Which ‘evidence’ and whose ‘knowledge’?

Notes for Aotearoa Education Collective panel ‘Beyond the Basics: Equipping Learners for the Future’

My focus for this panel was: The word ‘evidence based’ seems to be attached to every policy idea announced.  Are all evidence bases equal? Why should we be wary of a knowledge-based curriculum and how do we move beyond the binary of knowledge and competencies?

Two decades ago the Australian education scholar Bronwyn Davies called out the new managerialism that neoliberal social and economic policies had been imposing into education.  She identified how this was causing the removal of the locus of power away from the knowledge of practising professionals, to instead empower the managerial class of auditors, policy-makers and statisticians, “none of whom need know anything about the profession in question” (Davies, 2003, p. 91).

Davies posed the following provocations:

• Which evidence should be the base, and who selects it? 

• Are those who produce the evidence and those who select it members of the profession of teaching?

• How have they chosen what counts as evidence, and how have they selected the particular evidence that is to be acted on?

• How are the links to the everyday practice of teaching to be accomplished?

• How is the teacher to alter her/his practices of teaching in light of this ‘evidence’? (Davies, 2003, p. 98)

And we could add:

• What consultation has taken place with the teaching profession to ensure that the proposed policies are relevant? 

• Have the proposed changes to practice been piloted across a diverse range of teaching contexts to ensure they are relevant and effective? and

• What supports are provided to the profession to shift their practices in line with the managerial dictates?

With regard to consideration as to ‘who’ is producing the currently proposed ‘evidence’,  Minister of Education Erica Stanford’s chief educational advisor is Michael Johnston, a cognitive psychologist and psychometrician who works for the right-wing think tank the NZ Initiative, now serving as the chair of her ministerial advisory group.

Educational philosopher Gert Biesta has critiqued the uptake of the construct of ‘evidence-based’ practice in education as delivering what he terms a “democratic deficit” (Biesta, 2010, p. 492).  Biesta emphasises how the selective use of ‘evidence’ threatens to replace professional judgement.  And furthermore shuts down wider democratic deliberation about the aims and processes of education. Biesta concluded back in 2010 that

The ‘project’ of evidence-based practice therefore urgently needs to be rethought in ways that take into consideration the limits of knowledge, the nature of social interaction, the ways in which things can work, the processes of power that are involved in this and, most importantly, the values and normative orientations that constitute social practices such as education. (p. 501)

We can see how the phrases ‘evidence-based’ and ‘the science of learning’ are employed to discourage disclosure or critical analysis as to the sources of specific ‘evidence’ or ‘science’, the agenda of those producing this ‘evidence’ or ‘science’, and how politicians and their advisors are selectively utilising this ‘evidence’ and ‘science’ to inform policy.

The frailty of the current ‘evidence-based’ reform is exposed by Newsroom journalist Laura Walters, who highlights that: “The Government’s curriculum ministerial advisory group is recommending an approach to mathematics that – in its own words – lacks evidence”. 

So ‘evidence’ is clearly being used as a trojan justification for ideological stances that are not informed by relevant local research.  Over a year ago I asked the Ministry of Education what research they had undertaken into the impacts of the decade of national standards on outcomes for children, and in particular for Māori and Pacific children.  The response:  They had not conducted any such research.

With regard to the current move towards adopting an alleged ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum, there has already been widespread critique of the power being bestowed on the narrow committee hand-picked by Minister Stanford to determine whose knowledges are privileged in the latest attempt to refresh our school curriculum.  There is a very present risk that a Euro-Western canon will become the required texts, excluding the knowledges of the majority of children in our schools, since the proportions of school enrolments of Pākehā/European students have fallen from 74% in 2001 to 44% in 2023.

A November 2022 ERO report found that 19% of tamariki Māori surveyed, or one fifth, stated that their reason for missing school was that they don’t like or aren’t interested in what is being taught at school (Education Review Office, 2022). A 2024 ERO report exploring the first year of teaching of the new Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum found that “around three in five Pacific (63 percent) and Māori (61 percent) students agree they enjoy learning about ANZ Histories” (Education Review Office, 2024, p. 6). Although interestingly, only 50% of Pākehā students agreed.

I am sure that as skilled teachers who adopt a sociocultural approach, understanding children as being culturally located, we can tune into children’s interests and build those bridges into a pre-determined,  narrowly defined ‘knowledge rich curriculum’.  It is just that some of these may need to be longer bridges than others.

Lastly, in addressing the alleged binary between knowledge and competencies, I think we can complexify rather than simplify this binocular lens, by acknowledging that in this age of superdiversity, with our children and grandchildren’s futures threatened by climate change, we should be aware that education should be responding to diversification with diversification rather than with an increasingly restricted, narrowed curriculum.  Superdiversity scholar Steven Vertovec has explained that:

Diversification is thus one of the foremost social processes of our age. As we consider the future, impacted profoundly by climate change, it is clear that diversification will continue to shape societies the world over – again in uneven and unfair ways as some people, depending on their combination of characteris­tics, will suffer climate impacts far more than others. (Vertovec, 2022, p. 2)

So one key additional lens to consider is that of a dispositional approach.  In addition to considering repertoires of both Western and other cultural knowledges and competencies, I think we should be focussing on fostering dispositions that will equip children to be able to respond and adapt to complex challenges that will be faced in the future.  Dispositions such as curiosity, open-mindedness, persistence, adaptability, resilience, cooperation, collaboration, criticality, empathy, compassion, ethicality, service to their community, kaitiakitanga, concern and caring for the environment and especially for our nation’s critically endangered biodiversity. So instead of mandating specific knowledges and competencies, let’s adopt a broadly dispositional approach that will equip tamariki to face the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

And as educators, we can also trust our own experience, our own knowledge, our repertoires of pedagogical strategies and our own dispositions of enquiry, ethicality, and empathy to critically analyse these claims of knowledge and curricular claims, remembering, as Kurt Lewin stated, "nothing is as practical as a good theory" (1945, p. 129).

References:

Biesta, G. J. J. (2010). Why ‘What Works’ Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-Based Education to Value-Based Education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(5), 491-503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9191-x

Davies, B. (2003). Death to Critique and Dissent? The Policies and Practices of New Managerialism and of 'Evidence-based Practice'. Gender and Education, 15(1), 91-103. https://doi.org/10.1080/0954025032000042167

Education Review Office. (2022). Missing out: Why aren’t our children going to school? E. R. Office. https://evidence.ero.govt.nz/documents/missing-out-why-aren-t-our-children-going-to-school

Education Review Office. (2024). Teaching histories. Implementation of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories and the refreshed Social Sciences learning area. https://evidence.ero.govt.nz/documents/teaching-histories-implementation-of-aotearoa-new-zealand-s-histories-and-the-refreshed-social-sciences-learning-area

Lewin, K. (1945). The Research Center for Group Dynamics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sociometry, 8(2), 126-136. https://doi.org/10.2307/2785233

Vertovec, S. (2022). Superdiversity: Migration and social complexity. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203503577