Assessment discourse and constructions of social reality in infant classrooms |
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| Authors: | Pat Tunstall |
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| Institution: | 1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Israel juliares@mscc.huji.ac.il |
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| Abstract: | The 1968 structural reform of the education system in Israel was part both of a global process of democratization of education launched after the Second World War and of a larger modernization project in which the social sciences played a crucial role. This dynamic was an expression of a conjunction of interests, in which political forces used research on educational matters in order to advance their socio‐political agendas, while researchers used the state's interest in their work and in the ‘social problems’ they elaborated in order to receive public funding and to obtain state recognition of their scientific contribution. This article traces the reformist discourse structuration—the process of institutionalization of the different social science discourses in state institutions, such as universities and national institutes—in order to disclose the social sciences/politics linkage in Israel. It also puts forward the argument that in order to understand discourse structuration at a national level, it is essential to consider an additional factor: global education networks. Global networks adopted a discourse inspired by the American school model that tended to be adopted by scholars in different countries. The article focuses on the processes in Israel whereby knowledge producers elaborated the ‘inequality of opportunity’ and ‘ethnic gap’ social problems, and proffered the 1968 structural reform as the solution. |
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