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Abstract

This paper theorizes the affective and moral grounding of “best practice” policymaking, particularly how best practice operates as an affective regime that encourages certain affective norms. To illustrate this, the author takes up the example of best practices promoted by the CoE’s Digital Citizenship Education Handbook for the acquisition of digital citizenship competences. It is shown that the distribution of best practices creates a set of affective conditions—especially through cultivating certain affective skills/competences and ethics/morals—that govern the ways in/though which best practices ought to be appropriately materialized. The paper discusses two implications of this analysis for education policymaking and policymakers. The first implication suggests that there needs to be work informing policymakers how affect works to create regimes of best practice; the second implication emphasizes the importance of working with policymakers to explore how they could challenge affective regimes of best practice.

Keywords

Affective regime best practice education policy Council of Europe digital citizenship education

Introduction

One of the policy instruments that has emerged in recent years as a central feature of educational governance at a national and transnational level is that of best practice, also called good practice interchangeably (Benavente and Panchaud, 2008; Blake et al., 2021; Macmillen and Stead, 2014; Papanastasiou, 2020; Vettoretto, 2009). The underlying assumption of best practice is that to help address certain challenges, there is a set of effective ideas delivering results elsewhere; these ideas can be used as “blueprint” to propel effective policymaking across different social, cultural, and political contexts (Blake et al., 2021). As Papanastasiou (2020) explains, the promise of best practice knowledge rests on two fundamental assumptions:

The first is to claim that it holds universal policy lessons which are conducive to policy transfer. And the second is to claim that best practices are generated from ‘tried and tested’ policy practices that have been shown to ‘work’ in situated contexts of policymaking. (p. 2)

In other words, best practice—which often appears in the form of handbooks, catalogs, checklists, and toolkits—is by definition perceived as good in itself for disseminating and deploying policy knowledge for many domains in both public and private sectors (Moore, 2013).

As Vettoretto (2009) has suggested more than a decade ago, best practice “has become a social practice in itself, a process that has to a certain degree been taken for granted” (p. 1069) so much so that “no other policy instrument has been so widely accepted by policy-makers and practitioners” (Vettoretto, 2009: 1068). Best practice is particularly popular within the European Union—famously called “a massive transfer platform” (Radaelli, 2000: 26)—as well as supranational bodies such as the Council of Europe (CoE) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which have issued publications on European and/or international best practices in several domains ranging from intercultural education, democratic citizenship, migrant education, language learning, and digital citizenship education to name a few. Also, many European funded projects over the last two decades have been instrumental in identifying and disseminating best (or good) practice examples (Macmillen and Stead, 2014; Papanastasiou, 2020; Stead, 2012).

Despite its widespread usage though, the notion of best practice has been increasingly criticized for a variety of reasons. For example, it has been suggested that what is considered good in one context is not necessarily good in another (Stead, 2012), therefore, the notion of best practice entails the risk of decontextualizing and depoliticizing what enables success within a particular political context (Vettoretto, 2009). Similar to this critique is the argument that the myth of best practice as transferable across social, cultural, and political spaces masks how best practice is based on conflicting claims, namely, claims that best practice is both situated in local practice and holds universal relevance (Papanastasiou, 2020). Furthermore, the literature for examining and evaluating the role, impact, and usefulness of good practices in specific education domains (e.g. intercultural education; digital citizenship education; etc.) is relatively limited; most accounts of best practices come from descriptions of case studies and initiatives (e.g. see Costa et al., 2017; Frau-Meigs et al., 2017, for an overview of literature on good practices in digital citizenship education).

In particular, what remains absent from the literature on education policymaking has been the role of affect in problematizing best practice, namely, how global trends of best practice function as an affective regime (De Costa et al., 2019; Wee, 2016) of educational governance framing best practice policymaking in affective and moral terms (see also Tikly, 2017). Drawing insights from recent work on the role of affect in education policymaking (Zembylas, 2020; Brøgger and Staunæs, 2016; Lähdesmäki et al., 2020; McKenzie, 2017; Matus, 2017; Pitton and McKenzie, 2020; Sellar, 2015; Shahjahan et al., 2020; Staunæs and Pors, 2015; Webb and Gulson, 2012), this paper aims to theorize the affective and moral grounding of best practice policymaking, that is, how best practice operates as an affective regime that encourages certain affective norms.

To illustrate how best practice operates as an affective regime, I take up the example of best practices promoted recently by CoE (2019) for the acquisition of digital citizenship competences for students through the curriculum, and for teachers through initial and in-service education. Specifically, I show how the distribution of best practices creates a set of affective conditions—particularly through cultivating affective skills/competences and ethics/morals—that govern the ways in/though which best practices ought to be appropriately materialized. As McKenzie (2017) points out, “what moves us collectively and individually is also important for what moves policy” (p. 188). I would argue, therefore, that the notion of affective regime is critical in helping us account for how and why various policy actors may be compelled to adopt best practices as an ethical imperative, and especially how best practices within particular domain areas become a prevalent ideology that permeates the actions of individuals and organizations alike (Zembylas, 2020). The focus of this paper, then, is not on a particular best practice policy per se, but rather on theorizing how the practice of best practice in education can be understood as an affective regime and process.

The paper is structured in the following manner. First, it discusses the conceptual underpinnings of best practice and its circulation as a mechanism of policymaking and policy transfer, drawing insights from policy studies literature; this part also sheds light on critiques of best practice. Second, the paper provides a brief review of recent work on the role of affect in policymaking; this section argues that more attention is needed to the affective dimensions of best practice policymaking and explains how affect theory is used in this paper to analyze best practice policymaking. Third, the paper theorizes the notion of affective regime and explains how best practice may operate as an affective regime of educational governance; this part draws on the example of Digital Citizenship Education Handbook (CoE, 2019) to illustrate the ways that the policy instrument of “good practices” invokes certain affective skills/competences and ethics/morals. The last section of the paper discusses the implications of this analysis for education policymaking and policymakers, and argues for the importance of engaging in a critical exploration of the affective and moral grounding of policy instruments, such as best practice, in education.

Best practice: Conceptualization and criticism

Jarrar and Zairi (2000) trace the origin of the term “best practice” to 1960s businesses looking for ways to improve performance and maintain competitive advantage, while Macmillen and Stead (2014) trace its genealogy to 1980s management consultancy. Although no one definition of best practice exists, the term “has gained much of its public sector legitimacy through its near-synonymous relationship to the concept of ‘policy transfer’” (Macmillen and Stead, 2014: 79); that is, the term is generally associated with interventions, actions, and procedures by which policy knowledge in one political system is transferred in another (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000). The term has been applied in many disciplines, including education, and has become popular among non-governmental organizations, national governments and supranational bodies such as the CoE and OECD (Macmillen and Stead, 2014).

In particular, examples of best or good practice are frequently found in local, national and supranational policy documents (Stead, 2012), while numerous reports and guides outline best practices from local and national governments in the EU (Blake et al., 2021). These trends toward the proliferation of best practice can be interpreted not only in terms of seeking effective solutions that reduce the financial constraints facing governments across the EU, but also in relation to promoting particular political agendas. Hence, the instrument of best practice has been considered an appropriate political tool in Europeanization.

processes of construction, diffusion, and institutionalization of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, ‘ways of doing things’, and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU public policy and politics, and then incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures, and public policies. (Radaelli, 2003: 30)

In fact, the policy instrument of best practice has been so widespread all around the world that it has been described as “an accepted wisdom within national policies and governments, as well as in international arenas and networks” (Bulkeley, 2006: 1030, added emphasis).

The claim that best practice knowledge is ideal for policymaking and policy transfer has led scholars from across multiple disciplines to problematize and critique best practice policy (Papanastasiou, 2020). A major critique that has been raised is the “institutional critique.” This perspective highlights the complex processes and effects of policymaking and policy transfer, including the crucial role of institutional structures, which are inevitably situated contextually. As noted by Peck and Theodore (2010), “In contrast to the policy transfer tradition, which invokes notions of rational diffusion and best-practice replication, critical approaches to policy mobility tend to explore open-ended and politicized processes of networking and mutation across shifting social landscapes” (p. 17). Furthermore, as Macmillen and Stead (2014) point out, what is often absent from policy transfer analysis “is attention to the agency of policy actors themselves, and how interpretations regarding best practices are actually made on the ground” (p. 80).

Overlapping somewhat with the institutional critique of best practice is also the so-called “pragmatic critique” (Macmillen and Stead, 2014). This critique draws attention to “the multiple political obstacles that undermine the simplistic narratives of policy transfer and the universal nature of ‘best practice’” (Papanastasiou, 2020: 4). In other words, the naïve assumption that best practice solutions can be exported to another political context is problematic not only for institutional reasons, but also because pragmatically speaking transferring policy solutions from one socio-political context to another is an extremely complicated process. This is demonstrated in practice, point out Blake et al. (2021) point out, as empirical studies show that contextual differences—for example, cultural, legal, and political setting—challenge transferability of best practices outside their original context. Such difficulties often lead policymakers to cherry-pick for best practices simply to support an existing political strategy or for public relations reasons, so at the end of the day the choice of best practices may simply be a façade that makes little or no practical difference in policy-making (Blake et al., 2021). As Nagorny-Koring (2019) also notes, best practices may often be used as political currency to supply organizations with a positive image for public relations or to provoke stakeholders and politics.

Most importantly though, for the purposes of this paper, is Bulkeley’s (2006) assertion that best practice represents “at once a political rationality and a governmental technology through which networks and coalitions seek to promote particular [. . .] futures” (p. 1029, added emphasis). As Macmillen and Stead (2014) observe, Bulkeley’s contribution to the literature on best practice is crucial, because she theorizes the “accepted wisdom” of best practice as a regulative instrument. Bulkeley’s treatment of best practice as a governmental technology can be used to support the argument for problematizing the typification process in the context in which best practice is deployed (Moore, 2013). Of particular salience, suggests Moore, is the argument that policymaking and policy transfer of best practices can be framed as a set of norms, rules, and decision-making procedures—namely, a regime—that is circulated internationally and can be operationalized in every political context. Yet, as Vettoretto (2009) has emphasized, how and why a best practice is selected and circulated is not a technical but rather a deeply politicized process, hence it is crucial to examine the ways in which best practice may be mobilized through mechanisms of governmentality.

Aside from a few recent contributions, scholarship attempting to address the issue of best practice as a governmental technology in education is slim. Leithwood (2008) has been one of the first scholars in education to raise explicit concerns about the widely accepted tactic of best practice, highlighting that “bandwagon” practices not only fail to live up to the claims of their champions and disciples, but also locally-valued ways of behaving and contextual complexities make best practices unsuitable for schools within different spatio-temporal dynamics.¹ More recently, Wu (2016) has argued that there is a link between evidence-based research that proliferates in education and the agenda-setting of best practices. This is partly due to the ways that a technocratic model of educational research has become a dominant paradigm, providing a clearinghouse of best practices to teachers. Best practices, then, have become a standardized mechanism of evaluating the effectiveness of educational means and techniques (Crampton, 2016).

In summary, this short and certainly incomplete review of how best practice has been discussed and used in education policymaking highlights two important insights for my analysis in this paper: first, best practice is a crucial dimension of policymaking and policy transfer and an instrument through which a certain regime may be established and circulated; and second, it is vital to analyze and evaluate the policy instrument of best practice and its outcomes in order to identify the conditions under which best practice may become a regime. A critical analysis of best practice turns our attention to one of these conditions, namely, the affective conditions of policymaking and policy transfer.

Affect and education policymaking

A growing body of literature in the field of education policy explores affect theories (Zembylas, 2020; Brøgger and Staunæs, 2016; Lähdesmäki et al., 2020; McKenzie, 2017; Matus, 2017; Pitton and McKenzie, 2020; Sellar, 2015; Shahjahan et al., 2020; Staunæs and Pors, 2015; Webb and Gulson, 2012). Affect theories come in many varieties; Seigworth and Gregg (2010) have identified at least eight main orientations toward affect. In general, affect theories are marked by a strong interest for embodied life and the capacities of bodies, or what bodies do, especially how bodies are impelled by forces other than language and reason (Schaefer, 2019). In this article, my analysis is informed by work in feminist cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Cvetkovich, 2012) that theorizes affect as entangled with emotion and feeling, paying attention to how this entanglement constitutes social, cultural, political and ethical relations, and subjectivities. In particular, I understand affect as a corporeal experience that is not separated from its linguistic representation or socially constructed emotion. Hence, my theoretical framework is grounded in the assumption that there is an entanglement of discourse, consciousness, body and representation, and that affect cannot be understood without emotion.

In recent years, affect theories have led to innovative contributions in policy studies, especially in relation to exploring the role of affect and emotion in the governmental technologies that societies and organizations use deliberately or incidentally (see Clough and Willse, 2011; Massumi, 2015; Protevi, 2009). Governmentality (Foucault, 1978; Miller and Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999) is generally understood as the ways through which subjectivity, thoughts and affects are governed by others or by one’s self—a perspective that opens up possibilities to explore how education policymakers and policymaking manage intersubjective affective relations to invoke particular feelings for example, to create optimism or to optimize professional standards (Zembylas, 2018; Juelskjær et al., 2013; Staunæs, 2011). In this sense, it may be argued that governmentality functions as an “affective technology” (Zembylas, 2015) of controlling others’ capacities to act, hence any policy design, enactment, or mobility is bound to hold affective implications. The literature that brings together affect theory and governmentality studies, then, addresses “a blind spot concerning the affective and emotional aspects of ways of governing mentalities” (Juelskjær et al., 2013: 1134).

In recent years, education scholars in critical policy studies have examined how affect influences policymaking and policy mobility, especially the ways that educational governance and management takes place through affective means. Webb and Gulson (2012) have drawn attention to the ways that policy texts, discourses, and processes invoke affective sense-making. For example, the content of policy and/or the ways policies are presented may “utilize the affect of fear to manipulate educational actors” interpretations. These interpretations and inferences are produced politically and are used strategically for desired, yet ostensibly unformed, policy outcomes’ (Webb and Gulson, 2012: 88). In other words, the processes of policymaking and policy mobility are open-ended and messy, and entail resistance and ambivalence, hence policy enactment or mobility does not (merely) work in techno-rational terms.

Further work in education policy studies has paid attention to the role of affect in the circulation of policies, especially through the work of supranational organizations. For example, Sellar (2015) explores the entanglement of affect, performance data, and education policy, and particularly how data from international large-scale assessments (e.g. PISA, an OECD program) are used for governance and policymaking purposes through affective means (see also Sellar and Lingard, 2018). In particular, it is shown how educational governance utilizes “the affective event created by the publication of performance data, in conjunction with political rhetoric about educational performance and economic security, to legitimate interventions into the field of education” (Sellar, 2015: 140). Similarly, Staunæs (2011) has examined intersections between OECD education policy work, affect, and new modes of governmentality in schools to highlight how technologies of management and government by supranational organizations operate affectively in contexts of policy enactment (see also, Juelskjær et al., 2013). Also, data from global university rankings are used affectively to influence global higher education policy (Shahjahan et al., 2020); in particular, commercial rankers, as shown by Shahjahan et al., construct and manipulate affective landscapes (emoscapes) to shape “public moods,” sell policy ideas, and bind people’s desires for best practices.

Finally, recent work has focused explicitly on how affect influences policy movement and transformation (McKenzie, 2017; Pitton and McKenzie, 2020). As McKenzie (2017) explains, affect is an important topic for policy mobilities, “given its centrality in why certain policies are appealing or felt necessary in different times, why particular policy actors are motivated to champion or adopt such policies, or in what sentiments are mobilized to encourage policy engagements in sites of uptake” (p. 188). Pitton and McKenzie (2020) add that “in-depth explorations of the affective techniques used to incite policy mobility and uptake, as well as the affective conditions that move us collectively and individually to engage with or reject certain policies, can further understandings of how and why policy moves” (p. 2). Pitton and McKenzie (2020) emphasize in particular that despite some studies that bring together affect theory and policy mobility, more work is needed, as “the policy mobilities literature has not engaged to much extent with affect” and previous research on affective governance “has not included a specific focus on the mobility of policy” (p. 2).

Building upon insights from this work, then, I turn my attention to the entanglement between affect and supranational policy networks mobilizing particular orientations to best or good practice—such as how affect is used to mobilize understandings of best practice in CoE’s (2019) policy on digital citizenship education, which constitutes the focus of my illustration in this paper. Introducing affect to the analysis of best practice entails understanding policy instruments as “apparatuses” of power (Anderson, 2014; McKenzie, 2017) that circulate affect through particular rhetorical devices—for example, by invoking and advocating affective value to best practices. As affect about/for best practice gains value, it further its power to shape and move policy nationally and globally (Pitton and McKenzie, 2020; Shahjahan et al., 2020), thus establishing an affective regime. In what follows, then, I take up the policy instrument of best practice and theorize how it operates as an affective regime that increases its affective value and power by exploiting the prevalent ideology of neoliberalism.

The affective regime of best practice: An illustration

An affective regime refers to “the set of conditions that govern with varying degrees of hegemonic status the ways in which particular kinds of affect can be appropriately materialized” (Wee, 2016: 109). In other words, an affective regime sets the norms that encourage, either explicitly or implicitly, particular affects while discouraging others. For example, if there is value in adopting a particular public policy that claims to create social well-being (e.g. the regulation of labor or the adoption of a specific environmental policy), then a set of affects are encouraged toward this direction (e.g. fear and anxiety, if the policy is not adopted; joy and pleasure, if it is adopted). In general, it is argued that neoliberalism and its capitalist cost-benefit analysis fosters an affective regime within which policymakers, political leaders and the public at large are pressed as a moral imperative to adopt policies that lead to optimal social ends—for example, the cultivation of certain competences (Anderson, 2016; Peck and Theodore, 2015; Povinelli, 2014). As Anderson (2016) has pointed out, neoliberalism itself is an affective event, as collective affects emerging from neoliberal policies and practices (e.g. fear, anxiety, anger) are inextricable aspects of the sites, networks, and flows of neoliberalism in contemporary western societies.

A focus on the policy instrument of best practice helps education policymakers consider how policies as affective regimes are manifested and circulated by driving policymakers at a transnational level to pursue particular practices that are labeled good or best. The emphasis that neoliberalism places on competition and benchmarks tends to result in increased convergence instead of diversity of practices, as competing organizations and countries urge the adoption of similar best practices for political, economic, or other reasons (De Costa et al., 2019). The affective regime of best practice, then, both facilitates and is facilitated by policy mobility, as “learning from, and ‘referencing’, distant models and best practices is now commonplace,” according to Peck and Theodore (2015: xvi), who add that “local reform efforts are framed, from the get-go, by a reading of the best-practice literature.”

To illustrate how the notion of best or good practice serves as an affective regime in education policy mobility, I will focus on a recent CoE policy framework, namely “digital citizenship education,” that explicitly aims to “promote and share best practices from member states on effective policies and programmes for the acquisition of digital citizenship competences for students through the curriculum, and for teachers through initial and in-service education” (CoE, 2016: 13, added emphasis). In particular, I analyze two relevant documents: (1) Digital Citizenship Education – Multi-stakeholder Consultation Report (Richardson and Milovidov, 2016), and (2) Digital Citizenship Education Handbook (CoE, 2019). The two are related not only because they are authored by the same individuals, but also because the first document (commissioned by CoE), which is a report of good practices in Europe, has essentially prepared the ground for the second one, which is a handbook that includes good practices for digital citizenship.

Needless to say, this is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the chosen documents, but rather illustrative of the ways that a specific policy instrument—that is, best practice—may operate as an affective regime which seeks to invoke certain affects and morals. Building on my recent analysis of the affective ideologies embedded in another European policy document (Zembylas, 2020), my aim here is to show how best practice guides policymakers at a transnational level to monitor and evaluate themselves on affective and moral grounds. In particular, my analysis will address two mechanisms through which good practice can be seen to invoke particular affects about digital citizenship education: (1) skills and competences and (2) morals and ethics. But before identifying and analyzing these two mechanisms, it is useful to examine how “good practice” is defined and established in the context of digital citizenship education.

Defining and establishing good practice in digital citizenship education

In the CoE’s Digital Citizenship Education – Multi-stakeholder Consultation Report (Richardson and Milovidov, 2016)—which analyzes survey questionnaire responses from national experts in 47 countries—a good practice is defined according to a seven-point list:

has a positive impact on individuals and/or communities; has been proven through implementation to be effective in realising a specific objective; can be reproduced and is adaptable to different contexts; responds to current and future needs of the target population; is technically, economically and socially feasible and sustainable; contributes to an inclusive society, adaptable for individuals with special educational needs; is a participative process that is able to generate a feeling of ownership in those involved. (Richardson and Milovidov, 2016: 19)

According to Frau-Meigs et al. (2017), however, the procedure followed for reaching what constitutes good practice entails certain risks and so good practices should be considered with caution:

national experts were identified; they completed a standardised questionnaire, including in-depth project summaries for the most significant good practices. Respondents were provided with definitions, guidelines and criteria to identify the most sensible projects in their respective country. The decision on the significance of the project was left to their discretion (which confirms the need to be cautious with “good” or “best” practices). (p. 33)

These results confirm, add Frau-Meigs et al., that the governance model which is followed in European policymaking entails various ways of construing the role of good practices. As Richardson and Milovidov (2016) themselves admit, their report of good practices “looks at the role of development of digital citizenship competence in education [. . .] and maps the administrative and legal responsibilities for school leaders, teachers, students and parents” (p. 9), while the ultimate goal of this project is “the development of a framework concept of digital citizenship, policy guidelines and a glossary of terms for the promotion and sharing of good practices” (Richardson and Milovidov, 2016: 9).

Frau-Meigs et al. (2017) emphasize that although there is no strong research evidence of how or what makes practices good or best, good practices in digital citizenship education governance have acquired power because they serve the political agenda of incorporating citizenship issues that are becoming increasingly important in Europe (e.g. radicalization, information trust, etc.). In other words, there is a strong affective and moral orientation toward good practices in digital citizenship education, which allows this policy instrument to become a highly dominant and widespread framework for developing digital citizenship competences in education. An adoption of this digital citizenship education framework would mean furthering the spread of this framework which entails not only best practices in epistemological terms but also as affective values, namely, as values that should be embraced. A stark illustration of this is how best practices promote particular skills and competences as well as ethics and moral values in digital citizenship education; these two manifestations of the affective regime of best practice are further discussed below.

Manifestations of the affective regime of best practice in digital citizenship education

The first manifestation of the affective regime of best practice in digital citizenship found in the Digital Citizenship Education Handbook (CoE, 2019) is the so called “skills and competencies” approach, which draws from the psychological literature and has achieved the greatest success by way of translation into good practices (Brown and Donnelly, 2020). As it is emphasized in the handbook’s Forward, “What is needed now [in Europe] is a structural approach to provide children and young people with the competences they need to become healthy and responsible citizens in the online environment” (CoE, 2019: 5), hence this handbook “builds on the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture” (CoE, 2019: 6). I have recently critiqued the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture as being driven by a psychologized approach, namely, it foregrounds personal emotional competences, while depoliticizing social problems (Zembylas, 2020). A similar perspective is found in the Digital Citizenship Education Handbook, that is, a “digital citizen” is conceived through a set of social-emotional skills and competencies (i.e. citizen competencies) that are to be developed and nurtured in children and adults, if they are to become “healthy” and “responsible” citizens.

For example, a digital citizen is defined as “someone who, through the development of a broad range of competences, is able to actively, positively and responsibly engage in both on and offline communities, whether local, national or global” (CoE, 2019: 11). There are 20 competences for democratic culture, covering four key areas (values, attitudes, skills and knowledge, and critical understanding)—which are explicitly considered to be “psychological resources” in the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (CoE, 2018: 32). These four key areas can be developed through a list of suggested activities for school classes, families, and other scenarios; these activities provide information and resources that cover several key points, one of which is “good practice/living digital citizenship.” In other words, good practices in digital citizenship education are those which cultivate (psychological) competences (e.g. responsibility, self-efficacy, empathy). As competences are understood to be the mastery of ability by individuals (Brown and Donnelly, 2020), the atomization of these competencies promoted by good practices in digital citizenship education invokes an affective regime of individual and psychologized competencies.

Hence, best practice functions not only as an affective regime of policy mobility but also as an affective regime of psychological competences in digital education. When best practice is conceptualized in education policy as an instrument of cultivating a set of competences or skills to be learned, the implication is an individual focus upon the agential power of the child or the adult “in their learned capacity to identify, react and manage their thoughts, feelings and behaviors in interaction with others” (Brown and Donnelly, 2020: 5)—in this case, in their engagement in online and offline communities. In other words, the burden is upon the individual to control and manage their emotions in order to promote “positive” and “responsible” engagement in online and offline communities. While schools and teachers may use good practices to facilitate the development of such competences, ultimately these competences “are viewed to be owned or lacking in the individual: the onus is on the child as the agent of change” (Brown and Donnelly, 2020: 5). This approach reveals a psychologized orientation to social problems that also reflects governmentality techniques which emphasize emotion self-management as a policy mechanism to social challenges (Zembylas, 2020). The emphasis upon emotional regulation effectively discourages “negative” emotions (e.g. fear, anger, frustration) and encourages “positive” emotions (e.g. empathy, tolerance).

In addition to the cultivation of psychological competences, then, best practices in digital education also promote particular morals and ethics. For example, the following two excerpts refer to the ethical dimensions of online behavior and particularly how empathy, as a psychological ability, is linked to moral behavior:

Ethics and empathy concerns online ethical behaviour and interaction with others based on skills such as the ability to recognise and understand the feelings and perspectives of others. Empathy constitutes an essential requirement for positive online interaction and for realising the possibilities that the digital world affords. (CoE, 2019: 13)

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s frame of reference, i.e. the capacity to understand their perspective and reality and to place oneself “in their shoes”. Because it leads us to understand the interests, needs and perspectives of others, empathy is an important determinant of moral behaviour, and a necessary building block in creating moral communities. (CoE, 2019: 58)

Ideas for good practice that address ethical considerations (CoE, 2019: 65) include: (a) taking a closer look at the templates provided on an EU website and work with a group of children to help them build their own game on digital citizenship; and (b) watching a short, animated clip “to emphasise that we can create genuine empathetic connections, if we are brave enough to get in touch with our own weaknesses.”

The above excerpts and the ideas for good practice reiterate my previous observations that digital citizenship education is seen through the lens of CoE’s competence model, namely, a psychologized approach that treats digital citizenship as another site for developing self-efficacy and emotional skills, values, and attitudes such as empathy, respect, responsibility, and tolerance for ambiguity. In other words, within the competence framework for digital citizenship, knowing how to use ICTs in an effective, efficient, and safe way “is no longer sufficient to be an effective citizen in a technology-rich society. Competence for effective digital citizenship also requires socio-relational and emotional competences” (Frau-Meigs et al., 2017: 39). Hence, the regulation of emotions—for example, through the promotion of positive emotions—is considered crucial in maintaining and preserving European well-being (Zembylas, 2020). However, as Brown and Donnelly (2020) have recently argued, the social and emotional understanding that is facilitated through a competence perspective does not de facto lead children or adults to use such skills for ethical purposes. Therefore, best practices that promote these competences, as those are situated within a psychologized framing, become an integral part of an affective regulatory system that understands citizenship education as a form of individual therapy.

Conclusion and implications

This paper explored how the policy instrument of best (or good) practice may operate as an affective regime in education policymaking. Building on recent problematization of best practice in policy studies (Blake et al., 2021; Papanastasiou, 2020) as well as drawing from affect studies in education policy literature (McKenzie, 2017; Pitton and McKenzie, 2020; Shahjahan et al., 2020), I have sought to reach a better understanding of some of the affective complexities underlying the notion of best practice. By integrating affect theory with education policy literature, I have shed light on how best practice as a policy instrument not only establishes its hegemonic status as a powerful affective regime that is taken-for-granted, but also promotes a neoliberal affective regime based on the skills/competences model and moralistic terms. Exploring how best practice is manifested as an affective regime in the case of CoE’s Digital Citizenship Education Handbook, the analysis has revealed how a policy instrument enables policy actors to shape and circulate affective collective conditions that to some degree depoliticize and decontextualize social problems such as the challenges of a technology-led society, framing them as a matter of personal competences and moral values (see also, Zembylas, 2020). In the last part of this paper, I discuss two implications of my analysis for education policymaking.

The first implication highlights that there needs to be work informing policymakers how affect works to create regimes of best practice. In other words, it is suggested that an important dimension of policymaking around policy instruments such as best practice is to identify how best practice functions in ways that establish certain moral and affective norms. While education scholars have previously discussed various aspects of how affect mobilizes policy—for example, how global university rankings construct emotional landscapes that impact on globalizing higher education policy (Shahjahan et al., 2020) or how policy actors’ responses to affective collective conditions influence the circulation of a particular policy initiative (Pitton and McKenzie, 2020)—an affective reading of a widely circulated and taken-for-granted policy instrument such as best practice has not been undertaken. Education policy scholars exploring affect in policymaking have revealed important insights including how policymaking can manipulate affects (e.g. fear, anxiety) to mobilize certain policy initiatives (Sellar, 2015); however, understanding how policy instruments such as best practice are not only politically, but also morally and affectively consequential, remains absent.

My analysis of best practice in the context of a specific policy document in this paper has illustrated that despite indications from the literature that best or good practice is not always accompanied by straightforward research evidence, a strong affective regime is created by/for this policy instrument rendering it difficult to be questioned. This is not to deny the positive impact best practices could have on circulating policy initiatives fast and effectively, but rather to challenge the extent to which there is a deeper understanding of the underlying affective conditions that drive and are driven by this policy instrument. Hence, it is crucial for education policy studies and policymakers in particular to pay more attention to the affective complexities emerging from the adoption and circulation of a policy instrument. This demands work on behalf of policymakers and education policy scholars to explore how policy instruments such as best practice function to establish particular moral and affective norms. As Blake et al. (2021) succinctly state:

Once carrying this title, best practices highlight what policies should be pursued, what planners should strive to implement, and, therefore, what citizens should best live in and through, effectively shaping discourses of future-making. As such, they contribute to the solidification of important moral and political choices with the appearance of a depoliticized, objective instrument. (p. 18, original emphasis)

My analysis of CoE’s Digital Citizenship Education Handbook in this paper reveals the contested and value-laden processes through which best practice is established as an affective regime. This emphasizes that policymaking and policy mobility in education, especially of taken-for-granted policy instruments such as best practice, must be thoroughly examined to critically reflect on their moral and affective grounding as well as their consequences in establishing a particular policy regime. Policymakers in education, then, have a lot to gain from exploring and reflecting not only how an affective regime of best practice is established, but also how they can work to challenge this regime and introduce alternative affective practices in policymaking—an issue that brings me to the second implication.

The second implication emphasizes the importance of working with policymakers to explore how they could challenge affective regimes of best practice. Given that best practice policymaking, just like any other form of policymaking, is situated in affective politics, it is not enough to disrupt a regime only at an epistemological level; challenging the affective regime of best practice has to also happen at the affective level. In other words, education policymakers will need to learn how affect can be used to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions that best practice is a panacea for solving educational problems. For example, if affects (e.g. fear, anxiety) are used to mobilize certain policy initiatives and policy instruments that establish a particular regime, then policymakers need to be able to invent counter-affective responses that address fear and anxiety in productive and strategic ways. Hence, an important dimension of educational leadership and policymaking programs and education policy studies more generally is to explore how policymakers could use affect to achieve different outcomes.

Future research could further our understandings of how and why policy instruments “flow” affectively in particular socio-political contexts and what consequences they have—for example, whether they indeed advance effective policymaking by creating productive affective conditions, and when they fail to do so, why might that be (see also, Pitton and McKenzie, 2020). Furthermore, future studies could expand the kind of analysis conducted in this paper, by exploring when, how and why other policy instruments (e.g. accountability measures; professional standards of teaching) operate as affective regimes which create “apparatuses” of power “that feed back to reshape or reverse the policy, or influence public affect and orientation to an issue” (McKenzie, 2017: 199). Hence, my analysis here raises more questions for future work such as: To what extent does the affective regime created by a policy instrument have an impact on teachers’ pedagogical practice or the pedagogical relationship with learners? What are some ways to disrupt the affective regime of policy instruments such as best practice? What are the risks involved in these efforts? There is still a lot of work on the role of affect in the mobilities of policy, especially in current turbulent political contexts where policy is mobilized through powerful emotional rhetoric, as McKenzie (2017) rightly points out. In closing, then, attention to the affective dimensions of policymaking and policy mobility stands to take center stage in future attempts to generate new insights on how policymaking operates as an affective regime with crucial ethical and political implications.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Michalinos Zembylas

Notes

Author biography

Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in educational theory and curriculum studies.

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Theorizing the affective regime of “best practice” in education policy

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Best practice: Conceptualization and criticism

Affect and education policymaking

The affective regime of best practice: An illustration

Defining and establishing good practice in digital citizenship education

Manifestations of the affective regime of best practice in digital citizenship education

Conclusion and implications

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References