1st Edition
An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes
An Archaeology of Educational Evaluation: Epistemological Spaces and Political Paradoxes outlines the epistemology of the theories and models that are currently employed to evaluate educational systems, education policy, educational professionals and students learning. It discusses how those theories and models find their epistemological conditions of possibility in a specific set of conceptual transferences from mathematics and statistics, political economy, biology and the study of language.
The book critically engages with the epistemic dimension of contemporary educational evaluation and is of theoretical and methodological interest. It uses Foucauldian archaeology as a problematising method of inquiry within the wider framework of governmentality studies. It goes beyond a mere critique of the contemporary obsession for evaluation and attempts to replace it with the opening of a free space where the search for a mode of being, acting and thinking in education is not over-determined by the tyranny of improvement.
This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of educational philosophy, education policy and social science.
Foreword by Stephen J. Ball
Introduction: Of other evaluations in education
Questioning educational evaluation as a critical ontology of ourselves
Inhabiting other evaluative spaces
Book overview
1. Governmentality, evaluation and education: An archaeological gaze
Educational evaluation as a governmental practice
Government, evaluation and truth
Genealogy and archaeology: Two complementary gazes on regimes of government
The archaeological method within an analytics of government
The archaeological description of discursive formations
Trees of derivation, interdiscursive configurations and forms of articulation
Conclusion
2. Educational evaluation as an enunciative field
Suspending educational evaluation
A long-standing and globalised social experiment to make education governable
Educational evaluation as a form of rationality
Educational evaluation as a way of seeing and perceiving
Educational evaluation as a governmental techne
Education evaluation as identity formation
Conclusion
3. The epistemic space of educational evaluation
Educational evaluation and the project of a mathematical formalisation
Locating educational evaluation in a tridimensional epistemic space
The formation of educational evaluation as an enunciative field through transferences
Conclusion
4. Living systems
System as a grid of specification
Biology, organisational theory and educational evaluation as fields of concomitance
Conclusion
5. Forms of production
Production as a grid of specification
Political economy, management and educational evaluation as fields of concomitance
Conclusion
6. Meanings
System of meanings as a grid of specification
The study of language, sociology and educational evaluation as fields of concomitance
Conclusion
7. Educational evaluation and its epistemic and political paradoxes
The homo of educational evaluation
Epistemic and ethical paradoxes
Political paradoxes
A reflexive government of performance
8. Epistemological ruptures and the invention of other evaluations in education
Epistemological ruptures: space, time and norm
Other evaluations in education: Contesting the anthropological postulate
References
Biography
Emiliano Grimaldi is Associate Professor of Sociology of Education at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy.
