Policy enactment, context and performativity: ontological politics and researching Australian National Partnership policies

Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of education policy Vol. 29; no. 6; pp. 826 - 844
Main Authors Singh, Parlo, Heimans, Stephen, Glasswell, Kathryn
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 01.01.2014
Subjects
Accountability
Australia
Case Studies
Community
Context Effect
Education reform
Educational Policy
Educational Research
Foreign Countries
Government
ontological politics
Ontology
partnership policies
Partnerships in Education
performativity
policy contexts
policy enactment
Policy Formation
Public-private partnership
Students
Teachers
Australia
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Summary:Recently, critical policy scholars have used the concepts of enactment, context and performativity as an analytic toolkit to illuminate the complex processes of the policy cycle, in particular, the ways in which a multitude of official education reform policies are taken up, challenged and/or resisted by actors in local, situation-specific practices. This set of theoretical tools are usually deployed to analyse interview data collected from a single school or cluster of schools to draw findings or conclusions about the complex processes of policy enactment. We aim to build on this critical policy studies work by, firstly, highlighting key aspects of these theoretical/methodological constructs, secondly, exploring the performative role of research in the materiality of specific contexts and, thirdly, theorising education policy research in terms of ontological politics. We ground this work in a recent collaborative enquiry research project undertaken in Queensland, Australia. This research project emerged in the Australian policy context of National Partnership Agreement policies which were designed to reform public or government-funded schools servicing low socio-economic communities, in order to improve student learning outcomes, specifically in literacy and numeracy as measured by high-stakes national testing.
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ISSN:0268-0939
1464-5106
DOI:10.1080/02680939.2014.891763