Introduction

The 21st century is intensifying policy formations that involve movement and interconnectivity. These formations are created through transnational migration, climate impacts, new forms of digital data movement and infrastructure, and the continuing development of networked governance. Indeed, policy making can now be said to increasingly stretch beyond, overflow and flatten the territorial borders of the traditional Westphalian nation state. The presence of the new policy formations, and the processes by which they are developed and disseminated suggest that policy research now requires novel conceptualizations and methodologies that can adequately attend to these emerging phenomena and that can provide both descriptive and analytical power.

In this chapter, we focus on policy mobilities as a broad term that captures work identifying and conceptualizing how policy moves through multiple and diffuse means, including nonscalar modalities. Policy mobilities work evolved a decade or so ago, connected to scholarship in urban, economic and critical geography (Peck and Theodore, 2010; McCann, 2011; Cochrane and Ward, 2012; Baker and Temenos, 2015), as well as the broader “mobility turn” in sociology (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). Mobility concepts posit that social formations are in constant movement and mutation rather than being static and immutable (Cresswell, 2006; Gulson and Symes, 2017), and can be distinguished from previous cross- disciplinary scholarship that focused on policy transfer and diffusion models (for example, Meyer, 1971; Ramirez, 2012). Such approaches sought to downplay the political, social and economic influences of specific national and local contexts in favor of a policy isomorphism deemed to be shaped by the increasing demands of an imagined world society (Carney et al, 2012). Policy mobilities are related to but distinct from political science notions of policy diffusion, for example, via modalities such as borrowing from other nation states.

Mobility studies developed in relation to increased globalization and a more relational orientation to space, which understood geographical scale (for example, the nation state and the subnational) as socially constructed rather than inherent and immutable (Amin, 2002). A policy focus within the mobility turn was explored initially by human geographers, who were suspicious of essentializing the national as the ultimate a priori reference point in discussions of policy transfer and diffusion.

Historically, there is nothing new about the movement of policy ideas and ideologies across national borders and systems of education. Indeed, the basic architecture of colonialism was only sustainable through the movement of policy ideas and ideologies, with directives coming from the metropole on how systems of education should be developed and managed to cultivate compliant colonial subjects. At the same time, some ideas and innovations of policy and practice in the colonies made their way back to the metropole, though they became authoritative only with the metropole's imprimatur. Similarly, the Catholic Church has long acted as a supranational organization, seeking to implement its policies and practices through its systems of Catholic schools and universities around the world.

During most of the 20th century, educational policies continued to move from the West to the Rest, shaping the policy priorities of educational systems everywhere, based on the assumptions of the inherent superiority of the Anglo- American norms. These assumptions were legitimized through the invocation of such ideologies as modernization, industrialization and, more recently, globalization. As new nations came into existence, they continued to subscribe to these ideologies. Their reliance on overseas aid, technical expertise and other resources they needed to forge their own systems of educational governance invariably meant adopting ideas that were developed elsewhere. Moreover, the idea of “educational development” in the image of the West played a key role in constituting and defining “new” nations and their perspectives on education.

However, as reliant as the newly independent nations were on policies designed elsewhere, there were always “slippages” in the implementation processes, between the grand designs and the practices on the ground. A great deal of literature has pointed to the unintended consequences of policies unsuited to local conditions, disconnected from local traditions and often oblivious or insensitive to local resistance. Implementation processes have clearly been shown to be a great deal more complex than expected, demonstrating the limits of technicism and instrumental rationality in a field of practice as contingent and complicated as education. Policies, it is now widely recognized, cannot be implemented by edict and instructions alone.

Introduction: the Programme for International Student Achievement and East Asia

The rise of large- scale assessments (LSAs) has created a new context of education policy making. High- achieving countries and economies in those assessments are now recognized as reference societies, a key point of reference for domestic policy discussion in many countries. The Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD)'s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been instrumental in “challenging historically based reference societies for many nations in respect of schooling systems” (Lingard and Rawolle, 2011, p 492; Sellar and Lingard, 2013). The recent international attention given to Finland, Shanghai and Singapore is one such example, where a country and a city, known for its educational commitment in its own regional context, suddenly became the “mecca” for education policy makers and researchers around the world.

Most notable among those that are now acting as new reference societies – particularly for observers in Anglo- American countries – are East Asia countries and economies that topped the recent PISA rankings. Traditionally, East Asia has rarely been a popular source of education policy ideas on a global scale. According to Japanese and East Asian education specialist William Cummings, any call to learn from East Asia meets “the vehement defensiveness of Western educators and researchers” and results from “anxieties around their assumptions (about education) … being challenged and even threatened by the often contrasting eastern Asian approach” (Cummings, 1997, p 291). The defensiveness is underpinned by the widely held dismissive view of East Asian society and education: East Asia is authoritarian, the central government dictates what is to be taught and teachers dominate classroom discourse. Students study under enormous parental and societal pressure for academic competition and success, and engage in factual recall and rote learning. As a result, though they achieve well in standardized assessments, including international testing, they lose joy in learning and are weak in creativity, critical and independent thinking, and problem- solving skills (Takayama, 2017).

Introduction

Policy movement is a multidimensional concept which covers various study areas in comparative and international education such as global education policy (see Edwards, 2021) and policy transfer (see Beech, 2006; Perry and Tor, 2008). Scholars studying global education policies often focus on the role and labor of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) – such as the Organisation of Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – to explain the manifold interplay between global educational discourse and national policy making (for example, Kallo and Rinne, 2006; Beech, 2009; Grek, 2009; Lingard and Sellar, 2014). Research on the reception side of global education policies sheds light on the divergence of local responses, drawing on the body of literature on policy transfer (for example, Steiner- Khamsi and Waldow, 2012). Approaches that acknowledge divergence in the nature of policy transfer explore how external policy ideas and models are recaptioned, resisted, recontextualized and internalized by local power politics or culture (Anderson- Levitt, 2003; Phillips and Ochs, 2004; Steiner- Khamsi and Waldow, 2012). While global education policies are extensively studied in the field, the abstract notion of the “global” is often used without a critical discussion on what the “global” actually is and how it is made. These are the issues that this chapter primarily aims to address by making a contribution to policy movement research.

Besides the notion of the “global,” this chapter challenges the hierarchal, static and binary conception of global/ local. Studies are often built on the tenet that IGOs play the key role in identifying, developing and disseminating certain education policies to the “local” level, which is customarily interpreted as a country or a subnational unit (see for example, Kallo and Rinne, 2006; Beech, 2009). The divergence approach does not perceive local recipients as passive emulators, but nevertheless retains and reproduces binaries such as convergent/ divergent, global/ local and real/ imagined (Silova et al, 2020). Such dichotomies may narrow down or already prescribe our understanding of policy movement, perceiving, for instance, the global as an entity of “the abstract, the ubiquitous, something out there, out of control and inevitable” (Beech and Artopoulos, 2021, p 435; see also Larsen and Beech, 2014).

Introduction

Over the last decade, dual training (DT) has progressively consolidated its status as a global or travelling policy idea. Born in German- speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), the DT model combines a strong component of school- based education with highly regulated work- based training. This specific approach to Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) appears to generate interest among a growing number of countries, which perceive it as an effective remedy against youth employment challenges and poor economic competitiveness (Euler, 2015). Gonon describes DT as an “export hit” (2014, p 242), noting that it is in growing demand not only on the part of Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) countries, but also within the developing world.

The idiosyncrasy of the German dual system and the challenges encountered by its international transfer have sparked considerable debate within practitioner and academic circles alike. Comparative literature has extensively discussed the institutional foundations of the model as originated in German countries, raising attention on the difficulty of adapting such policy to other settings (for example, Valiente and Scandurra, 2017; Gonon, 2014; Pilz, 2017; Li and Pilz, 2023). Evaluation reports commissioned by government and cooperation agencies have similarly emphasized the challenges posed by the implementation of such policies in contexts with economic and education structures that differ sharply from those of Germanic countries (for example, Maurer et al, 2012; Stockman and Silvestrini, 2012).

However, much less has been said about the very origins of DT as a global policy – that is, a portable or mobile policy, ready to be exported to contexts other than the Germanic countries of origin. While there is growing understanding on why recipient countries might be interested in DT, there is less clarity on how this policy idea acquired global currency – that is, how it was put into circulation and articulated theoretically.

To be sure, there is some consensus on the fact that the spread of DT owes much to the cooperation and internationalization efforts made by German-speaking countries, and by Germany in particular. Germanic donors have been longstanding supporters of TVET as a key area in cooperation efforts, and Germany was the top Development Assistance Committee bilateral donor in the area of vocational training during the 2016–2019 period in terms of ODA disbursements (OECD, 2021).

Introduction: theorizing temporal dimension of policy diffusion in comparative and international education

In this chapter, I trace particular instantiations of the temporal regime of Western modernity with its colonial aspirations in the secular historiography of higher education in Turkey, more specifically in the juxtaposition of the history of madrasas, Islamic institutions of higher learning, and the history modern universities in Turkey. My starting point is to focus on the conditions that make it possible for secular historians to be able to conceptually juxtapose two institutions that have historically belonged to two different discursive systems, temporal regimes and institutional traditions – with one such system being the madrasa, which focused particularly on the teaching of Islamic sciences and law, while another system, the modern university, is a product of unique historical conditions in the West responding to different material, epistemic, political and moral problems. I explore the legacy of colonial time in the secular historiography of the madrasa and the modern university in Turkey with particular attention to how secular historians narrated attempts in policy and institutional borrowing of scientific ideas and higher education institutions in the 19th- century Ottoman Empire. In the last section of the chapter, I pragmatically engage with recent revisionist historiography of the madrasa and modern higher education institutions to trace multiple temporalities in the 19th- century events related to transferring and translating higher education in the Ottoman Empire when the Empire encountered the encroachment of Western modernity.

Theorizing temporal dimensions of educational policy and discourse mobilities remains a conundrum as well as an understudied object of inquiry in comparative education and its various theoretical and methodological trajectories in last half- century. In her 2010 presidential address for the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), Gita Steiner- Khamsi rightly put it that there is “an overemphasis on the spatial dimension of policy borrowing and lending” as the majority of studies in the field attempt “to trace and record the direction and destinations covered by a traveling reform” (Steiner- Khamsi, 2010, p 333; see also Lingard, 2021; Rappleye and Komatsu, 2016). In other words, studies attempt to explicate the horizontal dissemination of educational policies and discourses – from one geopolitical context to another on a similar scale.

Introduction: the global dissemination of accountability reforms

In recent decades, as a result of globalization processes, most countries around the world are facing an imperative for policy change. Globalization has deepened the international flows of capital, technologies and individuals, as well as of information and political agendas. As a result, a Global Education Policy (GEP) field has emerged, and educational policies and the role of governments have been simultaneously rescaled (that is, government authority and political legitimacy have been progressively located at the global scale) and transnationalized (that is, political power has been increasingly flowing from nation states’ arenas to global ones; see Lingard and Rawolle [2011]). However, the increasing importance of global actors and scales of governance does not mean that the state has a secondary role in the context of this global field (Edwards et al, 2022). Instead, we witness the transformation of the main features, functions and modes of operation of the state regarding the government of public sectors, such as education systems.

In line with such transformations, many public administrations and education systems worldwide are experiencing profound reforms inspired by the core principles of New Public Management (NPM), which aim at debureaucratizing and “modernizing” state apparatuses, as well as seeking more efficiency, quality and efficacy of public services (Hood, 1991; Ball and Youdell, 2008; Pal, 2012; see also Wilkins et al, Chapter 11 in this volume). Accordingly, many educational systems are promoting school autonomy with accountability reforms, operationalized with the use of Large- Scale Assessments (LSAs) for accountability purposes. Reforms with these characteristics have been termed Performance- Based Accountability (PBA) policies (Verger et al, 2019).

The theory of change for accountability reforms is based on the tension between school- level autonomy and centralized administrative control at a distance, often through testing instruments, with several incentives attached to them, ranging from reputational to financial ones. These reforms are expected to generate a virtuous cycle of innovation and educational enhancement due to the capacity and autonomy of schools to respond to their contextual needs and to use the data provided by tests to implement improvement measures.

Introduction

This chapter makes an intervention in the literature on knowledge mobilization and global education policy by presenting a novel approach to studying policy movement. The central purpose of this approach – labeled bibliographic ethnography – is to highlight the work that bibliographic references do in the context of academic and organizational texts, while also keeping one eye on the larger implications of the productive nature of such citations beyond the limits of the text itself. The approach brings an ethnographic sensitivity to the analysis of the role that citations play in the sense that it asks: what kinds of statements or claims are enabled in the context of academic and organizational texts by the invocation of a given reference? As will be explained, this analysis is then placed within a second level of reflection where the researcher assesses the work of citations in relation to the dominant features of the sociohistorical and political- economic context. The method we suggest breaks with the internalist reading of texts – in our case, scientific research and organizational publications on global education policy – thus enabling us to critically analyze the structures and practices that grant authority to particular kinds of research in the first place. Analysis of this kind necessarily has a political dimension, because the underlying phenomenon itself is political. That is, the issue of who to cite and how to interpret and instrumentalize existing research has political implications, even when authors do not have open political intentions with their research.

Because the method being proposed here represents an innovation, the purpose of the present chapter is not only to describe what this method entails, but also to clarify the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands, which are based on linguistic anthropology and Bourdieu's work on language. The chapter then demonstrates the kinds of insights related to policy movement that can be produced through bibliographic ethnography. It does so by sharing an example of how this approach has been applied previously to one global education policy in particular, namely, the policy for charter schools that emerged in Colombia in 1999 and has subsequently been widely cited and promoted.

Introduction

This edited volume contributes to the literature on global education policy by bringing together, extending and problematizing different theoretical and methodological approaches to policy movement. A variety of concepts – including policy transfer, borrowing, lending, travelling, diffusion, dissemination and mobility – have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across territories, jurisdictions, scales and organizations. A central premise of this volume is that these various concepts align with different theoretical traditions, which can have conflicting epistemological and ontological orientations that are important to examine and understand. We employ the term “policy movement” as an umbrella term that encompasses this range of concepts and associated research approaches.

The literature on policy movement has increased exponentially and has evolved in recent decades in parallel to the global intensification of education policy circulation (Dale and Robertson, 2012). Historically, the policy transfer and diffusion literatures focused on policy moves between governments (for example, from government A to government B) and, later, between international organizations (IOs) and governments (for example, from IO1 to governments A, C and F). However, with digitalization processes and the expansion and multiplication of policy networks, policy relationships have become increasingly reticular and multidirectional, and constantly feed new policy cycles. The growing role of nonstate actors in education governance has accelerated this interactivity, with academic institutions, philanthropic foundations, civil society and corporations influencing policy formation and its movement. As a result, understandings of the classical mechanisms of policy transfer (for example, emulation, competition, learning and coercion) have evolved to account for other modes of global policy making and pathways of influence (Blatter et al, 2022). As one example, policy transfer scholarship has begun to focus in a more nuanced way on the role of IOs, finding that they are more than triggers of classical transfer mechanisms. Their role in global governance is increasingly subtle, materializing in less frequently examined activities such as framing the terms of policy debates; the provision of technical assistance; the facilitation of study tours to learn about policies; and the construction, theorization and development of policy models, not to mention their transposition across different sectors (for example, health and education) (Zapp, 2021; McKenzie and Stahelin, 2022; Edwards et al, 2023; Fontdevila and Verger, 2024 forthcoming).

Introduction

A key focus of this chapter is the different kinds of joining up work that make possible the assembling and recontextualization of New Public Management (NPM) within different national and subnational policy spaces. This means documenting how NPM takes hold, endures or becomes disrupted within different national policy spaces as a result of intersecting forces and interests, “including the alignment of divergent political motivations, the translation of different ideas, and the invention of new concepts and programmes” (Prince, 2010, p 169). To make sense of these issues empirically, we trace multiple iterations of NPM within five countries: Argentina, Australia, England, Italy and Spain. We focus our attention on the intermediating actors, networks and projects that have crystallized to produce different possibilities for the emergence of NPM in these countries and reflect on their comparable yet uneven development as dynamic expressions of governance assemblages. By making explicit the active processes through which NPM is made and contested within obscurely national and subnational policy spaces, we draw attention to the fragility and multiplicity of NPM as situated expressions of contingent ideas, relationships and practices.

In the field of global education policy, multilateral, transnational, nongovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) have been vital to the spread and maintenance of NPM. Elevated by these global organizations to something akin to metapolicy, NPM has been used to remodel (and discipline) schools and school systems around the world according to a narrow set of economic and business objectives focused on “quality improvement” (World Bank, 2012, p viii) and “effectiveness of management control systems” (World Bank, 2013, p xiv). This includes producing schools and school systems that are comparable and commensurate with each other through their shared use of performance indicators and output measurements to calculate teaching quality, school management, inputs and infrastructure, and learner preparation. The result is schools and school systems that are vulnerable to capture from standardized testing regimes and global measures of “good governance” (Sellar and Lingard, 2013). Yet, empirical studies point to the uneven development of NPM across the globe as the co- function or coarticulation of pre- existing laws, networks and institutional logics (Gunter et al, 2016; Wilkins et al, 2019).

This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first proposes the Ten Teacher Questions framework. This set of questions is designed to provide you with a generic framework for critical enquiry into all your pedagogical choices, and to connect your pedagogical knowledge to what you have learned in previous chapters. The second section provides the curriculum context structures ‒ that is, the ACARA Cross-curriculum Priorities and General Capabilities, which inform our work. The third section presents Teaching Ideas in Mathematics, The Arts and English. Our key message is not that you must implement every Teaching Idea! Instead, we hope the examples will consolidate a practical approach to harnessing the linguistic diversity of your students. We hope that you will grasp the principles which you can see at work in the Teaching Ideas, and the way that they respond to one or more of the Ten Teacher Questions.