Abstract
We live in precarious times, where policy in and of education really does matter. In these precarious times when Twitter feeds and social media can dictate, direct and perpetuate quickly made promises and strongly affecting statements, there is a glaring need to pay attention to cross-cultural complexities inherent in educational policy. Revealing what it means to be a researcher, thinker, teacher and student in the contemporary media-saturated educational policy environment depends, amongst other things, on re-recognising diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being. Alongside the media barrage, and global trends to internationalise education, the confluence of diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being and their relationships in, and effects on, education impacts on policy from multiple angles. The challenge for policy research, studies and scholarship is the elevated need that this brings, for ‘keeping it complex’ and making space for multiple experiences of diverse cultural knowledges and lived educational experiences.
This complexity depends on there being multiple ways of ‘doing’ policy research and thinking. It also reflects that there is not just one way of ‘doing’ or ‘knowing’ cultural ways of being (Kristeva, 2008). Since we carry with us our own historicised and localised cultural knowledges into increasingly rapidly transforming educational landscapes, we cannot assume any particular stability or ongoing singular status quo. In recent times various views on shifting educational landscapes have been espoused, with Bauman (2009), for example, arguing for conceptualising as a state of liquid modernity the rapid convergences of multiple realities and monumental shifts occurring through the globalisation, marketisation and fast-tracking of societies and education, where policy shifts and decisions are difficult to keep up with. Other arguments, for example from Springer (2016), position neoliberal discourses underlying such developments as dangerous, insidious and ultimately ruinous of individuals, their interdependence, collective responsibilities and the planet’s environment. They call for ‘new regimes of truth’ that move beyond neoliberalism’s ‘suffocating strictures’ (p. 2), a view reflected also by Alpesh and Cole (2017) in the previous issue of this journal, who call for a shift in thinking about policy, and earlier this year by Guilherme (2017), who calls for the necessity of thinking ‘critically about educational, social and philosophical issues’ (p. 3), in relation to educational policy, to point out just a few. Despite such arguments, recent reminders of complexities and shifts in educational landscapes demonstrate a strongly grounded status quo with roots in moral universalism and liberal attitudes to individual freedom.
Globalised cultural logic of policies
Our point in this editorial is to elevate calls for recognising complexities of cross- and intercultural influences in policy responses to the contemporary liquid modern, neoliberal policy discourses and landscape in education. The dominant push for an increasingly globalised cultural logic and outcomes-driven productiveness in the neoliberal agenda raises Springer’s (2016) argument, that it is time to rewrite the narrative, by creating cracks ‘in the neoliberal façade’ (p. 4). Perhaps doing so could alter the seemingly homogeneous universalising culture of forgetting what falls outside of this ideology, and perhaps the task for educational policy work then is to recognise, (re)consider and (re)introduce often marginalised, little known, side-lined cultural knowledges.
The global phenomena of evidence-based research and outcome-focused policy and benchmarks (Peters and Tesar, 2017) drive (and arguably fund) educational scholars and policy makers in their research and analysis. What possibilities exist in this space for policy research and decision-making to openly embrace and respond to diverse cultural knowledges or ways of being in education? In what ways can the reliance on binaries and evidence-based essentialisations be challenged, to recognise and work with multiple knowledges and ways of being affecting and arising in cross- and intercultural educational settings? Resisting dominant ideologies and marginalising practices calls for diverse theoretical and conceptual underpinnings and orientations towards various possible confluences. Affirming this stance, Mika (2017) raises a Māori indigenous perspective placing the task in the realm of dominant Western philosophy, which remains a strong foundation for contemporary Western educational policy. He states that it ‘quite simply needs to branch out, not in a tokenistic way, but with genuine dialogue in mind’ (p. 13), making space for diverse ways of thinking. Underlying attitudes clearly matter, and drive policy.
Epistemological pluralism in educational policies
One opening to branching out towards increasingly intellectual and pedagogical engagement with diverse ways of thinking, knowing and being focuses on the concept of epistemology. Taking people’s knowledge and how it is obtained, shared, produced or affirmed, and the existence of multiple knowledges or multiple ways of knowing and being, calls forth the notion of epistemological pluralism (Andreotti et al., 2011). Drawing also on the philosophical concept of ontology, meaning that policy researchers consider questions about what exists (and what does not) in the context of educational policy, an orientation towards epistemological pluralism may be a useful response to such calls as Mika’s (2017), above. Epistemological pluralism captures the underlying recognition that there is no one single truth, way of being, knowing, researching, or teaching, learning or capturing these nuances in policy. In our endeavour to make space for the multiplicities that inherently underlie cross- or intercultural imperatives in educational policy, the usefulness of this conception is not only in its elevation of multiplicity. It is also in its breaking down of binaries, for instance, about who is presumed, supposed or allowed to have, know or understand particular knowledges or ways of being.
The various epistemologies reflected in policy arise from and represent the ontologies and diverse cultural and professional knowledges that converge in any educational fields. This does not always occur in a conscious way. The coming together of cultural knowledges and histories in a particular educational space or place could then already be the openings for ‘branching out’ and ‘genuine dialogue’. Their genuineness would depend on avoiding a tokenistic approach, alerting us to a further point that arises in dialogue, through its own inherent construction. Kristeva (1980) refers to an intertextuality, in the idea that messages shared in dialogue are always already imbued with and build on the knowledges and messages of those who have gone before the speaker, and the listener. The further point that this insight raises, then, is that such a plurality of epistemologies coming together in dialogue cannot always be aligned with each other, measured against each other, or even be considered in the same way, through the same lens, as each other, or by the same people.
Kristeva’s work thus further adds to the re-conceptualisation of educational policy research and practice through these positionings. It raises new ways of thinking through and beyond ourselves and our own set of knowledges, also through the notions of the foreigner and the foreigner within. Kristeva (1991) argues that as human subjects we should all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, even to ourselves, in order for the other to become less threatening. In acknowledging that being the other in itself is difficult, complex and often excruciatingly raw, delicate and variable, she further challenges us to consider whether we shall ever be ‘able to live with the others, to live as others’ (p. 2, emphasis in the original). Her challenge implicates educational policy as always immersed and entangled in the context and process of the subject formations it affects, while implicating also subjects and objects, people, places, things, that are indirectly affected by the policy.
The notion of living with the other draws on the conception of the other as the foreigner. For policy research and scholarship, the importance of Kristeva’s challenge lies in the notion of living as others, requiring us to recognise the foreigner that Kristeva claims is within each of us. Kristeva’s (1991) notion of the other – the foreigner – is the foundation of her foreigner lens, and of her theory that as subjects we are always in constant process. All policy researchers and the participants in policy research are, in our diverse ways, in constant, unstatic, turbulent and transient formation. It is us who are responsible and responsive to each other and who form and produce a particular – local and global – policy community. It is us that become the other, and challenge the other, at the very same time.
Humbling awakening
Recognising that we are all foreigners within therefore fundamentally shifts the parameters of cross- and intercultural research and policy studies. Kristeva’s (1991) claim, that ‘strangely … the foreigner lives within us’ (p. 1), and that it is only once the inner foreigner is recognised that other foreigners become less threatening, is central to the question of whose knowledges and ways of being are listened to, heeded, or favoured in policy research and practice. It is critical in recognising our own shifts, as policy researchers, that we commit to recognising ourselves too, as foreigners within. Policy work has arguably never been more complex, or exciting.
Kristeva’s (1998) theory on the subject in process exposes the idea that as subjects we are never completely products only of our own experiences. Her argument, that identities are ‘infinitely in construction, deconstructible, open and evolving’ (Kristeva, 2008: 2), as unknowable as they are unstatic, creates openings for further entanglements of policy research with both knowable and unknowable factors. It gives permission for knowledges and ways of being that might be outside of the dominant narrative to emerge and become recognised. For us as policy researchers, it is a humbling awakening that propels us towards such imperatives as Mika’s (2017) challenge for Western educational research. It acknowledges and reminds us of the concerns of predetermined, fixed or linear expectations or outcomes in our research, writing or practice.
This reminder brings with it a constant uncertainty, of not having a clearly laid out set of ideas. It illuminates the possibility that we should not only acknowledge, but engage more closely, by allowing our research ideas to develop with those that we would traditionally mark as ‘participants’, so that we all are researchers and participants, simultaneously. In policy research, it affirms a more recent trend to shift from research on teachers and children, to activate and empower teachers and children to become researchers with us. Our questioning of the constant uncertainty and non-knowing, and the possible frustrations that can arise, is what leads us, for example, to grapple with the uncertainty of unknowing, when we engage with indigenous or other non-Western and non-dominant perspectives. Again we are reminded of the possibility of the incommensurability of such perspectives, and of our fundamental inability to claim to have knowledge of another’s life or culture (Todd, 2004).
Concluding comments
The indeterminate nature of possible knowledges affecting policy and policy research means that we see no truths or answers to the earlier questions of how or where they might enter the policy discourses. There is no certainty either, of particular processes for recognising, elevating, or articulating non-dominant ways of being or knowing, which, following Todd (2004) are not even ours to know. Conversely, despite the call to broaden Western philosophical constructs in contemporary policy to encompass, allow for, or co-exist with, diverse cultural knowledges and ways of being, we cannot be sure to what extent such broadening is perhaps already happening, in ways that are not researched, reported on, named, tamed, disseminated and exploited or otherwise recognised from Western-centric positions. Nor can we be sure of how such a broadening of policy considerations might impact on cultural knowledges and ways of being themselves, perhaps wearing them thin, following assimilationist, colonising or marginalising practices already witnessed, or other ways of obliterating whatever purity remains intact. Perhaps then the usefulness of increasingly philosophical attitudes and approaches to policy research and practice, involving examinations of the nuances of life and how we live it, might provoke an intellectual and pedagogical de-essentialising of and openness towards complex cultural encounters, pedagogies and world views. Instead of a conclusion, then perhaps an individual and collective opening: towards genuine dialogue, towards acceptance of multiple knowledges and ways of being, towards an epistemological pluralism in, with, through and by policy endeavours and encounters, is the next step?