Beyond the western horizon: Rethinking education, values, and policy transfer

Abstract

Over the past four decades, the dominant understanding of education policy has shifted dramatically. In the past, education policy was seen as a reflection of particular historical, political, social, economic, and cultural configurations of a given country. Today, policy is increasingly understood as heavily influenced by extra-national forces, so much so that policies “elsewhere” are seen as possible reform options. This has given rise to many dominant trends in education policy today: the OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA), the discourses of “best practice, " the dominance of the World Bank in the “developing” world, and now even attempts to borrow from “high performing” countries to improve education policy and practice at home. This chapter critically reexamines the implicit backdrop of existing education policy research, foregrounding the limitations of its universalist logics and underlying provincialism, and reframes the discussion within the ontoepistemic possibility for pluriversality. Drawing on Walter Mignolo’s work, we propose a new framework for understanding the nature of education policy studies, comprising five main research trajectories that are shaping global futures: re-westernization, global reorientation to the left, de-westernization, decoloniality, and spiritual/ontological options. This framework also requires that we as researchers think seriously about the values that underpin our scholarship and reflect on what sort of global futures our work seeks to contribute to.