Performativity and pedagogising knowledge: globalising educational policy formation, dissemination and enactment

Abstract

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalized and globalizing processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public-private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global-national policy translation and enactment in local school contexts. Scholars have emphasized firstly, the economic turn in education reform policies, a shift from a social democratic education orientation, and secondly, policy convergence towards a dominant neo-liberal political agenda. This paper suggests that Bernstein's concepts of the totally pedagogized society (TPS) and the pedagogic device, as the ensemble of rules for the production, recontextualization and evaluation of pedagogic discourses may add to this corpus of critical policy scholarship. It does this by firstly reviewing the take up of Bernstein's concept of the TPS in the critical policy sociology literature, arguing that this interpretation presents a largely dystopian account of globalizing educational policies. In contrast, the paper argues for and presents an alternative open-ended reading and projection of Bernstein's concept of the TPS and pedagogic device for thinking about globalized processes and devices of the pedagogic communication of knowledge (s).