Policy reconfiguration as enactment in the strategy of recontextualized neoliberalism: Paradigmatic shift in teacher education policy reform

Drawing on Bernstein's notion of policy recontextualization, this study analyzes the exercise of neoliberal governmentality in the case of teacher education policy reform in Taiwan by analyzing data collected from official documents, meeting minutes, articles of legislation and media reports. The findings show that senior policymakers actively engaged in policy reconfiguration through paradigmatic adjustment. The resulting 'recontextualized neoliberalism' suggests that agents in the pedagogical recontextualizing field, through public activism in education, are speaking back to official policy discourses and forcing a softening of neoliberal market agendas in education.1