Ian Cook

Manipulating the data: Teaching and NAPLAN in the control society

High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattaris ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new understandings of the ‘good teacher’. Media reports are used to look at how teachers are responding to the high-stakes database through manipulating the data. This article argues that manipulating the data is a regrettable, but logical, response to manifestations of teaching where only the data counts.

Education policy-making and time

This paper examines the global policy convergence toward high-stakes testing in schools and the use of test results to ‘steer at a distance’, particularly as it applies to policy-makers’ promise to improve teacher quality. Using Deleuze’s three syntheses of time in the context of the Australian policy blueprint Quality Education, this paper argues that using test scores to discipline teaching repeats the past habit of policy-making as continuing the problem of the unaccountable teacher. This results in local policy-making enfolding test scores in a pure past where the teacher-as-problem is resolved through the use of data from testing to deliver accountability and transparency. This use of the database returns a digitised form of inspection that is a repetition of the habit of teacher-as-problem. While dystopian possibilities are available through the database, in what Deleuze refers to as a control society, for us the challenge is to consider policy-making as a step into an unknown future, to engage with producing policy that is not grounded on the unconscious interiority of solving the teacher problem, but of imagining new ways of conceiving the relationship between policy-making and teaching.

Western heterosexual masculinity, anxiety, and web porn

This article is an examination of nine pornographic Web sites. Web porn is important because the Internet increases mens access to pornography. The pornography presented on these Web sites is first examined in terms of the way that it manifests important continuities with pornography delivered in other ways. Central to these continuities is the way that pornography manifests the anxiety that is here taken to be fundamental to the acquisition of Western heterosexual masculinity or male identity. An important difference, though, is that this anxiety appears more clearly manifested in these sites than it is elsewhere. In addition, however, these sites appear to intensify this anxiety by making it harder for men to prove that they are truly “man enough.”

The Logics of Good Teaching in an Audit Culture: A Deleuzian analysis

Abstract This article examines the attempted reform of education within an emerging audit culture in Australia that has led to the implementation of a high-stakes testing regime known as NAPLAN. NAPLAN represents a machine of auditing, which creates and accounts for data that are used to measure, amongst other things, good teaching. In particular, we address the logics of a policy intervention that aims to improve the quality of education through returning ‘good teaching’. Using Deleuze’s concepts of series, events, copies and simulacra, we suggest that an attempt to return past commonsense logics of ‘good teaching’ as a result of NAPLAN is not possible. In an audit culture as exemplified by NAPLAN, ‘good teaching’ is being reconceptualized through those practices and becomes unrecognizable. Whilst policy claims to improved equity and quality are admirable, this article suggests that the simulacral change to logics of good teaching may actualize something very different.

Becoming-topologies of education: deformations, networks and the database effect

This article uses topological approaches to suggest that education is becoming-topological. Analyses presented in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society are used to demonstrate the utility of topology for education. In particular, the article explains educations topological character through examining the global convergence of education policy, testing and the discursive ranking of systems, schools and individuals in the promise of reforming education through the proliferation of regimes of testing at local and global levels that constitute a new form of governance through data. In this conceptualisation of global education policy changes in the form and nature of testing combine with it the emergence of global policy network to change the nature of the local (national, regional, school and classroom) forces that operate through the ‘system’. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary effects, but in a different way. This new–old disciplinarity, or ‘database effect’, is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.

Contemporary politics in Australia : theories, practices and issues

Summary: Contemporary Politics in Australia provides a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the study of Australian politics. Written by a diverse range of experts, the book offers a comprehensive overview of current theories, debates and research in Australian political science and looks forward to new developments. It encompasses not only formal and institutionally based politics, but also the informal politics of everyday life, including the politics of Australian culture and media

Stare Decisis, Repetition and Understanding Common Law

The works of Michel Foucault have not, so far, been employed so as to enable an adequate understanding of the functioning of the law. This article begins to remedy this situation. Past uses of Foucault’s work have failed to provide a satisfactory account of the relationship between the juridical and the disciplinary aspects of ‘the law’ in general. The application of his ideas to the practice of the common law offers a way forward. In this article, we use Foucault’s ideas of discursive formations and discursive practices to understand the operation of the doctrine of stare decisis in the common law. It is uncontroversial to assert that the doctrine is difficult to define — this analysis demonstrates that this signifies its ‘always/already’ nature. The understanding applied here indicates that stare decisis is best seen as a set of discursive practices — the most significant of which relates to the repetition of past legal statements. The doctrine, as a result, is both fundamental to the operation of the common law as a discursive formation and constitutive of those who participate in, and perpetuate, it — the lawyers and judges.

Political Science and Environmental Sustainability, Responsible Citizenship and Corporate Social Responsibility

At its heart, politics addresses the perennial problem of maintaining social order, which it treats as the highest public good. Political scientists, then, study the processes that hold societies together. We assume that ES, RC and CSR represent putative public goods associated with maintaining social order and discuss problems related to their recognition and promotion in liberal-democracies. We argue that, though ES, RC and CSR are public goods, governments in liberal democracies cannot bring individuals and leaders of firms to pursue them. This results from basic principles of ordering in liberal democracies, which limit a government’s capacity to cause people and those responsible for firms to accept and pursue ES, RC and CSR.

On Not Mistaking Deleuze (With the Help of Some Buddhists)

In this chapter I identify two ways in which interpreters or followers of Deleuze mistake Deleuze’s ideas and one way in which Deleuze and Guattari mistake Deleuze. While this might have been conducted as something that can be handled purely within a Deleuzian frame of thought, I rely on important Buddhists texts to see how Buddhists seek to avoid such mistakes in their personal practices. I do so because Buddhists have been more concerned with personal practice, and the mistakings I discuss relate to problems with personal practice as much as they relate to understanding Deleuzian theory. This is why Buddhism proves useful, in that it is principally directed to self-conceptions and personal practice. My intention is not to belittle those whom I claim to have mistaken Deleuze, but to try to care for them: “The ultimate answer to neurotic dependencies on professionals is mutual self-care” (Seem 1983, p. xxii).

Contemporary Politics in Australia: Politics in Everyday Australian Life

Summary: Contemporary Politics in Australia provides a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the study of Australian politics. Written by a diverse range of experts, the book offers a comprehensive overview of current theories, debates and research in Australian political science and looks forward to new developments. It encompasses not only formal and institutionally based politics, but also the informal politics of everyday life, including the politics of Australian culture and media