Interrogating the Discourse of Educational Policy Analysis: Insights from the South African Outcomes Based Education (OBE)

Abstract

This conceptual paper proffered critical examination of the subject of educational policy analysis and the factors, theories and methods that shape the process. The paper thus begins with an overview of major debates in policy sociology including the conceptualizations of policy as process, text anddiscourse before delving into the discussion of the models of policy-analysis often articulated in social and political science disciplines. The factors influencing policy-making are highlighted and so are the shifts in education policy with examples drawn from the South African context of education. In doing so, the paper also explores the various conceptions, methodsand theories of educational policy and policy analysis. This implies that the paper alsooutlines what constitutes educational policy and methods of policy analysis in a country. In this regard, the views of Steven Ball on policy as discourse and astext are employed to demonstrate how the social agentive nature of people as actors helps them make sense of texts through interpretations, contestations, constructing responses and dealing with contradictions and attempting representations through educational policy analysis. Jonathan Jansen’s perspective of how curriculum policyreform sometimes reflects thestruggle for the achievement of a broader political symbolism are also explored in the paper with examples drawn from the South African experiences of how the post-apartheid curriculum policy reforms were used to mark a paradigm shift or transition from apartheid education policy to the post-apartheid educational curriculum. In this sense the emphasis will be on how the conditions of social transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa made politicians of the new democratic South Africato analyse and useeducational policy reformto herald this educational policy transformation in a sense that made educational policy reforms to function as a form of political symbolism.Trevor Gale’s criticalsociological perspective on policy analysis is also used as one of the lensto show how the workings of society particularly the relations of what Wright Mills would call personal troubles and public issues influence policy analysis and reform.

Keywords: Curriculum, discourse, organizational politics, text, political symbolism