Melody Viczko

The enactment of professional learning policies: performativity and multiple ontologies

While teacher learning has become a locus of school reform across many international settings, there is relatively little examination of the idiosyncratic ways in which policy discourses on teacher learning are enacted in schools. In this paper, we aim to investigate how these policy discourses are translated and configured into practices and thus, enacted into concrete realities. Using the conceptual notion of multiple ontologies, we argue that teacher learning is actualized in a multiplicity of socio-material entanglements, not as a single reality, but as a multiplicity of realities that coexist, simultaneously, in the mesh of assemblages that we call “school.” In this study, we describe and trace how particular socio-material configurations of teacher learning produce concrete realities of practice that mobilize and generate specific networked effects. We conclude that the postulation of multiple ontologies of teacher learning prompts a shift in how policy makers could conceive of and develop strategies aimed at transforming teaching practices.

A Rich Seam: How New Pedagogies Find Deep Learning, by Michael Fullan and Maria Langworthy

The prevalence of technology in educational reform is a contentious issue in school systems across the globe. How might challenges emerging from the entanglement of education with technology be lev...

Assemblage, enactment and agency: educational policy perspectives

The idea for this special issue emerged after a panel held at the 7th International Conference on Interpretive Policy Analysis in 2012 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Our goal for the panel was to bring together recent work around the notions of assemblage, enactment and agency in educational policy analysis, with particular attention to issues of subjectivity, practice, power, and relationality. After the conference, we invited other papers to form a special issue on these topics. The collection of papers in this issue aims to explore the emerging shift in policy research towards analyses embracing the notion of policy enactment, and specifically, theorizations that attend to the:

Conclusion: Reflections on Assemblage in the Governance of Higher Education

The chapters in this book provide a rich enquiry into the way higher education comes to be assembled amid contemporary pressures and reforms as education is entwined with public sector reforms and private interests. The organizing concept of assemblage that framed this book beckons a relational approach to thinking about the leadership and governance of higher education institutions in this context. Relational analysis in policy and governance studies has been articulated to move beyond the prevalent notion of the static institution in both research and practical terms. Theoretical and methodological insights are shifting the ways we think about governance, such as those offered through strategic-relational approaches (Jessop 2004) and approaches showing how policy creates links between agents, institutions, technologies and discourses (Shore and Wright 2011). In the study of higher education, a relational approach helps us to see how policies co-exist, suggesting gaps in our understanding of policy when we consider individual political actors (Shultz and Viczko 2012; Viczko and Tascon 2016).

Global Social Justice, Democracy and Leadership of Higher Education: An Introduction

As higher education institutions (HEIs) are faced with increasing pressures to restructure and change their organization in line with global institutional demands, the foundational assumptions on which their leadership and governance are based are called into question. The basis of this book initiates from an assumption about an inherent democratic nature of higher education governance, whereby those who practise in HEI institutions are involved in deciding, as well as questioning, the ways in which the foundations of higher education are materialized through reform processes. Much leadership literature is focused on building a corporate university that is able to respond to market principles, economic ideology driven policies and practices, alliances with big business and industry, and strategies to internationalize for increased revenue. We take a critical approach to understanding higher education leadership and governance within this global context. The overarching questions asked in this book are: how has higher education come to be assembled in contemporary governance practices within the context of global demands for reform; and how are issues of justice being taken up as part of, and in resistance to, this assemblage?

The Sisterhood is Watching: Challenging Identity and Agency in Citizenship

“The Garneau Sisterhood is watching”, warns an impromptu poster in the Garneau community, following a police warning for women to take safety precautions subsequent to announcements of a serial rapist in the area. In this context, tensions exist between the individual, the state and the collective. In this interpretivist study, we invoke the lens of feminist theory to examine the relationship between identity and agency in a collective conceptualization of the citizen. Through content analysis of a sampling of public media, we present the case of the Garneau Sisterhood to consider the relationship between collective identity and agency in challenging the constraints of individualist notions of citizenship. Finally, we argue that feminist citizenship education is needed to engage the notion of collective identity and agency as a source of empowerment for students, and other citizens, to raise issues of importance in the public sphere.