Patterns of actorship in legitimation of educational changes: The role of transnational and local knowledge

Abstract

This paper examines how different meanings of knowledge (transnational, comparative, statistical, local, and personal) relationally stabilise the agential position for the legitimation of educational reform across state and non-state actors. Analysing the materiality and systems of reason of proposals to reform education in the pre-election debates in the Czech Republic, the focus is placed on different patterns of legitimate and legitimating actorship, assembled from global and local relations. Through an ecological conceptualisation the research identifies the problematisation and decomposition of actorship into contradictory assemblages of both traditional actors (teachers and politicians) and relatively new ones (NGOs). The relationship of the civil sector and the state structures allowed the emergence of new non-state, non-professional actors (NGOs) who aggregate their expertise from transnational data and legitimate both their position as experts and the particular educational change. This has consequences for non-experts as politicians and teachers. The transnational and European context penetrated into the Czech educational sphere not through an elite class of system actors but through the representatives of NGOs. Rhetorically saving education from degradation, NGOs engage in spreading the transnational data and externalise the legitimation of educational reform and thus become the bearers (although agentially limited) of the European space.

Absence of education in civil defence education: Nationalising education and its actors and knowledge

“…Findings from interviews and media content show that the various types of knowledge acted predominantly as stabilisers of positions for action. Thanks to its reputation for being objective and impartial, which, in the Czech context, is a strong position-maker (Wirthová, 2022) this kind of knowledge was present in the legitimation practices, especially of critics, less of advocates. In other words, this kind of knowledge seems to be useful for any kind of goal, regardless of the social or historical context.…”

“…Forming and stabilising agential positions in educational governance is a process in which the politics of expertise intervenes. Informed by current studies of the politics of expertise (Fenwick et al, 2014; Rinne et al, 2018; Turner, 2015), we take into account the findings about the expertisation of educational legitimation in the European context (Grek, 2013; Hultqvist et al, 2018; Tveit and Lundahl, 2018), in which the Czech Republic has participated since at least 2004 (Wirthová, 2022). These research results demonstrate that (and how) expertise is a relational source that allows action, not essentially a true knowledge representation of reality.…”