The Politics of Quality Improvement Policies in Teaching Practices: The Case of FE in the British Education System

Conference: The European Conference on Education (ECE2021)
Title: The Politics of Quality Improvement Policies in Teaching Practices: The Case of FE in the British Education System
Stream: Educational Policy, Leadership, Management & Administration
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Zahid Naz, Canterbury Christ Church University, United Kingdom

Abstract:

This research project constitutes an extended inquiry into quality improvement policies and how they are connected with teaching practices in Further Education. It is a case study of an FE college that examines how quality agendas, informed by neoliberalism, create contradictory and complex contexts in which teachers produce different types of practices for specific purposes. Apart from an in-depth exploration of recent policy agendas, data was collected using semi-structured interviews and unobtrusive observations in and outside classrooms. This ethnographic study uses Michel Foucault’s archaeology and genealogy as analytical tools to critically examine the dichotomies between practices focusing on day-to-day pedagogies and practices produced for performance management and accountability purposes. By attending to Foucauldian conception of power and counter-conduct, this work explores new means of defining quality in teaching spaces. My research calls for a reimagination of teaching and learning spaces in FE by demanding that we loosen our relations with reductionist approaches - informed by consumerism for judging quality - and embrace an emergentist and a process-oriented conception of quality. I argue that we need to unlearn our knowledge of ‘quality’ that overlooks contextual constraints and opportunities enmeshed in teaching spaces and rests on the assumption that this system of robust accountabilities is capable of quantifying the quality of education in a classroom, department or a college in toto. In other words, we must ‘rethink’ quality by ‘unthinking’ our current common sense.

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