Bridging worlds and spreading light: Intermediary actors and the translation of knowledge for policy in Portugal

Abstract

The vision of a ‘backward’ education system in face of the rhythm and successes of the so-called ‘more advanced’ countries is at the core of the thinking that, since the mid-nineteenth century, has been guiding education in Portugal. António Nóvoa (2005, p.121) shows the strong position this institution of the national thought on education was still holding by the last turn of the century: The twentieth century ends just as it began, with a strong sense of ‘backwardness’ towards Europe. Studies, diagnoses and manifestos resent the state the school is in and demand urgent measures. We must put order in school. We must put the school in order. A new ‘education battle’ is announced. (...) By the end of the twentieth century, the country seems as confused and disturbed as it was in the late nineteenth century. Portuguese society is aware of the path taken in the last thirty years, but the indicators explain that the distance towards other European countries is increasing. Fed for more than a century by the injunctions of international statistics (Candeias, 2005; Nóvoa, 2005) on the coordinating and communicational spheres of education, the rhetoric on the Portuguese educational backwardness remains central today. More recently, in the framework of the processes of Europeanization of education (Lawn & Grek, 2012), benchmarks and indicators such as those used in the Education and Training Monitor have been contributing to this. These regularly encourage comparisons between systems and renew the projection of the ‘Portuguese backwardness’, now in matters related to early leavers from education and training, tertiary educational attainment, or participation in adult learning (see e.g. European Commission, 2017). Significantly, even when the positive variation of indicators (perceived as legitimate to assess the state of the educational system) allows for praise with national success and hope to exceed guilt, the rhetoric of the Portuguese education backwardness persists. For example, in the context of the reception of the results of PISA 2015 and in face of the graphical positioning of Portugal above the ‘OECD average’ in literacy scores, the public reception of results was divided between – on the one hand – the dispute for the merit on the improvement identified and – on the other – the naming of a central problem, that of backwardness in relation to more advanced systems: the excessive grade repetition of the Portuguese students vis-à-vis their surveilled counterparts (Carvalho, Costa & Gonçalves, 2017). The deep-rooted version of a “fear of being left behind” is performed in diverse policy spaces, including in emergent spaces where expert knowledge based on numbers is enacted as a ‘driver of improvement’ in education. In this chapter we focus on two collective actors immersed in these dynamics: aQeduto and EDULOG. Both came to public in 2015, are based on small-scale organizations with significant web and media presence, are supported by two different philanthropic foundations and build expert knowledge in order to frame and to shape other actors’ involvement in policy processes. The presence (and the relevance) of this type of actors that operate ‘between’ organized spaces of activities, namely between knowledge and policy ones, has been captured in social research by diverse analytical categories, like “mediators” (Jobert & Muller, 1987), “brokers” (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993), “intermediaries” (Nay & Smith, 2002), “transnational policy actors” (Lawn & Lingard, 2002), “boundary persons” (Sultana, 2011) or “intermediary organizations” (Cooper & Shewchuk, 2015). More important, their agency is associated with the rising of new transnational and intra-national spaces of policy (Lawn & Lingard 2002; Ball 2016) and with the intensification of knowledge mobilization in policy contexts (Levin & Cooper, 2012). We use the notion of intermediary actors (Nay & Smith, 2002) – i.e., actors who engage in a set of cognitive and social operations for the construction and stabilization of interactions between ideas, individuals, and technical devices –, in order to describe and analyse both emergent actors and their specific activities that aim to frame and to shape other actors’ involvement in policy processes. As a result, we found important similarities between these two organisations that contribute to their characterization as intermediary actors. First, expertise and mediation between diverse knowledge and social worlds are the two central ingredients of their logics of action: they act in public space fundamentally through processes of mobilization, fabrication, dissemination and legitimation of expert knowledge (a type of knowledge they depict as useful and needed to support public policies that will improve Portuguese educational performance); and it is through this knowledge that they intend to connect distinct actors from the world of education - academics, administrators, politicians, professionals, families and lay people - in more informed and enlightened processes of reflection and decision-making. Secondly, the establishing of relations with those diverse worlds operates through ways that are commonly observed in ‘third-communities’ (Lindquist, 1990) - information generation, publication and convocation activities -, but also through new modes that engage the receivers in interactive relations with data and information. This new presence and its modes of action seem to be inseparable from the emergence of new ways of orienting, coordinating and controlling education systems, in which cyclical monitoring of data and information takes centre stage. This chapter is organized in three sections. Firstly, we will present briefly the two intermediary actors we analysed and the methodology used in the empirical study. Secondly, we will present the main features of these two actors that illustrate their translation(s) of knowledge for policy: self-presentation both as experts and mediators; basic assumptions regarding the social role they perform – the one of helping to enlighten their audiences and to illuminate public choices –, and concerning the role they imagine for education systems and ways for these to be governed; main activities, aiming to connect knowledge and policy. The chapter closes with a discussion and some concluding remarks.