Global Agenda on Knowledge and Governance and Language Literacy Practices in Secondary Education in Greece

Abstract

This chapter aims to contribute to research on standards and regulation in education, taking as a point of departure three sets of interrelated policies, core to the globalised educational agenda: policies on competencies and skills, school autonomy and performance-based accountability, representing a new governmental logic founded on the values of efficiency, quality, competitiveness and outcomes. The chapter has a double purpose: first, to make a theoretical contribution to the literature interrogating the new modes of governing schools and curricular knowledge. It does this, by explicating the relationship between the regulative dimension of global policy discourses, embodying the principle of performativity, and the discourses regulating pedagogic practices in local sites, where policies are enacted. Second, to present aspects of a study carried out in the Greek education context, in which policies towards a post-bureaucratic administration regime (school autonomy, national testing, accountability mechanisms) have failed to be institutionalised. Focusing on the Modern Greek Language curriculum and its enactments in demanding school settings, the study illustrates how discourses on inclusion, diffused within the educational field and invading the school space, exert strong control over teachers' instructional practices. It is argued that developments of Bernstein's theory of knowledge pedagogisation provide a language to describe the complex ways in which regulative discourses operate in global times, affecting the recontextualisations of curricular policies. The theory thus contributes to the literature on the enactments of globalised education policies and helps explain the diversity of national and institutional responses to such policies.

Citation

Tsatsaroni, A. and Koutsiouri, S. (2022), "Global Agenda on Knowledge and Governance and Language Literacy Practices in Secondary Education in Greece", Riese, H., Hilt, L.T. and Søreide, G.E. (Ed.) Educational Standardisation in a Complex World, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 63-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-589-920221004