Shifting regulative ideas of education policy and practice: the case of quality assurance in education in Slovenia

Abstract

Based on Foucault’s concept of the dispositive, the paper attempts to show how societies and schools have been functioning for some time now by regulating three dispositives: juridical, disciplinary, and security. While the crises of the 1970s shifted the combination of dispositives in education in the West towards security, this shift in the rationality of education policy and practice did not occur in Slovenia until the 1990s, following the broader political transition to democracy and a market economy. The paper aims to present these shifts through the structuring of quality assurance mechanisms in education in Slovenia in the previ-ous two decades. First, the concept of quality assurance is presented as part of a broader change in society and education. This is followed by analyses of the dynamics of the conceptualisation, implementation, and regulation of quality assurance in education in Slovenia. Complementa-rily, following Bourdieu’s approach, seven interviews with experts from the field of quality assurance are presented, with the aim of reflecting on the past and shedding light on the current state of affairs in quality assurance in education in Slovenia.