Genealogy of the Ethics of Teacher Self-Evaluation : From Adherence to Norms to Self-Discipline through Self-Evaluation

Abstract

Quality evaluation (QE) has assumed major importance in governing education. QE is acknowledged as a self-evident and necessary method of improving quality in education across education systems. Along with the quality ‘evaluation wave’, schools and teachers have not only become objects of evaluation, but have also been subjected to increasing demands to self-evaluate. Using genealogical methodology, this chapter analyses the emergence and formation of the politics of school and teacher self-evaluation and also the power and subjectivities invoked through it in the case of Finnish comprehensive education. The research material includes curricular, legislative and education policy texts and national guidelines and textbooks on school and teacher self-evaluation in the period 1970–2014.

The chapter demonstrates how, along with these changes in policy, the ethics of the necessity for self-evaluation in Finnish basic education emerges. It shows how teachers and schools traditionally strictly governed by rules and norms and subjectified as obedient to norms have since the early 1980s transformed into the self-developing and self-evaluative teacher and school. Becoming entangled with the long histories of teachers as reflectors on their own work, these changes enabled the formation of self-evaluation as a normal and self-evident everyday practice of teachers and schools to evolve, and along with this, the related ethics of the necessity for self-evaluation to emerge. This ethics is closely entangled with and supports the governing of education through quality evaluation.