d) La Restauración y la Dictadura de Primo de Rivera

Foucault believes that the use of power is fundamental to understanding the modern state. For Foucault, power is a creative force. It creates a certain type of individual through their internalisation of power relations and in their interactions with their environments. He examines the development of various public institutions such as policing, medicine and mental institutions to demonstrate how the nature of power has changed over time. Scheurich and McKenzie (2005) argue that there are three shifts in Foucault’s thoughts: archaeology to genealogy to care of the self and

7 governmentality. Each of these is useful when considering the role of assessment in Irish primary schools.

1.2.1.1 The archaeological method

Foucault’s archaeological method is constructive in analysing the theme of discourse in assessment in Irish primary education. Foucault argues against modernity’s teleological assumption that history moves upward or forward. He argues that an archaeological approach to understanding concepts shows that there are displacements and transformations in their development. The history of a concept, such as assessment, is not of its progressive refinement or increasing rationality, but that of its “various fields of constitution and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured” (1989, p.5). Foucault avers that the problem of whether there is movement to difference or stable structures can be analysed in the questioning of the document. For Foucault, “history is now trying to define within documentary material itself unities, totalities, series, relations” (1989, p.7). Foucault asks that we take documentary material, such as curricular or policy documents, not at face value but question the underlying narrative in their development. He states that all documents are a product of the context in which they are written and that the discourses surrounding the production of the document should be questioned. Foucault states that discourses “do not come about of themselves, but are always the result of a construction the rules of which must be made known, and the justifications of which must be scrutinised” (1989, p.28). This is particularly relevant to my research into assessment policy in Ireland and particularly the

8 development of the Literacy and numeracy for learning and life strategy and is investigated in Chapters 4 and 6. Foucault’s argument offers a perspective through which to analyse this document to understand how it was given its structure and how the material in it relates to itself.

His argument also signals the importance of exploring the broader context in which the strategy was written. This method is not seeking to find out what intentionality is behind what is being said, it is not a history of thought. Instead it seeks to show only why the discourse could not be other than what it was, “how it assumes, in the midst of others and in relation to them, a place that no other could occupy” (1989, p.31). As well as exploring the origins of discourse, it is essential to explore the relations between them. Foucault explains that discourses give each other further status or power when they group together. He argues that the event of clinical medicine in the nineteenth century must not be regarded as a new technique of observation, or as the result of the search for pathological causes of illnesses, or as the effect of the teaching hospital, or the introduction of the concept of tissue. Instead, it should be viewed as “the establishment of a relation, in medical discourse, between a number of distinct elements, some of which concerned the status of doctors, other the institutional and technical site from which they spoke, others their position as subjects perceiving, observing, describing, teaching, etc” (1989, p.59). This conceptualisation, if applied to assessment in primary education in Ireland, implies that it is important not only to examine the document, but also the relation among the document, policymakers, teachers, pupils and the wider educational context, and indeed the relation of all these factors to each other. Foucault asserts that archaeology “analyses the degree and form of permeability of a discourse: it provides the principle of its articulation over a chain of successive events; it defines

9 the operators by which the events are transcribed into statements” (1989, p.185). I will utilise Foucault’s archaeological method as one approach in understanding the nature of assessment in Irish primary schools at present, and also to explore the development of the literacy and numeracy strategy. Foucault offers an analytical framework, which can be employed to examine policy formation (1991b, p.59-60). This focuses on an archaeology of knowledge to explore how a system came into being:

a) The limits and forms of the sayable – what is it possible to speak of?

b) The limits and forms of conservation – what disappears without a trace? What is marked as reusable?

c) The limits and forms of memory – which utterances does everyone recognise as valid/invalid?

d) The limits and forms of reactivation – what is retained from previous epochs or foreign cultures? What transformations are worked on them?

e) The limits and forms of appropriation – what individuals/groups/classes have access to a particular type of discourse?

1.2.1.2 The genealogical method

The genealogical method outlined by Foucault gives insights into the themes of control and access in assessment in primary education. Foucault argues that assessment is an instrument of the state to create its subjects (1975). He urges analysts to see new practices in education as “a practice of power that has emerged

10 and circulates more broadly in society” (Scheurich and McKenzie, 2005, p.855). Foucault uses a genealogical method to outline how disciplinary mechanisms have changed over the past three hundred years (1975). Disciplinary mechanisms were external to the person in the eighteenth century. These included such measures as flogging and the stocks, leading ultimately to the spectacle of the public execution. Foucault posits that these disciplinary mechanisms were employed so that the state could exert its power through fear. To cross the state could result in a very public punishment. However, this changed in the nineteenth century with the advent of the industrial revolution, which led to the establishment of schools. Foucault argues that the state changed from exerting power externally on its subjects to exerting power internally through its subjects. This is done by control of the body through the distribution of individuals in space; the control of activity through the manipulation of time and the instruction of the correct relation between body and gesture; and instilling the means of correct training through hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and examination (Foucault, 1975).

In education, this includes choosing the content from the curriculum, organising the classroom (including seating arrangement and the positioning of furniture), timetabling the various curricular areas and activities of the school day, and choosing what to assess and how to assess it. This process is not neutral. Through making these decisions, the teacher works through a norm, normalising whilst categorising. Foucault’s notion of the examination is particularly relevant to my research. He avers that subjects internalise the power relations of the state through a process of normalisation – by comparing oneself with what they should be like. This has led to the growth of objective and standardised tests and the development of phrases such as ‘atypical development’. In regard to this doctoral

11 dissertation, the genealogical method provides a thinking tool to analyse how assessment practices in Ireland have developed in the present day. It can open up who has access to the development of these practices and how the practices impact on the pupils. It also gives a tool to explore teachers’ assumptions about the role of assessment, as well as exploring the locus of control in the utilisation of assessment techniques between the institution, the teachers and the pupils (Chapters 6 – 9).

1.2.1.3 Governmentality

The concept of governmentality is especially beneficial when considering the development of education policy and exploring the themes of discourse, control and access. Michel Foucault argues that power relations are internalised by subjects and are not scrutinised or examined as the subjects are unaware that they have been internalised. He also avers that “the instruments of government, instead of being laws, now come to be a range of multiform tactics” (1991a, p.95). These tactics include social control mechanisms outlined in the previous section. Foucault argues against the “individualisation of discourses” (1991b, p.54). He asks what do we mean by ‘medicine’ or ‘economics’? For him, “Each discourse undergoes constant change as new utterances are added to it” (p.54). Foucault argues that one should examine how certain laws or policies came into being in the first place. For him, there are discourses that give legitimacy to each political act. These discourses limit what can be thought or spoken in the policy development process by creating the construct in which the policy is to be developed. Foucault outlines his theory of discourse analysis: “The question which I ask is not about codes but about events: the law of existence of statements, that which rendered them possible – them and

12 none other in their place: the conditions of their singular emergence; their correlation with other previous or simultaneous events, discursive or otherwise” (1991b, p.59).

Foucault argues that from the sixteenth century there is a ‘double movement’ in governmentality of state centralisation from feudalism and religious dissidence. He asserts that the art of government and policy making is “essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy – that is to say the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family and of making the family fortunes prosper” (1991a, p.92). The correct manner of managing the individual within family was replaced in the eighteenth century with the problem of population. Power is exercised through disciplinary mechanisms that reflect and regulate the norms outlined in the previous section. The mechanisms include “methods of observation, ‘productivity’ benchmarks and apparatuses of control” (O’Brien, 2012, p.552). The theory of governmentality will be central to my analysis of assessment policy development in primary education in Ireland (Chapter 4). It offers an insight into the reasons why specific modes of assessment policy were constituted rather than others.