Abstract:
PISA (Program of International Student Assessment) evaluates educational systems worldwide measuring reading, mathematics and science in 15 year-old students. The premise underlying the development of PISA by OECD is that education is associated with learning skills that enable an individual to contribute to a country’s economy (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/). PISA has become a form of international and transnational governance in the context of global capitalism (Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Pereyia et al., 2011). It is the purpose of this presentation to argue that PISA (1) positions education as commodification. (2) Macro-politically, PISA operates within a society of control (institutional social practices that operate through continuous control) (Deleuze and Parnet, 1994). (3) Education becomes an apparatus of capture (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) by OECD/PISA that disrupts micro-politics of educational governance. Multiple Literacies Theory (Masny, 2012) is the theoretical framework and rhizoanalysis the analytical lens (Masny, 2013). Literacies consist of words, gestures, sounds, that is, human, animal and vegetal ways of relating to the world. They are taken up as visual, oral, written, tactile, olfactory, in multimodal digital and in various settings. MLT conceptualizes reading to be (1) intensive- reading disrupts and (2) immanent – potential for creating transformation. Rhizoanalysis is an assemblage (research settings) constantly transforming. Rhizoanalysis is interested in what ‘data’ do and produce. Reading data consists of reading documents and sections are selected (vignettes) according to their power to disrupt (intensive) and their potential to transform an assemblage (immanent). The analysis is reported in indirect discourse, that is, the subject is decentered (Mazzei, 2010). The documents for analysis consist of the latest PISA report; PISA related documents engaging the discourse of the global capitalism/neoliberal regime; secondary documents that produce PISA as a constructive and informative instrument; and the counterdiscourses suggesting PISA does not measure competences for the 21st century and consequently undermines contemporary education. The findings are presented in the form of questions poised to think about how education might become and what it might produce in connecting relations with PISA: (1) how PISA might normalize school-based literacy and dismiss non-academic literacies; (2) As a result, what the narrowing influence of PISA might become on the school curriculum (ex. marginalizing school subjects other than math, science and literacy); and what education might become in light of: (3) how PISA shapes the definitions of competences and (4) how countries compete with each other.