Conference Agenda

Our proposed symposium explores diversity as not a transcendental concept but something produced as a domain of knowledge articulated through educational practice and research, in the theories and daily language of education and its goals. Put differently, educational research is seen as part of producing and naturalizing particular kinds of knowledge and facts about the world and people. This process of valuation and naturalization, in Europe and beyond, entails that values, politics of knowledge, and the creation of diversities become invisible in this process (Latour, 1987, 1993).

Drawing on science and technology studies (Dussauge, Helgesson & Lee, 2015; Latour, 1987, Popkewitz, 2020; Sundström Sjödin, 2019), the papers of this symposium approach different layers of practices that explore how science becomes mode of reasoning about diversity and differences in children, teaching, and society. In particular we use literacy and Literature reading as examples for understanding how truths and facts about an educational content are created, valued and naturalized through its systems of knowledge. How do truths and facts about educational phenomena, content, teaching, and learning – once they are stabilized and naturalized – order, classify and differentiate people? (Latour, 1993; Hamilton, 2012).

The symposium specifically contributes with knowledge on how both the infrastructure and the social inscriptions of ‘numbers’ act as truth telling practices that generate notions of differences as diversity, and how the valuations generated in the sciences circulate in science based public and political debate (Popkewitz, 2022; Sundström Sjödin, 2019; see also Edwards, Ivanič, & Mannon, 2009; Graff, 2010; Hamilton, Maddox & Addey, 2015). Our shared focus is on how these numbers become entangled in processes of value-making about people and things, and how science operates phenomenally as a policy and pedagogical knowledge about what is “reasonable” (and not reasoned) people in the ordering of society. The valuations are in no way innocent. Productive in the governing of modernity, its modes of giving intelligibility to the self and others, and in how social commitments are enacted concretely in the discourses for political reforms and interventions with a direct impact on society and individuals (Popkewitz, 2022).

The symposium includes four papers commented by a discussant from the field. The papers take two different intersecting avenues. One is papers that historicize the notion of “truth” through examining how science performs agentially; that is, examining how the infrastructures of science generate patterns of recognition and expectations of experience by which “truth” is constituted through the rules and standards applied to the objects of reflection and action (Popkewitz, 2020). The other avenue highlight research–school–society interractions that enact certain values on educational content such as literacy and literature reading, which entails specific educational effects and diversities.

Reading is a political phenomenon of modernity. While reading as an idea of literacy in the European Middle Ages was to learn the gospel of God, literacy in the modern societies and school is for making of the earthly “self “ and the good life. The paper takes this historical interest to explore how science generates a reading about the “literate” self as a kind of person through the architectures and cartographies of research. The calculations of research are viewed as formed through grids of practices that generate principles for reading: how judgments are made, conclusions drawn, rectification proposed, and the fields of existence made manageable and predictable. The focus will be on research in teaching and teacher education in the making of the “literate” professional teacher . The empirical objects are different clusters of identified in biometric maps drawn from web-of sciences peer journals concerned with teacher education research between 2010-2022 (Lindblad et al, 2021). Three of seven cluster identifies are examined: - instructional strategies, student teachers, and pre-service teacher education research. The most cited papers in each of the clusters is textually analyzed. Methodologically, the paper explores the principles in research generated through: (1) the distinctions and classification of the kinds of people given as the “literate” professional; such as articulated as benchmarks and standards of professional competence; (2) the affect inscribed in the notions of the literate; that is, the images and narratives of the utopic kinds of people that research is to activate as having “the good life” as a teacher; (3) the comparative reason of research that inscribes and distributes differences of who is literate and is outside of its spaces of normalcy; and (4) the phantasmagrams; that is, how the infrastructues of science are, analogous to the 17th magic lanterns, projections of creative illusions that act as real and affective sites for acting in teacher education (Popkewitz, in press). The discussion is to understand science as an actor and agential in modernity; science as a reading of the self, literacy as a technology of the self and the other that paradoxically excludes and abjects in thrusts to include in contemporary research. The calculative reasoning of the research is political; performing as spaces of action through the mapping of people that occurs in policy making, educational reform and their practical knowledge.

Lindblad, S., Nelhans, S., Pettersson, P., Popkewitz, T., Samuelsson, K., Wärvik,, G-B., (2021) "On Knowledge Organization and Recognition of Research in and on Teacher Education: Views from above." In ECER conference, Geneva, online September 6-10, 2021. 2021. Popkewitz, T. (in press). Infrastructures and Phantasmagrams of Inclusions that Exclude: International Student Assessments. International Journal of Inclusive Education.

This study explores the ways in which literature reading is motivated as something valuable in the public discourse. We specifically focus on the research-society-school interactions that enable specific dominant interpretations of reading, readers and literature, while shadowing others. Historically, reading can be understood as an activity that holds society together as well as carrying important cultural knowledge, and reading has often been motivated by humanistic ideas and ideals of understanding various dimensions of being human. Rationales for literature reading are hence often attached to issues such as the development of common cultural and historical references (see for example; Graff, 2010; Smidt, 2016; Sundström Sjödin, 2019) and the acquisition of democratic skills (Langer, 2011; Nussbaum, 2003). In our study we investigate how societal institutions, public and media discourse, local practitioners and researchers reason and make arguments about the necessity of reading literature. In this we acknowledge a possible epistemic shift in the reasons and arguments put forward - from reading motivated by humanistic ideals into emphasizing the importance of reading with the use of ‘numbers’ aggregated through various measurements and quantifications. One example of such ‘numbers’ that circulate about reading are the amounts of words that seventeen-year-olds who read a lot are said to have (50 000 words), compared to those seventeen-year-olds who do not read a lot (15 000 words). These kinds of statements are rarely questioned and they disseminate into the societal discourse of reading, but where is this kind of truth-making and knowledge created, what kind of empirical data is used for such statements and based on what legitimacy do they act? In the study we have analysed material from sites in what we call “the Swedish reading-industrial complex” (Sundström Sjödin & Persson, forthcoming). We focus on actors that specifically and publicly define themselves as promoters of reading, both from sites with traditionally governing functions and from commercial and cultural actors. Although we draw on Swedish cases, and as such they are as most situated and sensible within its own context, it resonates well with a global tendency of quantification and measurement in education. Drawing on Science- and Technology Studies, we present actors that take part in the legitimation and valuation of reading, and we show in what ways and with help of what actors reading becomes naturalized as a societal problem that school is expected to solve.

Graff, H. J. (2010). The literacy myth at thirty. Journal of Social History, 43(3), 635–661. Langer, J. A. (2011). Envisioning literature: Literary understanding and literature instruction. New York: Teachers College Press. Nussbaum, M. (2003). Cultivating humanity: A classical defence of reform in liberal education. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Smidt, J. (2016). Framtidas skole - med litteraturen på mørkeloftet? In S. Gimnes (Ed.), Ad libitum. Festskrift til Gunnar Foss (pp. 243–259). Oslo: Novus forlag. Sundström Sjödin, Elin. (2019). Creating the valuable: Reading as a matter of health and successful parenthood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(1), 46–60. Sundström Sjödin, Elin. (2019). Where is the Critical in Literacy? Tracing performances of reading, readers and non-readers in educational practice, Örebro Studies in Education, 59, Örebro Studies in Educational Science with an emphasis on Didactics, 18.

The background of this paper is the interplay between science and society in the larger field of educational research on the educational agora (cf. Nowotny et. al., 2001). The specific aim of the paper is to map the field of reading and literacy research in order to find how science ‘act’ in creating phenomena as objects of truth (Lindblad, Pettersson and Popkewitz, 2018). The paper starts with a common hypothesis on that the research field under scrutiny previously was aligned to a reasoning on reading as a mean for the formation of the educated citizen into becoming a question of creating productive individuals for the development of economical and societal desires (cf. Tierney & Pearson, 2021). In performing this task, we therefore started out with a question on if we could see this change of values represented as a tradition of ‘Bildung’ transmogrified into the notion of ‘literacy’, and with that, if ‘numbers’, normally used and tabulated on within literacy research are becoming more important than ‘words’, normally used within reading research for making arguments on reading. Another way to state this observation is to ask when quantitively explanations became more important than qualitative explorations within this field of research, and in line with this – who are they addressing and based on what scientific traditions? To investigate this, the paper performs a systematic review for investigating changes, research fronts and geographies as well as different trajectories and scientific traditions over time (1980-2022). The research articles used (n: 750) are articles within a specific scientific journal (Journal of Reading Behaviour, renamed in 1996 as Journal of Literacy Research) that are peer-reviewed, written in English, and presented within the Web of Science. In mapping, coding and analyzing the articles, maps were constructed for investigating the reading and literacy research field over time with its changes, fronts, geographies, trajectories, and traditions. The result of the study shows how reading research and literacy research develops into distinct fields based on different research traditions but also how these traditions ‘speaks’ to the society in different ways; reading research more commonly address other researchers within the same field, while literacy research to a larger extent address actors outside of the scientific field, such as policymakers, stakeholders, and politicians.

Lindblad, S., Pettersson, D., & Popkewitz, T. (2018). Education By the Numbers and the Making of Society : The Expertise of International Assessments. New York: Routledge. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. & Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press. Tierney, R. J. & Pearson, P. D. (2021). A History of Literacy Education: Waves of Research and Practice. Teachers College Press.

Reading in France is an important issue for education politics. It sustains the Republican imaginary and truth related to the 3Rs which were at the foundation of the French common school. It gives rise to conservative visions and a Republican revivalism, as shown by the recent return of dictation in primary education proclaimed by the Minister himself. It serves also an emancipation project inherited from the Enlightenment that gives great importance to the transmission of basic knowledge to shape citizenship under an influent National Curriculum Council. In education policy, reading is at the core of national assessments, taking the PISA survey as a reference, and a component of the national basic skills framework (Normand, 2022). It corresponds to an epistemic governance (Alasuutari, Qadir, 2014) institutionalized in a National Scientific Council and a Ministerial knowledge center promoting evidence-based knowledge and truth in national conferences, as well as producing reports and designing best-practice guides for primary education teachers. The communication proposes to analyze this production of knowledge and truth on reading that involve different spokespersons and spaces of interest close to the Ministry of Education. These policy assemblages (Gorur,2011) legitimize and shape literacy standards at the crossroad of evidence-based education, experimental economics, neurosciences and metrics. By following this chain of translation, from the ministry to primary schools, it is possible to show how some statements and inscriptions serve an experimental policy that increasingly considers the classroom as a laboratory (Normand, 2016). In doing so, it assumes teaching as a clinic practice, diagnosing student skills and differentiating them according to their psychological pathologies and cognitive disabilities. Then, national assessments as metrics on student learning are used to stabilize classifications and benchmarks by the ministry, to blame and put pressure on the teaching force, and to legitimize an epistemic authority. These national metrics justify other standardized interventions and comparative reasoning from other data borrowed from meta-analyses, systematic review literature and international assessments (Popkewitz, 2022).

Alasuutari, P., & Qadir, A. (2014). Epistemic governance: An approach to the politics of policy-making. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 1(1), 67-84. Gorur, R. (2011). Policy as assemblage. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 611-622. Normand R. (2016) "‘What works?’: From health to education, the shaping of the European policy of evidence." In Trimmer K. (eds) Political pressures on educational and social research. London, Routledge, 2016. 25-40. Normand, R. (2022). PISA as epistemic governance within the European political arithmetic of inequalities: A sociological perspective illustrating the French case. In Critical Perspectives on PISA as a Means of Global Governance (pp. 48-69). London, Routledge. Popkewitz, T. (2022). Comparative reasoning, fabrication, and international education assessments: Desires about nations, society, and populations. International Journal of Educational Research, 1120. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2022.101940