The RE-mapping project’s work revolved around two pillars:
I. First pillar: Addressing the difficulties of policy convergence in education.
This research pillar, having explored both state of the art and the difficulties encountered in the process of educational policy convergence in the EU since the Lisbon agenda, put forward an innovative argument stating that: (1) policy convergence in education should be viewed as a complex process of dialogue between multiply coded social semiotic systems, (2) any change in the national education systems cannot disregard their semiotic substrata and (3) locating and understanding the semiotic areas of entropy emerging in the policy convergence process offers valuable insights into the ongoing challenges encountered in policy convergence.
In service of the above-mentioned objectives, this pillar selected education policy documents of Italy, France and Greece for the period 2001 to 2017 as the corpus for analysis, to explore the semiosis of their dialogic process with the EU policy documents of the same period. In this regard, a thematic qualitative text analysis of the above corpus was first conducted using the MAXQDA 18 software on three parameters of Jacobson’s (1985) model of communication (the addresser, the addressee and the message itself), and secondly, concept maps for the thematic category ‘goals and objectives of education’ qualified as the ‘message’ in Jacobson’s model, were created with the Leximancer software.
Research results revealed that, in the official policy discourse of the three countries, there are significant differences: a) in the constitution of the national Self, b) in the constitution of the EU as partner in dialogue, and c) significant absences in the “translation” process of the EU directives concerning the thematic category “goals and objectives of education” in the national policy documents.
These results are breakthrough because a) they revealed that a semiotic analysis of policy discourses can locate areas of “untranslatability” between State-Members and the EU and b) suggest that a semiotic knowledge brokering, as additional source of data can facilitate and accelerate policy convergence in education. In Table 1, we can see the five dimensions of the proposed Semiotic Knowledge Brokering paradigm.
II. Second pillar: Addressing the difficulties in students’ underperformance.
By looking into the shortcomings of the current state-of-the-art and policy making in relation to the consideration of global-scale dynamics in the construction of educational disadvantage, this pillar built innovative theoretical alliances with capability theory, sociology, human geography and architecture, and through a mixed methods research, based on questionnaires, visual methodologies and elicitation interviews, explored how 212 vocational students from Italy, France and Greece position themselves in time and space. During the adopted research protocol, students were provided with graphic material and a visual code and were invited by positioning themselves in the present, to use the visual code in order to design under the form of a reflexive cartography, the path towards their dream.
Results revealed that in all three countries more than half of the students participating in the research, had difficulty to use the visual code in order to create the path towards their dream, revealing in fact an invisible form of sociological disadvantage manifested under the triple absence of a) the ability to dream, b) the ability to position themselves in space and time, and c) the ability to create a meaningful relationship with society. In figure 2 we can see nine examples of reflexive cartographies in which the students although they used some parts of the visual code, could not describe the path towards their dream or could not create connections with their present life, whereas in figure 3, we can see 9 examples of reflexive cartographies in which students either could not use the visual code at all, or they could not establish the connections between the elements of the visual code to create a path.
The above detected type of disadvantage is critical because: a) it reveals a new type of exclusion that is not located in the physical or the social space but in students’ imaginative space of possibility, b) it has repercussions on students academic profiles as the sustaining conditions for learning are missing, c) seems to affect for our sample highly similarly students with similar socio-demographic characteristics and d) has strong social and political implications.
So far. the project has communicated its results a) in the schools participating in the research, in their local communities and in their local universities; b) in scientific conferences of the education field, c) in scientific conferences of other fields, d) in the MSCA If cluster of education in EC in Brussels in June 2019, e) in the European Researcher’s Night in September 2019 in Padova.
