Hannele Pitkänen is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Education and Culture, University of Tampere. She defended her thesis on “Evaluation, Knowledge and Power” at University of Helsinki in 2019. Her current Academy awarded project Educating the Evaluative Soul? (EdSoul 2020-2023) examines the current politics of pupil self-evaluation and the enactment of it in the daily practices of schooling and pupils’ experience. It runs from the theoretical claim that pupil self-evaluation is not a neutral part of the learning process, but an operation of a subjectifying power as well. It plays a role in the shaping of a subject made docile to the requirements of the western evaluation society. EdSoul studies ethnographically how this power is being enacted in schools and experienced by pupils. Finally, it will bring the empirical data together to enable a theoretical discussion on the making of pupil subjectivity at the intersection of theories, policies and practices of self-evaluation; in other words, on shaping of the subject as an evaluative soul.
Pitkänen’s research interest in evaluation in education and governing education and educated stems from the theories and perspectives from the fields of sociology, politics and history of education as well as critical curriculum studies.