Carlijne Ceulemans

Professional standards for teachers : how do they 'work'? An experiment in tracing standardisation in-the-making in teacher education

During the last two decades, professional standards describing competencies for teaching staff have emerged in nation states all around the world. This article reports on a pilot-study that applies a sociotechnological ‘lens’ to examine this standardisation process in educational policy. In line with ethnographic analyses drawing on science and technology studies and actor-network theory, the authors present a case study of teacher education in Flanders to demonstrate empirically how professional standards for teachers are being translated in (material) reality. First, we show where the Flemish professional profile and the core competencies of the teacher are being inscribed in teacher education. Second, we register how they gather an assembly of people, documents, procedures, instruments, etc. into specific types of stable and self-evident practice, and, third, we describe who and what is therefore set in motion. By displaying where the core competencies of the teacher function as ‘obligatory points of passage’, we make visible how their activity intensifies the standardisation network. This indicates, then, how the presence of professional standards in education is being stabilised or ‘black boxed’. Thus, our analysis traces the role played (or the type of work done) by professional teaching standards.

Schools in the Making: Mapping Digital Spaces of Evidence.

In this article, the focus is on educational governing in the making. Drawing on conceptual underpinnings of socio-technical approaches, this implies an interest both on the way in which a sound knowledge base for policy measures is created, as on the distribution of that knowledge through publically available instruments. Governing by evidence only is possible when it relies on concrete instruments, such as feedback reports, publically consultable audits and examples of good practice. Since knowledge-related practices increasingly make use of online tools where knowledge is accessible for each and all, three websites are analysed in a particular way to describe the making of evidence. First, considered as active devices, the websites are analysed as essential components of the governing by evidence: by publishing specific data and information in a particular way, they come to constitute what comes to count as evidence and the way in which it comes to count. By addressing their visitors in a particular way, moreover, they constitute for whom it comes to count as evidence. As such, we argue, it becomes visible that digital spaces of evidence actually make schools real, and, at once, that there are different modes for schools to exist.

What - If Anything - Do Standards Do in Education? Topological Registrations of Standardising Work in Teacher Education

This article takes a particular interest in the doings of educational standards. Accordingly, it does not discuss the contents, objectives or various states of implementation of educational standards. Rather, it follows a strange and peculiar thing and traces how it gets to work in localised practices. Building on Bruno Latours exercises of socio-technical analysis, various modes to register and describe these practices are being put to the test. In so doing, the aim is to gather pieces of evidence on how standardising takes shape and what sorts of workings it generates. Undertaking such socio-technical exercises, this research argues, offers an entry point to readdress the ubiquity of educational standards today.