinctive techniques and technologies possible and, at the same time, originate from them. They also establish and presuppose knowing and knowable subjects. Symmetrically, techniques and technologies of government operate through and mobilise rationalities, forms of knowledge and knowing, expertise, know-how, modes of representation and distinctive subjectivities in their design and operation. There is a mutually constitutive relation between the dimensions of government here, where techniques as modes of intervention and technologies as forms of ruling are essentially systems of relations connecting regimes of visibility and enunciability and things into actual practices of government. As such they have forms of rationality and field of visibility inscribed within them (think for instance of means of government such as statistical tables, graphs and reports that can be both analysed as intellectual technologies of government that render specific aspects of governed reality amenable to governing, but also knowable). Finally, practices of identity formation involve the enactment of forms of knowing/visualising and modes of ruling the conduct and, vice versa, this enactment is made possible through the establishment of knowing, seeing and acting subjects. This means that the option for one of these foci implies an ordering of concerns in the disentangling of the governmental assemblages, whereas the choice for the form of rationality, the fields of visibility, the forms of ruling or the processes of identity formation as entry-points implies inevitably the necessity to deal with all of them, their intertwining and their dynamics of mutual constitution.

Yet, opting for one of the four foci listed in Table 1.1 as entry-point means to locate at the centre of an exercise in the historical ontology of ourselves four ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Stephen J. Ball
• Introduction: Of other evaluations in education
• 1 Governmentality, evaluation and education: An archaeological gaze
• 2 Educational evaluation as an enunciative field
• 3 The epistemic space of educational evaluation
• 4 Living systems
• 5 Forms of production
• 6 Meanings
• 7 Educational evaluation and its epistemic and political paradoxes
• 8 Epistemological ruptures and the invention of other evaluations in education
• References
• Index