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Funding, reputation and targets : The discursive logics of high-stakes testing
Lewis, Steven Hardy, Ian
Lewis, Steven
Hardy, Ian
Author
Abstract
This paper provides insights into teacher and school-based administrators’ responses to policy demands for improved outcomes on high-stakes, standardised literacy and numeracy tests in Australia. Specifically, the research reveals the effects of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and associated policies, in the state of Queensland. Drawing suggestively across Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, the research utilises interviews with teachers and school-based administrators to reveal how high-stakes, standardised testing practices served to discursively constitute performative teacher subjectivities around issues of funding, teacher and school reputation and target-setting within what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’. The paper argues that the contestation evident within this field is also reflective and constitutive of more educative schooling discourses and practices, even as performative logics dominate.
Keywords
high-stakes testing, Foucault, Bourdieu, disciplinarity, subjectivity, fields
Date
2015
Type
Journal article
Journal
Cambridge Journal of Education
Book
Volume
45
Issue
2
Page Range
245-264
Article Number
ACU Department
Research Office
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled