Currently in many countries there is a dominant discussion about the challenges the teacher profession is facing due to political moves, new technologies of assessment, accountability and norms intended to regulate daily professional work (Mausethagen & Mølstad, 2015). One aspect of this policy development has been characterized as a ‘datafication’ of governance (Hansen, 2015), meaning e.g. that education is framed and understood in terms of various algorithms (cf. Pettersson, Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2016). This kind of policy is driven by an expert discourse that, by means of comparative strategies, tends to impose natural or common sense answers in national settings (cf. Pettersson, 2008) which provides policymakers with a global policy lexicon concerning what education is and ought to be (cf. Pettersson, 2014) and as such co-construct how ‘teachers’ are conceived. This can be seen in how the OECD, with its international comparative knowledge assessment PISA, has developed into producing international comparative data for educational policies and practices. Through statistics, reports and studies OECD has activated a “common sense” in political decision making by stating that numerical scientific ‘proofs’ are indisputable (Martens et al., 2007). With this in mind, how teachers are presented and defined by PISA becomes a question of high relevance. Our study draws on a previous study (Pettersson & Mølstad, 2016) analysing PISA reports illuminating how teachers are constructed as important and crucial for educational transformation and development. Moreover, teachers were emphasised as developers of education and educational strategies, rather than deliverers of state determined policy. In this current study, we aim to further elaborate on these findings by investigating aspects of uploading and downloading of educational policy (Prøitz, 2015) with a particular eye to teacher narratives in PISA reports. In order to illuminate how a PISA narrative on teachers can be downloaded (and uploaded) across international and national borders we draw on examples from PISA international and national reports concerning education policy developments in evaluation and accountability. The investigation is conducted through content analysis. Hence we elaborate and contribute to a comparative perspective on and the restructuring of the teaching profession in the contemporary.

References

Hansen, H. K. (2015) Numerical operations, transparency illusions and the datafication of governance. European Journal of Social Theory. 18(2) p. 203-220. Mausethagen, S., & Mølstad, C. E. (2015). Shifts in Curriculum Control: Contesting Ideas of Teacher Autonomy. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy (NordSTEP), 1(2). Martens, K., Rusconi, A., & Leuze, K. (Eds.). (2007). New arenas of education governance: the impact of international organizations and markets. Palgrave Macmillan. Pettersson, D., & Mølstad, C. E. (2016). PISA Teachers: The Hope and the Happening of Educational Development. Educação & Sociedade (Education & Society), 37(136), 629-645. Pettersson, D. (2008). Internationell kunskapsbedömning som inslag i nationell styrning av skolan. (PhD), Uppsala University, Uppsala. Pettersson, D. (2014). Three narratives: National interpretations of PISA. Knowledge Cultures, 2(4). Pettersson, D, Popkewitz, T. S. & Lindblad, S. (2016) On the use of Educational Numbers: Comparative Constructions of Hierarchies by means of Large-Scale Assessments. Espacio, Tiempo y Education. 3 (1) 177-202. Prøitz, T. S. (2015). Uploading, downloading and uploading again - concepts for policy integration in education research. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy (NordSTEP), 1(1), 70-80.