Conference Agenda

In many European and OECD contexts, teaching is no longer understood solely as a pedagogical activity but as a regulated profession shaped by legal frameworks, career structures, and governance reforms aimed at enhancing quality and accountability (OECD, 2019; OECD, 2020). Beyond transmitting curriculum content, teachers are expected to create effective learning environments, guide students toward educational goals, and exercise specialised professional expertise (Başaran, 1993). Extensive research has demonstrated that teacher quality is among the most influential school-based factors affecting student learning and achievement, leading many countries to reorient education policies around the central role of teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2017). As a result, teacher-centred reform agendas increasingly focus on defining the desired teacher profile and restructuring systems of teacher education, recruitment, induction, and continuing professional development (OECD, 2019).
Within this global policy context, the legal regulation of the teaching profession has emerged as a key mechanism for defining professional status, rights, responsibilities, and professional standards. Across Europe and beyond, dedicated legislative frameworks distinguish teaching from general education law and formalise it as a profession requiring specialised expertise (Dönmez Yapucuoğlu & Eryılmaz Ballı, 2022). For example, in Germany, teaching is regulated through state-based public service arrangements that secure employment protections and professional status through constitutional principles (KMK, 2018). Similarly, in Singapore, a centrally governed system links career structures, performance evaluation, and continuous professional development within a coherent legal and institutional framework (Tan, 2017). These cases illustrate a broader trend toward professionalisation through legislation and governance reforms.
This development is closely connected to European debates on teacher professionalism, career pathways, and the governance of professional learning, where issues of status, autonomy, accountability, and working conditions remain highly contested (Monteiro, 2015; OECD, 2020). Although Türkiye is not an EU member state, its education policies are closely aligned with European and OECD policy discourses. In this sense, Türkiye’s recent legal reforms provide a valuable case for examining how professionalisation policies are translated and recontextualised within different national and institutional settings.
In Türkiye, despite repeated education reforms, a comprehensive legal framework addressing teachers’ professional status, rights, and obligations remained limited for many years. An initial attempt was made in 2005 through the Regulation on Promotion in Teaching Career Steps, which introduced career stages (teacher, expert teacher, head teacher) with the aim of supporting professional development and ensuring equal opportunity (Regulation on Promotion in Teaching Career Steps, 2005). However, this arrangement could not be fully implemented due to legal challenges and criticisms related to merit and fairness (Lammich, 2024). Against this background, the Teaching Profession Law was enacted in 2022 (Law No. 7354) and revised in 2024 (Law No. 7528). The revised law seeks to strengthen professional identity by providing a statutory framework, maintaining career steps, and reorganising professional development and employment structures, including the establishment of the National Education Academy (Başol, 2024).
This study explores how key education stakeholders in Ankara—teachers, school administators, and union representatives—interpret and evaluate the revised Teaching Profession Law (No. 7528), focusing on its perceived implications for professional development, rights and entitlements, workplace safety, school-based relations, and the governance of teacher education and recruitment.

Since the turn of the millennium, PISA results have occupied a central position in political discourse across OECD nations, serving as a primary benchmark for evaluating educational quality and equality (Mertanen and Brunila 2024). These results provide a foundational basis for justifying various educational policy decisions (Bacchi, 2012). Previous research has analysed PISA testing both globally (Baroutsis and Lingard 2017, Hansen, Wallenius et al. 2020, Santos, Carvalho et al. 2022) and within the Finnish educational landscape (Säntti, Hansen et al. 2021), this article specifically investigates how Members of Parliament leverage PISA results to articulate and legitimize their policy positions.

The primary analytical framework for this research is Kenneth Burke’s (1969) dramatistic pentad, which conceptualizes linguistic action and rhetorical choices as dramatic instruments comprising five key elements: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. By deconstructing political discourse into these categories, the analysis reveals the underlying structures through which speakers seek to legitimize their perspectives in debate. Furthermore, this article aims to delineate the rhetorical mechanisms of guilt and scapegoating.

The analysis demonstrates that different political parties and ideological leanings are associated with distinct dramatistic configurations; some emphasize structural contexts and systemic constraints, while others prioritize individual responsibility and accountability. Consequently, actors perceived as heroes from one perspective are frequently framed as villains from another. Ultimately, these configurations serve to mobilize specific normative evaluations and policy priorities, thereby revealing implicit assumptions regarding the fundamental purposes of education.

Technology has evolved from being a marginal consideration to a key central strategy in shaping UNESCO’s approach to fulfilling its global education mandate. What began as a focus on ICTs to support access and capacity-building, has gradually expanded into a broader digital transformation agenda encompassing platforms, data infrastructures, and multistakeholder partnerships with global technology corporations (Giannini, 2022). This reorientation has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which UNESCO (2023; 2025) has repeatedly framed as an inflection point; one that exposed long-standing systemic fragilities while simultaneously opening new possibilities for reimagining how education systems are governed and made resilient. Within this context, digital technologies are increasingly positioned not as temporary solutions to crisis, but as foundational conditions for long-term system reform. These imaginaries articulate a broader vision in which social and technological transformations are co-produced, yet they also raise critical questions about the politics, priorities, and power relations embedded in this reorientation (Elfert & Yseden, 2023; Gorur, Seller & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019). This complexity underscores the need for a more critical, nuanced approach to understand the integration of technology into global education reforms.

This PhD study examines how UNESCO’s sociotechnical imaginaries of digital education are evolving through its entanglements with big tech actors, and how these imaginaries are reshaping its approaches to global education reform under conditions of crisis and uncertainty. It focuses on two post-pandemic UNESCO initiatives- the Global Education Coalition (GEC) and the Digital Transformation Collaborative (DTC). They were Initially established as emergency responses to widespread educational disruption in 2020 and have since stabilised into a more long-term arrangement. The GEC and DTC bring together more than 200 members, including international organisations, civil society actors, global technology corporations, and government bodies. Together, they provide critical sites for examining how digital education futures are assembled through complex interactions of policies and partnerships. The research addresses two key questions: (1) How are UNESCO’s sociotechnical imaginaries of digital education evolving through its partnerships with big tech actors, and in what ways are these imaginaries reconfiguring global education reform? (2) How are new roles, competing visions, and priorities negotiated within these multistakeholder assemblages?

The study approaches the UNESCO-initiatives as sociotechnical assemblages through which particular visions of education, and its governance are articulated and operationalised. It draws from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to frame its theoretical background and mobilises key concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries, infrastructures and assemblages. The study seeks to contend that UNESCO’s education reforms, aligned towards digitalisation, are not merely reflecting pre-existing visions of an equitable and accessible quality education, but are also actively materialising desirable education futures. As such, this research study locates digital education beyond a set of tools, practices and policies. It views digital education as dynamic sociotechnical imaginaries, which get assembled, contested, and performed across scales and sites. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries as defined by Jasanoff (2015, p.6) refers to “collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures”. These imaginaries, hence, are not simple narratives or visions. They are world-making forces which evolve as materialisations within infrastructures, policy-enactments, and get legitimised through institutional relationships (Furlong, 2014; Star & Bowker, 1999). UNESCO’s entanglements with big tech thus become reflective of how these imaginaries travel, morph and assemble in diverse contexts. This framing further implies that neither technology nor policy can be fully understood in isolation from the discourses, practices, and infrastructures that sustain them. In the context of this study, such a perspective is critical for analysing how UNESCO and its big tech partners configure digital futures through sociotechnical imaginaries that travel across borders and are locally contested.

School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms, inspired by New Public Management, grant schools autonomy in exchange for centralized performance monitoring (Tröhler et al., 2014). While sharing common principles, these reforms display significant variations in their institutional design, policy instruments, and modes of legitimation. The literature distinguishes “high-stakes” accountability models, found mainly but not exclusively in Anglo-Saxon contexts, from “soft accountability” or “low-stakes” approaches relying on negotiated instruments, procedural regulation, and discursive alignment rather than direct sanctions (Maroy & Voisin, 2014; Verger et al., 2019).

Historically characterized by a “quasi-market” and “freedom of education” (Maroy & Dupriez, 2000; Maroy, 2004), the education system in French-speaking Belgium is undergoing a major shift. Initiated by the 2017 the “Pacte pour un Enseignement d’excellence”, a new governance model introduces a suite of instruments rooted in accountability, notably the steering plan (plan de pilotage) (Renard & Demeuse, 2017). Since 2019, every school is required to design a six-year strategic plan, translating central system-level goals, “Objectifs d'Amélioration du Système Éducatif” (OASE), into local actions adapted to their specific context. Once validated by administrative officials known as “Délégués aux contrats d'objectifs”, these plans become objectives contracts (contracts d’objectifs). Fundamentally, this framework creates a dual dynamic : schools are expected to use their autonomy to make their own diagnosis, choose strategies and actions to be implemented to contribute to the system improvement goals set at the central level, while the central authority exercises greater control over the achievement of results (Renard & Demeuse, 2017; Souto Lopez, 2022).

This new accountability policy places the steering plan at its core, marking a shift in the governance of the educational system that merits close examination. This contribution specifically investigates the narratives surrounding the instrument, aiming to deconstruct its political formulation and the justifications that underpinned its acceptance.

Guided by a specific set of inquiries, we examine:

1. How was the steering plan introduced and promoted? What potentialities and/or limits were identified by key stakeholders involved in the policy process leading to the adoption of this policy?
2. Did this instrument generate tensions or negotiations? How was a consensus ultimately achieved, and what specific compromises regarding the nature of the "contract" were required to secure its adoption?
3. Were there other instruments defended and discarded, and why?

To address these questions, we mobilized a sociology of policy instrumentation (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2004, 2007) combined with a policy narratives analysis (Radaelli, 2000; Stone, 2012). Following Lascoumes and Le Galès (2004, 2007), we consider instruments as socio-technical arrangements that materialize specific representations of public problems and organize power relations between governing authorities and policy recipients. This instrumental perspective is articulated with a policy narratives analysis. Drawing on Stone’s (2012) concept of “causal stories”, we argue that policy narratives participate in the construction of the “policy problem”, its causes and legitimising specifics solutions such as the steering plan.

In this contribution, we stress the policy narratives that have been produced during the policy process leading to the adoption of the steering plan. We highlight how a consensus emerged around this instrument that can be seen as instrumental for regulating the functioning of schools and as a key feature of the new accountability policy promoted in French-speaking Belgium. We examine the properties, limits, and potentialities attributed to it by different stakeholders during the policy process. We thus show that the consensus built around this instrument relies on its interpretive flexibility. We stress that the plasticity of the instrument enabled it to be framed simultaneously as a tool for “soft accountability” and a lever for “professional empowerment” thereby helping to build a consensus among stakeholders that enabled its adoption.