POISED welcomes Professor Matthew Clarke from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, as a visiting senior research fellow. All are warmly invited to attend his seminars on Critical Policy Analysis in Education and Poetics of Education in August and September.
Each seminar will be held at Tampere University’s city centre campus, in Virta building, room 255, from 12:00 to 16:00. The abstracts below provide an introduction to the themes explored in the seminars.
Registration is open until 21 August via the registration form.
25 and 26 August – Critical Policy Analysis in Education: Theoretical Approaches
“Theory is finished,” announced The New York Times Magazine in 2003 (Shea, 2003), while the following year, in his book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton (2004) would argue that what had at once time seemed like stirring intellectual dissent, has devolved into futility and farce, a revolutionary philosophy become an eccentric hobby. Perhaps worse, those drawn to theory lapse into arcane discourse that diverts them from meaningful engagement with the world.
In this seminar, we will suggest, to paraphrase Mark Twain, that rumours of the death of theory are greatly exaggerated. Indeed, theory, which might be defined as sets of assumptions about how the world works that cohere into traditions of sense-making, is not only alive but inevitable, in that those who disclaim or ignore theory are operating under the guidance of some unacknowledged theory. Importantly, no policy problem is free of theory. Crucially, in relation to habituated ways of thinking and sense making, theory can challenge and perhaps transform our unquestioned readings and understandings of the world. In other words, theory provides an alternative perspective on education policy that is not bound to the assumptions of policy-makers (Ball, 1997).
Adopting the position that in such a context, “theories are tools to think with” (Gulson, Clarke & Bendix-Petersen, 2015, p. 2), this seminar will explore how theory offers concepts and vocabulary that can uncover and articulate the unspoken assumptions underpinning policy, as well as provoking new ways to conceive of and conduct educational policy research. Specifically, n this seminar, we will examine some – but by no means all – of the different theoretical and methodological lenses of critical policy research and how they can be used in a complementary way in educational policy studies.
References
Ball, S. (1997). Policy sociology and critical social research: a personal review of recent education policy and policy research. British Educational Research Journal, 23(3), 257-274.
Eagleton, T. (2004). After theory. New York: Basic Books.
Gulson, K. N., Clarke, M., & Bendix Petersen, E. (Eds.). (2015). Education policy and contemporary theory: implications for research. London: Routledge.
Shea, C. (2003, December 14). Theory is finished. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14THEORY.html
7 and 8 September – Poetics of Education: Exploring Thinking with Literary Fiction and Cinema in Educational Research
Much mainstream thinking about education in recent decades has been in thrall to the so-called ’learning sciences’. Peter Taubman (2009) suggests four interrelated reasons underlying what he refers to as the ’seduction of a profession’ by the notion of the learning sciences, namely: fear (of dwindling resources); shame (about not being taken seriously in the academy and in the media); grandiosity (fantasies of transforming economy and society); and unresolved mourning for the loss of ideals of transformation and emancipation. The problem, however, at least for critical scholars, is that the learning sciences lock us into a techno-rational, techno-bureaucratic world governed by mechanistic and instrumental logics, which is reflected in academic thinking and writing.
In this seminar, we will explore the notion of a poetics of education, which can trace its roots through the romantic era and back to Aristotle, where poetic thinking is taken as thought that is unconstrained by rigour, system and method, and that draws insights that emerge from a ’crafted metaphor’ (perhaps a novel, poem, film or artwork) and that thereby open up spaces for open-ended reflection (Eshel, 2020) – on education and its relationship to life and society. The seminar will share some examples of such thinking from published research (e.g. Clarke, 2020; Rankin & Clarke, 2026) as well as exploring possibilities arising from the participants’ ideas and interests.
References
Clarke, M. (2020). Eyes wide shut: The fantasies and disavowals of education policy. Journal of Education Policy, 35(2), 151–167.
Eshe, A. (2020). Poetic thinking today: An essay. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Taubman, P. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountibility in education. New York: Routledge.
Rankin, K. H., & Clarke, M. (2026). Poor things and Scottish education: Falling into the Clyde and being pulled up from the Thames. Research in Education, 00345237261446125.
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