Jessica Holloway
Biographic Data
| ID | 3650396 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Holloway |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Holloway |
| SIGNATURE | HOLLOWAY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian Catholic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9267-3197 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Validity First: The Politics, Governance, and Consequences of Teacher Evaluation
Debates over teacher evaluation and teacher effectiveness have largely focused on methodological refinement, particularly the technical adequacy of value-added models (VAMs). Far less attention has been paid to the validity of the evidentiary foundations on which these systems rest. In this theoretical synthesis of validity theory related to use, interpretation, and consequences, we argue that validity must be treated not as a technical property …
The multiple societal roles of teachers in England: Accountability, pedagogy and safety
Different educational systems, especially in highly accountable and so-called soft accountability systems place varying expectations on teachers. This study examines how different approaches to school accountability shape perceived roles and responsibilities by teachers. The study was conducted using the discursive dislocation method whereby four English and four Finnish teachers observed each other’s work in authentic situations. Data included o…
Teacher collaboration: How Conditions of Accountability Shape Teachers’ Autonomy, Responsibilities, and Relationships
Technical agonism: Embracing democratic dissensus in the datafication of education
This paper interrogates whether technical democracy is well-suited to contend with possible technical controversies, including the increasing prevalence of EdTech in public schooling. Drawing across Habermasian 'deliberative democracy' that seeks consensus-derived resolution, as well as more agonistic approaches that embrace conflict as the means for pursuing pluralistic values, we use this paper to problematise technical democracy for its potent…
Evaluating the validity evidence surrounding use of value-added models to evaluate teachers: A systematic review
Local education agencies (LEAs) continue to use value-added models (VAMs) for teacher evaluation policies and purposes, often with consequences attached. Although the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides more flexibility to LEAs, few have discontinued VAM use, suggesting they interpret VAMs as a valid measure of teacher effectiveness. In this systematic review, we used a framework built on the Standards of Educational and Psychological Test…
Humanising feedback encounters: A qualitative study of relational literacies for teachers engaging in technology-enhanced feedback
Modes of feedback such as audio or video are thought to foster relationality because they humanise feedback encounters. Few studies have examined teacher feedback literacies for relationality. This knowledge gap is significant as students want to be seen by their teachers and for their teachers to express care within the feedback encounter. Teacher feedback literacies are the knowledges, skills and dispositions needed to enhance and sustain a stu…
Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: A collective biography
In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging ca…
Democracy and teachers: The im/possibilities for pluralisation in evidence-based practice
In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers’ capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault’s discipline with Connolly’s pluralisation, we argue that evidence-based practice disciplines teachers to comply with a prescribed set of crite…
Anti-standardization and testing opt-out movements in education: Resistance, disputes and transformation
Testing, scoring comparison and accountability policies have become a ubiquitous part of schooling across most countries in the 21st century. The persistence of these hyper-surveillance measures has occurred in spite of an accumulative and increasing amount of evidence that illustrates negative effects of these kinds of policies. Meanwhile, diverse school actors have grown increasingly skeptical of how tests are being used, leading various groups…
Teachers and educational policy: Markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance
This double special issue, “Teachers and educational policy: markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance” explores the figurative politics of the teacher in current education systems around the world. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss how and why teachers have emerged as a key focus of contemporary policy reform. We argue that teachers are seen as a logical site of public commentary in the global knowledge economy, yet teac…
Governing teachers through datafication: Physical-virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability
In this paper, we draw on Foucault's and Deleuze's theorisations of discipline and control, respectively, to understand a teacher accountability system in the US state of Texas: the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (hereafter, T-TESS). Specifically, we focus on the interplay of physical and virtual modes of governance - which we develop here as physical- virtual hybridity - and the techniques that make these physical and virtual domain…
Teachers and teaching: (Re)thinking Professionalism, Subjectivity and Critical Inquiry
The collection of papers presented in this issue of Critical Studies in Education adds to the expansive body of work on teachers and teaching. Collectively, the papers draw our attention to new ways the field is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. With this editorial introduction to the issue, I not only summarise the various themes of the collection, but also offer a provocat…
Teacher accountability, datafication and evaluation: A case for reimagining schooling
The purpose of this commentary is to push the boundaries (real and perceived) of how we think about teacher accountability, education and the purpose of schooling in contemporary times. It takes as a starting point a view that recent changes to the Every Student Succeeds Act does little to shift the underpinning logics of high-stakes teacher accountability that ultimately threaten the stability and adaptability of public schools. Building from th…
Standards without standardisation? Assembling standards-based reforms in Australian and US schooling
Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of ‘globa…
Discourse analysis as theory, method, and epistemology in studies of education policy
Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relatio…
Datafying the teaching ‘profession’: Remaking the professional teacher in the image of data
This paper explores how data-driven practices and logics have come to reshape the possibilities by which the teaching profession, and teaching professionals, can be known and valued. Informed by the literature and theorising around educational performativity, the constitutive power of numbers, and affective responses to data, it shows how different US educators experienced, and came to embody, new forms of numbers-based accountability. Drawing on…
Re-professionalizing teaching: The new professionalism in the United States
This article examines the re-professionalization of teaching across a transformative decade of market-based and standards-based reforms in the U.S.A. The first section works with the sociological concept of the ‘new professionalism’ to situate the No Child Left Behind act, Race to the Top, and CAEP accreditation within a broader movement to align the professions with the commercial and managerial values of the private sector. The next section com…
How is an inclusive agenda possible in an excluding education system? Revisiting the Danish Dilemma
The policy of inclusion in the Scandinavian countries is often related to the idea of the welfare state, and specifically to notions of equality, equity and democracy. The image of the welfare state seems to live well, even though structural and social barriers seem to maintain inequality when it comes to access to education. Instead of overcoming the barriers, the politics of inclusion may actually make the gap between ideals and realities more …
Examining the influence of international large-scale assessments on national education policies
This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy-making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in…
Teacher evaluation as an onto-epistemic framework
This article analyzes the constitutive and productive effects of one US middle school’s teacher evaluation system, and the way it operates to (re)make teacher subjects. Using transcripts from interviews with teachers and evaluators, as well as policy and system protocol documents, the article demonstrates how a positive evaluation discourse has become the structuring framework for legitimizing high-stakes evaluation, normalizing constant surveill…
Make money, get money: How Two Autonomous Schools Have Commercialised Their Services
Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper illustrates how the current marketised articulation of education is allowing for new possibilities of commerc…
Risky teachers: Mitigating risk through high-stakes teacher evaluation in the USA
As a post-structural critique of US teacher evaluation policy, this paper aims to disrupt accepted conceptualizations of teachers by (1) identifying discursive constructions of teachers in political talk, action, and legislation; (2) unpacking the ways that these constructions operate to legitimize punitive accountability policies and practices; and (3) mapping the associated accountability practices used by one school district to understand how …
Making accountable teachers: The terrors and pleasures of performativity
This article draws from Stephen Ball’s work on markets, managerialism, and performativity to frame a comparative study that examines the reconstitution of the teacher–subject across a pivotal decade in which neoliberal standards and accountability reforms effected significant changes in US education. It juxtaposes two qualitative studies conducted during the implementation of successive standards and accountability movements. The first study of e…
Making accountable teachers: The terrors and pleasures of performativity
This article draws from Stephen Ball’s work on markets, managerialism, and performativity to frame a comparative study that examines the reconstitution of the teacher–subject across a pivotal decade in which neoliberal standards and accountability reforms effected significant changes in US education. It juxtaposes two qualitative studies conducted during the implementation of successive standards and accountability movements. The first study of e…
Re-professionalizing teaching: The new professionalism in the United States
This article examines the re-professionalization of teaching across a transformative decade of market-based and standards-based reforms in the U.S.A. The first section works with the sociological concept of the ‘new professionalism’ to situate the No Child Left Behind act, Race to the Top, and CAEP accreditation within a broader movement to align the professions with the commercial and managerial values of the private sector. The next section com…
Standards without standardisation? Assembling standards-based reforms in Australian and US schooling
Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of ‘globa…
Risky teachers: Mitigating risk through high-stakes teacher evaluation in the USA
As a post-structural critique of US teacher evaluation policy, this paper aims to disrupt accepted conceptualizations of teachers by (1) identifying discursive constructions of teachers in political talk, action, and legislation; (2) unpacking the ways that these constructions operate to legitimize punitive accountability policies and practices; and (3) mapping the associated accountability practices used by one school district to understand how …
Examining the influence of international large-scale assessments on national education policies
This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy-making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in…
Discourse analysis as theory, method, and epistemology in studies of education policy
Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relatio…
Democracy and teachers: The im/possibilities for pluralisation in evidence-based practice
In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers’ capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault’s discipline with Connolly’s pluralisation, we argue that evidence-based practice disciplines teachers to comply with a prescribed set of crite…
Teachers and teaching: (Re)thinking Professionalism, Subjectivity and Critical Inquiry
The collection of papers presented in this issue of Critical Studies in Education adds to the expansive body of work on teachers and teaching. Collectively, the papers draw our attention to new ways the field is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. With this editorial introduction to the issue, I not only summarise the various themes of the collection, but also offer a provocat…
How is an inclusive agenda possible in an excluding education system? Revisiting the Danish Dilemma
The policy of inclusion in the Scandinavian countries is often related to the idea of the welfare state, and specifically to notions of equality, equity and democracy. The image of the welfare state seems to live well, even though structural and social barriers seem to maintain inequality when it comes to access to education. Instead of overcoming the barriers, the politics of inclusion may actually make the gap between ideals and realities more …
Teacher evaluation as an onto-epistemic framework
This article analyzes the constitutive and productive effects of one US middle school’s teacher evaluation system, and the way it operates to (re)make teacher subjects. Using transcripts from interviews with teachers and evaluators, as well as policy and system protocol documents, the article demonstrates how a positive evaluation discourse has become the structuring framework for legitimizing high-stakes evaluation, normalizing constant surveill…
Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: A collective biography
In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging ca…
Governing teachers through datafication: Physical-virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability
In this paper, we draw on Foucault's and Deleuze's theorisations of discipline and control, respectively, to understand a teacher accountability system in the US state of Texas: the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (hereafter, T-TESS). Specifically, we focus on the interplay of physical and virtual modes of governance - which we develop here as physical- virtual hybridity - and the techniques that make these physical and virtual domain…
Make money, get money: How Two Autonomous Schools Have Commercialised Their Services
Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper illustrates how the current marketised articulation of education is allowing for new possibilities of commerc…
Making accountable teachers: The terrors and pleasures of performativity
This article draws from Stephen Ball’s work on markets, managerialism, and performativity to frame a comparative study that examines the reconstitution of the teacher–subject across a pivotal decade in which neoliberal standards and accountability reforms effected significant changes in US education. It juxtaposes two qualitative studies conducted during the implementation of successive standards and accountability movements. The first study of e…
Datafying the teaching ‘profession’: Remaking the professional teacher in the image of data
This paper explores how data-driven practices and logics have come to reshape the possibilities by which the teaching profession, and teaching professionals, can be known and valued. Informed by the literature and theorising around educational performativity, the constitutive power of numbers, and affective responses to data, it shows how different US educators experienced, and came to embody, new forms of numbers-based accountability. Drawing on…
Re-professionalizing teaching: The new professionalism in the United States
This article examines the re-professionalization of teaching across a transformative decade of market-based and standards-based reforms in the U.S.A. The first section works with the sociological concept of the ‘new professionalism’ to situate the No Child Left Behind act, Race to the Top, and CAEP accreditation within a broader movement to align the professions with the commercial and managerial values of the private sector. The next section com…
How is an inclusive agenda possible in an excluding education system? Revisiting the Danish Dilemma
The policy of inclusion in the Scandinavian countries is often related to the idea of the welfare state, and specifically to notions of equality, equity and democracy. The image of the welfare state seems to live well, even though structural and social barriers seem to maintain inequality when it comes to access to education. Instead of overcoming the barriers, the politics of inclusion may actually make the gap between ideals and realities more …
Examining the influence of international large-scale assessments on national education policies
This paper examines whether, to what extent, and how international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) have influenced education policy-making at the national level. Based on an exploratory review of the research and policy literature on ILSAs and two surveys administered to educational policy experts, researchers, policymakers, and educators, our research found that ILSAs, with their multiple and ambiguous uses, increasingly function as solutions in…
Teacher evaluation as an onto-epistemic framework
This article analyzes the constitutive and productive effects of one US middle school’s teacher evaluation system, and the way it operates to (re)make teacher subjects. Using transcripts from interviews with teachers and evaluators, as well as policy and system protocol documents, the article demonstrates how a positive evaluation discourse has become the structuring framework for legitimizing high-stakes evaluation, normalizing constant surveill…
Make money, get money: How Two Autonomous Schools Have Commercialised Their Services
Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper illustrates how the current marketised articulation of education is allowing for new possibilities of commerc…
Risky teachers: Mitigating risk through high-stakes teacher evaluation in the USA
As a post-structural critique of US teacher evaluation policy, this paper aims to disrupt accepted conceptualizations of teachers by (1) identifying discursive constructions of teachers in political talk, action, and legislation; (2) unpacking the ways that these constructions operate to legitimize punitive accountability policies and practices; and (3) mapping the associated accountability practices used by one school district to understand how …
Teacher accountability, datafication and evaluation: A case for reimagining schooling
The purpose of this commentary is to push the boundaries (real and perceived) of how we think about teacher accountability, education and the purpose of schooling in contemporary times. It takes as a starting point a view that recent changes to the Every Student Succeeds Act does little to shift the underpinning logics of high-stakes teacher accountability that ultimately threaten the stability and adaptability of public schools. Building from th…
Standards without standardisation? Assembling standards-based reforms in Australian and US schooling
Our aim in this paper is to examine how standards-based reforms (SBRs) relating to teachers and teaching are being constituted in Australia and the US. Our focus is not the specific impacts of these policies as enacted practices in schools or teacher training institutions, but rather the dynamics of policy production, with a specific focus on how federally-driven policies have been assembled in each country. Bringing together the notion of ‘globa…
Discourse analysis as theory, method, and epistemology in studies of education policy
Discourse has featured in studies of educational policy as an analytic and methodological tool, theoretical frame, realm of implication, and even a foundational definition of educational policy itself (e.g.) Despite the centrality of discourse as a frame for exploring educational policy and its implications, the ways that discourse is defined or operationalized in educational policy research are often left implicit which can lead to murky relatio…
Teachers and teaching: (Re)thinking Professionalism, Subjectivity and Critical Inquiry
The collection of papers presented in this issue of Critical Studies in Education adds to the expansive body of work on teachers and teaching. Collectively, the papers draw our attention to new ways the field is problematising the emerging and evolving conditions that shape the work, lives and identities of teachers. With this editorial introduction to the issue, I not only summarise the various themes of the collection, but also offer a provocat…
Anti-standardization and testing opt-out movements in education: Resistance, disputes and transformation
Testing, scoring comparison and accountability policies have become a ubiquitous part of schooling across most countries in the 21st century. The persistence of these hyper-surveillance measures has occurred in spite of an accumulative and increasing amount of evidence that illustrates negative effects of these kinds of policies. Meanwhile, diverse school actors have grown increasingly skeptical of how tests are being used, leading various groups…
Teachers and educational policy: Markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance
This double special issue, “Teachers and educational policy: markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance” explores the figurative politics of the teacher in current education systems around the world. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss how and why teachers have emerged as a key focus of contemporary policy reform. We argue that teachers are seen as a logical site of public commentary in the global knowledge economy, yet teac…
Governing teachers through datafication: Physical-virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability
In this paper, we draw on Foucault's and Deleuze's theorisations of discipline and control, respectively, to understand a teacher accountability system in the US state of Texas: the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System (hereafter, T-TESS). Specifically, we focus on the interplay of physical and virtual modes of governance - which we develop here as physical- virtual hybridity - and the techniques that make these physical and virtual domain…
Technical agonism: Embracing democratic dissensus in the datafication of education
This paper interrogates whether technical democracy is well-suited to contend with possible technical controversies, including the increasing prevalence of EdTech in public schooling. Drawing across Habermasian 'deliberative democracy' that seeks consensus-derived resolution, as well as more agonistic approaches that embrace conflict as the means for pursuing pluralistic values, we use this paper to problematise technical democracy for its potent…
Evaluating the validity evidence surrounding use of value-added models to evaluate teachers: A systematic review
Local education agencies (LEAs) continue to use value-added models (VAMs) for teacher evaluation policies and purposes, often with consequences attached. Although the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides more flexibility to LEAs, few have discontinued VAM use, suggesting they interpret VAMs as a valid measure of teacher effectiveness. In this systematic review, we used a framework built on the Standards of Educational and Psychological Test…
Humanising feedback encounters: A qualitative study of relational literacies for teachers engaging in technology-enhanced feedback
Modes of feedback such as audio or video are thought to foster relationality because they humanise feedback encounters. Few studies have examined teacher feedback literacies for relationality. This knowledge gap is significant as students want to be seen by their teachers and for their teachers to express care within the feedback encounter. Teacher feedback literacies are the knowledges, skills and dispositions needed to enhance and sustain a stu…
Belonging as flickering and in flux in academic work: A collective biography
In this article, we explore the concept of belonging and its utility as a means for understanding academics’ experiences of working in the academy. Transformative changes have reorientated academic work in recent years and continue to do so as we grapple with what it means to work and live in a post-digital, post-covid, world. We engage a collective biography methodology to highlight the embodied spatial-material assemblages in which belonging ca…
Democracy and teachers: The im/possibilities for pluralisation in evidence-based practice
In this paper, we draw on policy sociology and democratic theory to illustrate how evidence-based practice not only limits teachers’ capacities to exercise professional discretion and authority, but also jeopardises the democratic project of schooling more broadly. Using theoretical concepts from Foucault’s discipline with Connolly’s pluralisation, we argue that evidence-based practice disciplines teachers to comply with a prescribed set of crite…
The multiple societal roles of teachers in England: Accountability, pedagogy and safety
Different educational systems, especially in highly accountable and so-called soft accountability systems place varying expectations on teachers. This study examines how different approaches to school accountability shape perceived roles and responsibilities by teachers. The study was conducted using the discursive dislocation method whereby four English and four Finnish teachers observed each other’s work in authentic situations. Data included o…
Teacher collaboration: How Conditions of Accountability Shape Teachers’ Autonomy, Responsibilities, and Relationships
Validity First: The Politics, Governance, and Consequences of Teacher Evaluation
Debates over teacher evaluation and teacher effectiveness have largely focused on methodological refinement, particularly the technical adequacy of value-added models (VAMs). Far less attention has been paid to the validity of the evidentiary foundations on which these systems rest. In this theoretical synthesis of validity theory related to use, interpretation, and consequences, we argue that validity must be treated not as a technical property …
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (14 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (14 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Accountability (9 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Public relations (9 works)