Mary Hamilton

This paper focuses on the rapidly expanding field of largescale international assessment surveys and their impact on the field of adult education and learning. I take the case of OECD’s survey assessing adult skills (PIAAC) and situate it within the wider context of the datification of educational policy and practice. The claims made for the policy effects of surveys like PIAAC are far-reaching and include the promotion of economic growth and more inclusive and equitable societies. I examine how these claims are translated into national contexts by examining documentary data collected from the OECDs publicity materials and media coverage of the second round PIAAC survey findings in 2016 in four of the nine countries that took part: Singapore, Greece, New Zealand and Slovenia. Using a socio-material approach, I discuss how these discourses were managed by the OECD and national actors and show how the survey findings are framed and interpreted through existing public debates. The paper concludes that international assessments do not serve the goals of growth and equity in any straightforward way, since many interests and contextual factors may intervene to create a mismatch between the testers’ intentions, media discourse and policy outcomes.

This paper examines how international, large-scale skills assessments (ILSAs) engage with the broader societies they seek to serve and improve. It looks particularly at the discursive work that is done by different interest groups and the media through which the findings become part of public conversations and are translated into usable form in policy arenas. The paper discusses how individual countries are mobilised to participate in international surveys, how the public release of findings is managed and what is known from current research about how the findings are reported and interpreted in the media. Research in this area shows that international and national actors engage actively and strategically with ILSAs, to influence the interpretation of findings and subsequent policy outcomes. However, these efforts are indeterminate and this paper argues that it is at the more profound level of the public imagination of education outcomes and of the evidence needed to know about these that ILSAs achieve their most totalising effects.

This paper explores academics' writing practices, focusing on the importance of digital platforms in their processes of collaborative learning. It draws on interview data from the first phase of a research project working closely with academics across different disciplines and institutions to explore their writing practices. The project is framed within a social practice perspective on literacy, which sees reading and writing as practices developed and maintained through participation in a social context, shaped by aspects of people's purposes, histories and institutional positionings (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Barton, 2007). The role of an academic in higher education is diverse, and almost every aspect of this role involves specialised forms of writing and knowledge creation in a very wide range of genres for many different kinds of audiences (Hyland, 2011). Transformations in the social and institutional structuring of higher education in recent years have changed the nature of the writing demands faced by academics. At the same time, information and communications technologies have proliferated in the higher education setting. As the demands of academic life have changed in recent years, so the writing practices have changed too. Learning how to engage with these new kinds of genres and practices goes on throughout academics' careers, much of it in an informal way, collaborating with other people on particular projects and learning as they go along. The paper outlines characteristics of academics' ongoing professional learning, demonstrating the importance of collaborations on specific projects in generating learning in relation to intellectual and disciplinary aspects of writing, writing strategies and structures, and using digital platforms. A very wide range of digital platforms have been identified by these academics, enabling new kinds of collaboration across time and space on writing and research; but challenges around online learning are also identified, particularly the dangers of engaging in learning in public, the pressures of 'always-on'-ness, and the different values systems around publishing in different forums.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is put forward as a landmark development in the lifelong monitoring and international comparison of education. The first round of PIAAC’s Survey of Adult Skills compared performance in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments across 24 countries. However, the translation of any OECD agenda into national policies is mediated by many actors, including the media. This paper examines and compares how the national media of Japan, England and France reported on the PIAAC results of their countries and the extent to which these reports mirror key messages from the OECD’s Country Notes. It begins to trace how the OECD PIAAC agendas materialise into national policies. Although their role in this initial period was limited, we argue the roles of the media together with other policy actors must be monitored as they interact to shape possibilities for sustainable adult education policies.

This paper is about a slow hunch. A hunch that a modest interference in networked learning, that we have called public click pedagogy (PCP), may, in some instances, usefully open up a side of networked learning that is often glossed. Learning new material, developing new skills, making new discoveries can be complicated, and messy. Few of us go from inexperienced to skilled or novice to master in anything like a simple, tidy or routine manner. We often learn more from our mistakes than our successes. We sometimes find ourselves in blind alleys or chasing down rabbit holes that appear to take us nowhere.What learners actually do when they try to come to terms with a new domain via formal or informal means, tends to be secret learner business. What is commonly made visible is how successful they are in coming to terms with the domain, something which is judged by people who have demonstrated knowledge and expertise in the domain. Our hunch is that a modest exploration of secret learner business by making public the fuzzy, pragmatic and messy business of learning may work as a useful complement to those elements of learning already made public. The label PCP draws attention to three characteristics of this work: that it is made public, that ‘aha’ or click moments which in a glossed account masquerade as the product of acute insight are traced carefully, and that accounts of these practices may operate pedagogically, for the learner, and perhaps, other learners.To explore the doing of networked learning we draw parallels with the doing of science as it has been studied by scholars in the field of science, technology, and society (STS). Looking at how scientists actually do science, STS scholars came to see that accounts of science as products of the scientific method glossed the messiness, noncoherence and fuzziness of what went on in the laboratory. To Bruno Latour, in the early days of STS, science was Janus-like, with two contradictory faces: science in the making and ready made science. More recently, John Law with others have extended this line of argument to examine the performativity of noncoherence.Drawing on this work, we examine three empirical cases, one of which is the preparation of this paper. We trace the negotiation of the ideas and arguments, our learning in the making, and the noncoherences which we partially domesticate through dialogue.

This paper explores the relationship between global, regional and local influences on adult literacy policy and practice in the UK through a discourse analysis of policy-related texts. The analysis is framed by theoretical perspectives from literacy studies and socio-material theory. The paper identifies a number of specific features in the UK literacy policy environment that have mediated the influence of transnational agencies such as UNESCO, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development and the European Union. It argues for the importance of understanding adult literacy policy as part of a wider constellation of discourses and governance practices and shows how textual representations of literacy and literacy learners are powerful constituents of the policy field.

This paper considers the policy environment of adult literacy as a space within which sites of learning are shaped and given value. It explores the interplay between international, national and local visions of what literacy is, who literacy learners are and what counts as learning, thereby linking broader social formations with local practices of literacy learning. The paper briefly reviews changes in UK policy related to adult literacy over the last 40 years, identifying some of the international and national influences on it. In particular, it describes the rising importance of international policy indicators through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union. These reach into the very heart of sites of learning, via the national media, policy documents and performance indicators used to evaluate both teachers and learners. It argues that the human resources view of literacy learning that has dominated recent policy initiatives produces a moral order of literacy which organises our understanding of different sites of learning, the people active within them and the different forms of learning in which they engage. Formal learning is privileged over informal learning; standardised and measurable outcomes are preferred. The ‘good’ literacy learner is constructed as a responsible citizen contributing to global prosperity.

Living in an increasingly visual culture, Rowsell, McLean, and Hamilton illustrate the importance of critically evaluating the potential of visual literacy as a dimension of the school context. They first situate visual literacy within the school arena and then examine its relevance to learning through different visual genres. In an effort to illustrate the power of visual literacy to enhance cross‐curricular learning, the authors conclude by sharing examples of students conceptualizing and extrapolating visual literacy through the consumption and production of texts.