Will Brehm  0:52
Steven Lewis and Rebecca Spratt, welcome to FreshEd.

Steven Lewis  1:11
Thank you very much, Will. Thank you for the invitation to be part of it.

Rebecca Spratt  1:14
Yeah, thanks, Will. It’s great to be here.

Will Brehm  1:15
Congratulations on your new book. It really is absolutely fantastic. Difficult, but really pushing the boundaries of comparative education and this is what we’re going to talk about today. It is a big question but a question that I think a lot of researchers in comparative education sort of think about -and beyond really. And that question is; what is education policy?

Steven Lewis  1:35
It’s a great question, Will. Probably a really good place to start because so much of our research talks about and assumes education policy as though we all know what we’re talking about. But it makes sense to sort of get that clear from the outset, with our conversation today. You’ve asked the question, “what is policy?” And I guess we could give a pretty conventional answer to that and say, it’s something like the allocation of values by state and state like institutions. But I think talking about the book, and the thinking that Rebecca and I have been doing with the book is that what is policy is definitely a question, but I think we would maybe suggest a more appropriate question might be, what does policy do? And what are the effects of policy? You know, what function does it serve? If we’re going to talk about some of the language that we’ll get into with the book, what desires are being assembled and made consistent through the assemblage of policy? And I guess what we want to do with this book, and with this thinking is that often when we think about what is policy, we really end up getting sort of bogged down in a discussion of the bits and the pieces of it, you know, what does the text say? Who made the text, you know, when was it published, etc. And it’s not to say that this isn’t important at all, or it’s not to say that something valuable can’t come from working out the what of policy, but we would suggest maybe you might be able to find different questions and different answers from asking not just what the bits are, but also looking at how those bits have come to be, and what is it that those bits do? So, I think we would say what is policy is definitely a starting point. But we would say then, that a follow up question might be, what does policy do? Or what are the effects of policy? And that’s definitely what we tried to capture in the book.

Will Brehm  3:13
And when you say, effects of policy, and what does it do? Well, I think a lot of people would begin to focus on how is policy implemented, right? Like, what’s the relationship between policy and practice? Is that exactly what you’re saying? Or are you sort of saying something slightly different?

Steven Lewis  3:30
Definitely not thinking about the effects of policy in an evaluation sense, you know, like this policy was designed to improve reading levels 80% and only increased them 70% or something. So, we’re not taking an evaluation sort of mindset to look at what we’re really doing is saying, what is it that policy enables? So, what does it mean about how we think about education, what it means for how we practice education? What does it do to the conditions of possibility for how education can be thought and thought otherwise? So, it’s really not so much an evaluation framework, but really, what does policy make possible to do with regards to education? So, what does it mean to the people making policy? What does it mean for the people implementing it, be they teachers or student leaders? What does it mean, when we think about how effective or otherwise our school systems might be? So, it’s really what is the imaginary power of policy? What does it enable? And what does it constrain?

Will Brehm  4:22
Yeah. You have a quote in your book where you say something about “the world building nature of policy” and I like that idea because it’s something about becoming and future creating.

Rebecca Spratt  4:31
And I think to add on to what Steven said, the moving away from just asking what is it leads us also to think about why has certain policies come into being? What broader purposes are they serving in our school institutions or in our broader society? And moving to that question of why I think also helps to move away from getting bogged down in those details of know exactly what does this policy say or what does that policy say? What is it enabling in that particular situation or a circumstance?

Will Brehm  4:59
Yeah. Before we get into all of the different conceptual work and theoretical work that this book does, maybe we need to ask this other broad question of not just what is policy, but why on earth should we even study it as scholars?

Rebecca Spratt  5:14
Yeah, great question, Will. And I think there’s a few different answers to that. One is that policy is quite ubiquitous. Policy affects all different aspects of our lives, and particularly within education. While there’s a tendency to think of policy as something that perhaps sits within just government institutions or elite spaces, it flows through everything that we do within education and within the system. So, that’s one obvious reason why. Another is because -and what we would argue and what we’ve said in the book- is that policy in some ways is really like an entry point. Or it’s an opportunity to really consider what are some of the broader interests or concerns or agendas that are motivating what we’re doing within education and what’s happening. And they speaks not just to, I think, what we might think about as specific educational technical issues -to how to improve reading, or what we’re teaching in our classrooms- but broader social issues. What is education doing in our broader society culture. So, in that sense, policy is a really useful way to considering those broader questions.

Will Brehm  6:21
Recently, I feel like there’s been so much talk, at least maybe in the world that I’m living in, and the context, but there’s so much talk on like brain science and neuroscience and its impact on learning. And it’s a discourse, it’s a policy, but it’s totally changing the way people see and justify what they do in their work. And in a way, I could see how that policy -if we call it that- is actually creating a future where brain science becomes so important in everything we’re supposedly doing. And we have to reframe, and think differently. We end up wanting to justify our own work to have some impact on brain science, or how brain science might somehow impact my work. I don’t know. I mean, I can see how these ideas become so important and so powerful in the way we understand education, and how they can change over time.

Rebecca Spratt  7:14
And I think, the value of really questioning and looking at issues around policy is that it gets to those questions of “Yeah, why are we even educating? And what are we educating for? What does education mean to us?” And there’s a real danger, I think that, you know, as you get more and more concerned about AI, and more and more concerned about test scores and results, and things like that, we move away from those broader questions of what are we actually trying to do here? And what does education do for our society? And therefore, also, what do we need to do within education?

Will Brehm  7:43
So, in this sense, I guess, your focus on education policy, are you sort of saying that you can use policy as like this entry point, you can really begin to study education policy, but you can then get into some philosophical issues about what the purpose and value of education is through looking and exploring and understanding how policy is creating certain values?

Rebecca Spratt  8:03
Yeah, for sure. And I think we would argue that now more than ever, we need to be considering those questions. That there’s a lot that we take for granted within education. There’s a lot that goes unquestioned that we just assume, “this is how we do things”. And I think a lot of us are feeling right now in the world that we’re in, now’s a good time to be saying, well, do we want to keep doing things in this way?

Will Brehm  8:24
So, to start unpacking, you know, some of your approach, you pull together different theoretical resources to study education policy, and the first let’s say, resource or theoretical approach is what’s called policy mobilities. So, what is policy mobility? What value do you find in that approach?

Steven Lewis  8:43
Yeah. So, it’s a good place to start, I guess, if we’re considering our approach overall, as PMAT. The PM is policy mobility. So, for those of you playing along at home, the first two letters policy mobilities, in the name really suggests that we’re dealing with how policy moves. What are the processes by how it moves, what are the effects that it has when it moves, and also what are the effects on policy as it moves through space? So, maybe to take a step back, Will, one of the things that conventional analyses of policy would have normally looked at would have been looking at the state and government as the sole locus of power and authority for making policy, you know. All policy sort of emanated outwards from the capital -from the bureaucracy. And of course, what we’ve seen now is that we’ve had an empirical change where you no longer have the government being the sole arbiter of policymaking. You’ve got different actors and organizations being involved. Some of them are intergovernmental organizations such as the OECD, you’ve got private actors and organizations such as corporations or philanthropic foundations and the like, civil society actors as well. So, in that respect, we’re trying to use policy mobilities as it was sort of initially intended, which is to try to capture the nuances and the breadth of these actors and processes involved in policymaking. It’s no longer in the ministerial office alone. It’s also in lots of other places. Now, I guess we should also say that it’s not that the ministerial office doesn’t matter. We’re not saying that governments cease to be important to policymaking and they cease to be of importance to what comes out and the processes through which it’s made. But through policy mobilities, we’re trying to capture that different sites, and different people, and different places are really having an input into policy. And then I think the second thing that it really aims to do, in addition to capturing the different spaces and people who are involved in policymaking is that it’s really trying to say that as policy moves, it’s not moving in this sort of perfect facsimile from one place to another. A lot of sorts of earlier understandings of globalization really saw it as things moving from the global North to the global South, or from the capital to the hinterlands, or whatever other sort of analogies you want to use; something happened up top in the global level, and it got done to more local and national levels. And what we would argue through policy mobilities, is that it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. You might use language like “bits of elsewhere unfolded into here”. And that applies, whether it’s a part of the global North being unfolded into a more local place, but also equally, if a policy comes from the global North -say, a policy from the OECD, for instance- how that’s taken up and enacted and understood and negotiated at a local level, you know, there’s an inflection there in terms of it’s not just the original policy, it’s the original policy, but with a particular spin on it as well. And it’s really not able to be predicted how it’s going to look. So, you know, while you might notionally have a common policy, that might equally have a whole different variety of it. They’re all variations on a theme, if you like. And this isn’t just to do internationally as well. I mean, policy mobilities often is used in a comparative education sense or in a global policymaking sense. But equally, you could also look at how policy from state or provincial level governments playing out across different schools within that state. You can look at a federal system such as the US, or Australia, or Canada, and understand how decisions made at the federal level are understood and enacted and negotiated at the state levels. So, I think policy mobilities, in a nutshell, recognizes that policy moves but I think it’s really trying to get to the heart of the complicating factors in that what happens to policy as it moves, and what happens to the spaces into which and through that policy moves. Both of them are sort of really shaping and reshaping each other.

Will Brehm  12:36
I think in comparative ed, was it Bob Cowen, who sort of said, “as it moves, it morphs”. And ‘it morphs’ being both the policy but also the location in which that policy exists, right? And I think that’s what you’re sort of saying, there’s this interplay between the two. They’re both sort of changing and the question is, how, in what way, and who’s involved and does become, I think you use the word conceptual mess. So, how then do we go about it right, as researchers? If it is this messy process, and it looks so different in different locations in different times, where do we begin?

Steven Lewis  13:12
I mean, I’m looking at Rebecca, who’s just finishing up her PhD, and I’m looking at myself who has been doing research in this space for a long time. And where we begin is often the hardest question. Look, I think, a conceptual but productive mess is a generous way to describe it. And I don’t see that as a pejorative in a way. It’s a conceptual mess, I think, because it draws across so many different academic traditions. It draws across critical geography, it draws across Urban Studies, it draws across Policy Studies in Education, it’s often seen most frequently in comparative education and policy, sociology. And I think it’s also interesting because methodologically it’s quite interesting. I often have methodologies where there’s a really clear way you need to go about it, you know, that’s a recipe of sorts. You’re following the methodology that was handed down on high from some sage previously. And I think in policy mobilities, there’s a real clear recognition that because the empirical is so contingent and emergent, and unknown, there’s an ad hockery if you like, to policy mobilities. So, there are lots of different methodological traditions and approaches you can draw on. You can do a lot of desktop ethnography and research, you can do “follow the policy” type approach where the case study is in a particular bounded geographical space, but you follow the policy as it moves through these different places and you follow who are the actors and organizations inputting into that policy and shaping it as it moves, you can do the whole moving around and doing international travel and speaking with these quite mobile policy actors themselves, and I think what makes policy mobilities a bit of a methodological mess, but arguably, it’s a mess that’s necessary to reflect the current empirical state of policymaking is that you attend to where policy is being made, you attend to the place is where these practices are occurring, you don’t necessarily go in with this preconceived idea of, well, I will look here, and this is where I’ll find it. You really need to be attuned to the on the ground reality, if you like, of policymaking. And often that becomes a bit of a, you need to find the entry point where you can. So, it might be, “Okay, I’m interested in policymaking in the Pacific” -and Rebecca will talk about this in more detail later in our conversation. But it might be a case that you start off with a policy document, and then okay, well, who contributed to this policy document, and where, and when, and under what circumstances did that occur, and what was the timeline of that document being created. So, you’re really sort of, if you like, you know, thinking about True Crime type fascination we have at the moment where you get a pinboard and you’re drawing all the links between the relevant actors, and you know, who did what when. It’s really taking that type of emergent approach where you go in with a set of research or dispositions if you’d like, but you’re not necessarily sure how they’re going to unfold or what you’re going to uncover. And so, it’s been quite attuned to that sense of on the ground contingency, which we would argue even if it makes it a little bit less certain going in, it definitely more accurately reflects the processes under which policy is made in this contemporary moment.

Rebecca Spratt  16:12
So, yeah, I mean, Will you asked where do we begin when we’re doing this kind of policy research, and something we say throughout the book is that we begin in the middle, because we are always in the middle of these things. And as researchers, we are part of the policy assemblages and the policy worlds that we are studying. So, we can’t extract ourselves from this, which does make it pretty challenging, I think. And it does make it feel as Steven said, it can feel quite ad hoc. It feels like you’re just muddling your way through. But I think what we were trying to do in trying to bring the ideas of policy mobilities, together with ideas around assemblage theory, which comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s work is learning to be okay with feeling in the middle of things and learning to not try to find the starting point. And I think that’s something I would emphasize. In conventional ways of looking at policy, we’re often concerned with, “Well, where did this policy start, who first came up with it”? This policy was written in 2015, therefore, that’s the starting point. But what we would argue is that, well, it’s not actually a very helpful question to try to answer to find the starting point. Because from the kind of theoretical frameworks that we bring, we understand these things to be continually in the becoming, and continually influenced by whatever is happening within that moment. And so, another response to the question of where do we start, or where do we begin is with the empirical. Is with what is happening within that moment, that situation and trying to understand the dynamics of that situation without recourse to saying, well, it’s the World Bank, who’s there, and the World Bank is powerful, and therefore, the World Bank is having this effect while the World Bank in a particular moment, in a particular place, may not be powerful. We can’t make those assumptions. We need to look at what are the particular empirical situation of whatever we’re looking at, and try to understand what’s happening in that moment.

Will Brehm  18:10
Yeah. I love it. It’s like you are sort of saying the hunt for an origin is futile because if everything is becoming, then that origin itself also was in this process of becoming. And so, it’s sort of theoretically impossible to ever actually get to that starting point. And then at the same time, you’re also saying that power works very differently than perhaps a lot of people often assume in some of the research by the boogeyman of the World Bank coming in and doing bad things to different countries, which maybe that’s true, but it’s a lot more complicated than that, and complex and power is operating in other ways, as well. So, Rebecca, you did bring up assemblage theory. And so, I think we should get into that, because that’s sort of the second half of your theoretical intervention, which when I read it, I called it P-mat. I don’t know if it was PMAT, or if I should say, P-Mat but whatever. But the second half of PMAT was assemblage theory. So, what is that? I know, it can get a bit complicated, but I’m more interested in how does assemblage theory sort of move the focus of policy mobilities forward in a productive way in your mind?

Rebecca Spratt  19:15
Yeah, and you’re right, Will. I mean, assemblage theory can get very challenging. Deleuze and Guattari’s work is known for being very interesting reading, but I don’t want to put anyone off trying to read that work because, well, certainly, Steven and I have found that is that it can be very generative. But I think what’s a good starting place for thinking about assemblage theory is, Deleuze and Guattari often say that that every idea or concept we have is a response to some kind of problem. And we might think about assemblage theory as kind of a response to the problem of why do we behave the way that we do? Why do we respond or behave and in particular situations in response to particular institutions or other people, why do we behave in those ways? And assemblage theory really offers us a way to understand the reasons for our behavior without recourse to identity, really. So, Deleuze and Guattari really are kind of trying to challenge this idea of people and things having a fixed identity, and the identity of something explaining why it behaves the way it does, or the effects that it has. So, as an example, we might think about teachers and meet someone who was a teacher, and we might assume some things from that identity about the way that they behave. But as we all know, teachers behave in lots of different ways, and they behave in different ways in different moments in different situations. And so assemblage theory is Deleuze and Guattari’s offering of how we can understand how those behaviors come to be by focusing, as I was saying before about really those particular interactions within any given moment, and the interactions between what we might think of as our material world, like bodies, and tables, and buildings, and trees, the material things in our world, and our kind of discursive, or you might call our discursive structures, our kind of thinking structures, our language, and the kind of historical problematizations, or historical ways of thinking about things that we’ve acquired over time, and how those things interact to help us understand in the world and respond to the world around us. So, you might ask, what does that got to do with policy because it sounds like some much broader, I guess, philosophical and psychosocial kind of approach, and it is. I mean, Deleuze and Guattari were developing assemblage theory as a much broader way of thinking about the world. But what we try to do in the book is to bring that to bear on the particular question of policy, and particularly how policy moves.

Will Brehm  22:02
And what did you find? How do they come together?

Rebecca Spratt  22:05
Well, we found after many conversations, and I think this was one of the fun things about doing the book, and the interesting thing about the process is that it did require a lot of conversation between us because we were coming from slightly different starting points in a way. And I think one of the things, I mean, Steven might have a different response from me, but one of the things that I think assemblage theory does when we join it with policy mobilities is, again to challenge that idea of what policy is. So, to really push us to challenge the ontology of policy. So, even as Steven was talking before, about policy mobilities being interested in how policy moves from one place to another, when we bring assemblage theory into that, we have to really push ourselves away from thinking of policy as a thing, as an entity that is moving from a bounded place to another place, in places that we can name and from those names, make some assumptions about them. Assemblage theory really pushes us to think about how those things come into be as they are within those moments. It’s challenging to kind of, I guess, describe in an abstract way. And I think, as you rightly said at the outset, Will, it’s hard. It really pushes -well, it has certainly pushed me to think differently, because it’s certainly different from what I’ve been brought up to believe how the world works. And I guess our overall argument would be that that might not always answer every question you have but it’s actually a really fruitful process to go through to just force yourself to think differently about things and challenge some of those assumptions that we often make.

Steven Lewis  23:39
And I might just add in there as well, Will, to just amplify what Rebecca is saying; when we think about policy -often more conventional takes on policy analysis, and even more critical post structurally sort of informed critiques of policy- often we’re interested in what the policy is, what are the effects, how is it doing the thing it’s doing? Very often one of the questions that were sort of a little bit weary to answer or to offer a response to is why is it the way it is? And I think that why question when there’s post structural sort of informing of research it’s coming from not a bad place, it’s saying, Well, you know, we can’t get an intention. So, we can’t make any knowledge claims about why something happened. And I think often that is a limitation with a lot of policy analysis. Not that we shouldn’t make claims if we’re asking questions, or using theories or approaches that don’t enable us to respond to that question, but I think one of the really beautiful things around bringing together policy mobilities and assemblage theory is that we can look at policy, we can look at the dynamism of policy, and how it moves and what happens when it moves between different places. How does it make place as it moves, how does it create new policy spaces where previously there weren’t any you know? A focus of the book for instance, is looking at the Pacific and regionalism and policymaking within the Pacific. Now of course, there is no such thing as the Pacific apart from the Pacific that we create. You know, it doesn’t exist outside of out of humans and nor does any sort of given region -a policymaking region, a geographical region. I mean, they’re all arbitrary lines on a map somewhere. So, I think why it even makes sense for a region such as the Pacific to develop a policymaking framework around education development, which is notionally sort of the empirical case that we explore throughout the book, why that even makes sense to do for the policy actors involved, for the organizations involved, what the purpose of that policy might be, you really need this sort of toolbox type approach to explore those questions in greater detail, because what we’re really trying to encourage with the book, and that’s certainly something that was key to that philosophical project of Deleuze and Guattari, is, we need to ask different questions. We need to ask and destabilize those taken for granted assumptions we have about things. Things are because that’s what they are. It’s like, well, maybe we need to start thinking about policy in terms of what it does, and making sense of it and trying to understand it on the basis of what it makes possible. So, it’s definitely been a big intellectual labor on our end, but I think that’s ultimately like these things take time, right? So, you know, it’s taken us well over two years to write this book. A big part of that is the conversations. And I think having those conversations and thinking differently about a problem and about a concept that you thought you previously understood very well is really at the heart of all research. And I guess we’ll leave it to the readers and your listeners to determine how successful we’ve been at that. But that’s definitely been the sort of thread that ties together the purpose of the book; how do we think differently about policy and policy research, and all the attendant concepts that go with that to maybe make different insights possible?

Will Brehm  26:36
And you’re really generous to the reader, I should say, always sort of saying, this is how we think and, trying to be very clear, and then inviting future researchers to sort of push this forward, push this in new ways, refute what you write, I mean, you’re quite generous in the way you’ve written this book. One of the things, Steven, that you said in the beginning of our conversation was something about desire, and I’ve read a little bit of Deleuze and Guattari in my time, and I know in assemblage theory, desire is so important. So, how do you see the connection with desire and some of these questions that you’re beginning to ask about policy?

Rebecca Spratt  27:12
Good question, Will. In some ways, I wish Deleuze and Guattari hadn’t used the word desire because obviously, that word conjures a lot of meaning for people when they hear it. And within assemblage theory, desire is not the kind of desire that we normally think of as when we desire something that we want, something that we don’t currently have, and that we wished we did have. For Deleuze and Guattari as I understand it, desire is really a name for that kind of underlying energy in a way that animates our lives and brings our lives into becoming to use that language. And the critical point within assemblage theory is that in our social world, desire never exists in a form other than within an assemblage. So, desire is always assembled. And the way that I like to think about it is, if you think of desire as that more kind of broader energy force in a sense, but that when it comes into contact with the material world and discourses and ideas, it becomes attached to things, I guess, and in that way, make certain things desirable, to use the word in that way. And so, what assemblages do and the real focus of assemblage theory is help us understand how things become desirable, how things become significant, and how different in a plain English, different desires for things are made consistent in our world. So, you know, one example might be, I think it’s we can talk about a general desire that most of us feel that we want to be recognized for what we do, we want to be appreciated and recognized as competent, good human beings. But we also have a desire that recognition to be done fairly, and for us all to be for a sense that we recognize in a similar way, or in a fair way, compared to other people. And if you put those two desires into the context of a schooling system, for example, then you can see how something like an examination system or a testing regime -you know, something like PISA, or here in Australia, we have something called NETPLAN, which is a national testing system- that then serves that function of bringing those desires into consistency because it enables us to be recognized but it also enables us to do that in what seems to be a fair way, but as many of us know, in the education space that can have lots of sometimes unintended and unexpected consequences as well. And so I guess what assemblage does in terms of thinking in terms of orienting us towards thinking about desire is that it helps us see that even the things that we might not see as positive or helpful in the world may still be things that we as a society, or we as a broader collective do desire in a sense, but it’s the way that it becomes mediated within our broader structures that produce the kind of different results it does at times.

Will Brehm  30:19
It’s such a great example that you gave about the different tests and the different desires and how they can come into the being and then sort of produce certain effects and reshape those school systems, for instance -if that’s what we’re looking at. So, I think desire can be difficult, but it is valuable, and I can really understand and see that. So, your book is in a book series on comparative education out of the Bristol University Press. So, the question, I guess, is; what do some of these theoretical insights and this particular approach to studying policy, what does it say about comparison? Because ultimately, I think you do sort of critique some of the foundational ideas of comparison. So, how might comparison itself change and be thought of differently from this approach?

Steven Lewis  31:04
I mean, it’s something we definitely set out to think about and think about differently. And I guess you could describe it as a critique of how comparison has been conventionally done. But I guess we would be very, very upfront and readily implicate ourselves in that critique. You know, we would describe ourselves as comparative educationalists ourselves, and we’re far from trying to police the correct or appropriate way to do research between different places. But I think the question around difference is key here. And difference in a few different ways. With comparison, there’s an acknowledgment that things are different, there’s an acknowledgement that things aren’t the same. But there’s also a sense that for our lives to be made understandable, accessible, you know, for us to be able to navigate day to day experience readily, we do sort of abstract things slightly. And you know, we use a sort of tongue in cheek example, at the beginning of the book, saying, a Thai restaurant is not the same as an Italian restaurant but if you abstract above the level far enough you can sort of get to the point where they are both restaurants that make a particular cuisine, and you can go there and exchange money for food. So, it’s not to say they are the same but again, if you adopt enough of a bird’s eye view, then some of those more particular differences become not quite so apparent at a certain level. And we kind of feel that it’s worthwhile thinking about the notion of comparison, because when we compare between places, there’s a sense that even those schooling systems are clearly deeply embedded in geography, and in the culture and the history, and the language and politics of the place in which they are to be found. They reflect their communities as much as they shape their communities. But often, when we come to these broad, sort of large-scale international tests, like Rebecca alluded to earlier with the OECD’s PISA test, when we look to compare between different schooling systems in countries, you know, to use a very well-worn example that will be familiar to many listeners, PISA performance and making Finland the poster child of global education. So many people would look to Finland. Lots of Finnish educationalists will tell you about education, tourism that basically cropped up overnight in Finland, where people wanted to learn from the Finnish miracle, what do we do to become more like Finland? And we think that’s at the heart of some of the tension within comparative education. Just because things look the same, or sound the same, just because that schooling system has classrooms, and teachers and students, and the schooling system over here has classrooms and teachers and students, it doesn’t mean that they are the same thing. We use the example as well, in the book, where we’re looking at particular ministries of education in Oceania. Now Oceania includes -if you draw wide enough sort of inclusion- Australia, New Zealand, so, large, more developed countries, and then very small microstates in a small Pacific Island countries. Now they both have ministries of education, but then also not the same thing. So again, we sort of tend to efface difference so that we can understand complex phenomena, complex collections of actors and organizations. But I think the danger is that when we try to do that, we lose the particularity of the places at which we’re looking, you know, because things look and sound the same doesn’t mean they are but nor does it mean that they are trying to be the same or that they want to or should be the same. Often, we understand what a place is only through reference to something else. But really, we would argue that probably doing a disservice to two places there. You can understand a place as not being like that, but it’s also a place independent of that second point of comparison, right? And there’s something there, we think. And this has implications for how we do comparative and international education. Two different policies can equally be of the same assemblage, even if they notionally look the same, notionally look different. So, what we’re really trying to get at with the book and the approach we’re taking is to really scratch beneath the surface. Things that are superficially the same or different upon deeper inspection aren’t the case. But yet, we often make very, very significant decisions around policy and practice that have quite wide ranging effects for the young people in our schools, for our broader communities, the teachers who work in these schools, and I think we sort of owe it to them, if we’re thinking about doing research in these places, and in these communities to give more than like a passing nod to the importance that each of these places are quite unique. And we can only ever know them to a limited degree when we understand them through something else.

Will Brehm  35:36
It’s like you’re trying to move away from focusing on identity, as Rebecca said earlier, and getting into the behaviors, the relations, the desires that get produced in these assemblages of various material things and discursive things.

Rebecca Spratt  35:51
Yeah. And I think to add on to what Steven was saying, and to reflect a message that we do repeat through the book was this thinking and this approach that we are offering here is not the solution to all questions, and it’s not going to be useful for everyone, and it’s not useful for all situations. But what it does do, I think, is, again, direct us to, in some ways been present in the moment that we’re in. And whatever we might be studying, whatever we’re looking at, or whatever situation we might be working in, and as policy actors or as educators to think about what can I do within the constraints and opportunities of this situation at this moment to do something differently, or to produce the result that we might want to produce? So, rather than being concerned with trying to compare or trying to make more generalized statements, this way of thinking is more about looking at what can we do within particular situations and what opportunities are afforded in those situations?

Will Brehm  36:57
Well, Steven Lewis and Rebecca Spratt, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, I think you’ve made a huge contribution to the field. And I do encourage people to go and read the book because it will push your thinking in new directions, in different directions, and maybe some uncomfortable directions.

Rebecca Spratt  37:11
Thanks very much, Will.

Steven Lewis  37:12
Thank you very much for the opportunity, Will, thank you.

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