Producing global citizens for the future: space,discourse and curricular reform

This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education’s seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation’s next agents. In order to locate curriculum’s productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system’s attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about institutions, knowledges and subjects that furthers the production of a neoliberal global imaginary.     

Policy ‘partnerships’? Power dynamics in curriculum reform

In curriculum policy, discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘communities of practice’ have become increasingly prevalent and were reflected in Western Australian curriculum policy processes from the mid‐1990s to the late 2000s – a period of significant, highly contested change. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the impact of curriculum reform on the changing dynamics within and between the government and non‐government education sectors, drawing on critical theory and post‐structuralist approaches to policy analysis within a broader framework of policy network theory. This approach is used to highlight power issues at all levels of the policy trajectory. This research found that despite policy discourses of collaborative and consultative processes to create a ‘shared’ curriculum, the government and non‐government education sectors remain largely distinct due to significant power differentials, as well as structural and cultural differences. The analysis reveals three closely connected emergent themes – limited collaboration, regulated consultation and enhanced state control of curriculum policy agendas. It is argued here that although discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘community of practice’ are increasingly evidenced in contemporary curriculum policy, they do not take sufficient account of embedded hierarchical power relationships. Further, such discourses can be used as legitimisation strategies to promulgate policy changes which enhance the steerage capacity of the state. Deeply entrenched power differentials operate simultaneously to distort policy partnerships and communities of practice, by both including and excluding particular sets of policy actors.     

Neoliberalism and curriculum in higher education: a post-colonial analyses

In an era of internationalisation and globalisation, neoliberal agendas have now become important aspects of many institutional and national governments’ higher education policy. A major aspect of these neoliberal agendas is their impact on the curriculum. This paper critically examines the impact of neoliberal agendas on curriculum through a postcolonial and decolonising lens, drawing on research conducted in the African context to illuminate the theoretical analysis presented. Drawing on 48 semi-structured interviews and documentary analyses across three public universities in Ghana, we examine the relationship between neoliberal agendas, neo-colonialism and curriculum imperatives in African higher education. The analysis illuminates the ways that hegemonic discourses connected to neoliberal agendas re-privilege Western-oriented values and perspectives and impact the curriculum changes in African higher education institutions.     

Vernacular globalisations: neo-statist accountability policies in France and Quebec education

The article argues that there is no single globalisation of education systems, but rather multiple globalisations of each system taken in its individual context. We propose three explanatory factors to account for these vernacular globalisation processes, that is, for individual policy trajectories in each national context: path dependence on earlier policy choices and institutions, education policy-making through bricolage, and finally the translation by national actors of international-level ideas or tools as a function of the debate, institutions or national power dynamics in question. The research design is based on the study of a most-likely case: accountability policy in two school systems – France and Quebec – which show strong variations. Document analyses and semi-structured interviews were conducted in both cases. In the two countries, distinct vernacular globalisations are at work leading to different neo-statist accountability policies. In Quebec, the reinforcement of state power through a growing vertical accountability and the systematic development of regulation tools between policy actors and levels lead to a ‘centralisation by institutional linkage’. In France, we rather witness a ‘globalisation by discursive internalisation’ in which transnational imperatives are integrated in official discourses on the regulation of the education system, but without radically questioning the mainstays of this regulation.     

Towards internationalizing the curriculum in a context of globalization: comparing policy processes in two settings

The primary focus of this paper is two case study schools, one in Singapore and one in Australia, which have both been actively pursuing an agenda to build a unique internationally‐oriented curriculum, in a context of globalization, but also within the constraints set by national/State curriculum frameworks, examinations and league tables. Interviews were used to collect data in each school, and then cross‐case analysis was conducted to reveal both similarities and differences in the way the two schools are moving towards internationalizing their curriculum. Emergent meta‐level conceptual themes around policy for ‘internationalization’ of the curriculum are discussed: enablers and constraints; the issue of whether such internationalization fosters a market ideology; changing power relationships; and the relevance of distinctions between internationalization and globalization. The paper concludes by pointing to the contribution of the ‘sociology of knowledge’ and ‘critical policy analysis’ in disrupting the potentially hegemonic economic discourses associated with internationalizing the curriculum.     

Discursive institutionalism: towards a framework for analysing the relation between policy and curriculum

Discourse approaches in education policy analysis have gained prominence in the last decade. However, though the literature on policy discourses is growing, different conceptions of the ‘discursive’ dimension and its potential for empirical analysis related to the field of curriculum policy have not yet been fully researched. To address this gap in education policy research, this article explores the framework of discursive institutionalism. Using background and foreground ideas and coordinative and communicative discourses on three analytically distinct levels, this article proposes and discusses a framework for empirically analysing, explaining and understanding education reforms on the transnational and local levels. The introduced conceptual framework represents an integration of discursive institutionalism (DI) and curriculum theory (CT) to provide a more multifaceted set of concepts to explore the lending and borrowing of transnational education policies and their application at both national and local levels. These concepts have been applied as analytical tools in a research study on the most recent curriculum reform in Sweden, and they may serve as an example of how different ideas, discourses and levels can be distinguished in research studies to maintain the complexity of education reforms.     

The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and researching education policy

Bourdieu did not write anything explicitly about education policy. Despite this neglect, we agree with van Zanten that his theoretical concepts and methodological approaches can contribute to researching and understanding education policy in the context of globalisation and the economising of it. In applying Bourdieu’s theory and methodology to research in education policy, we focus on developing his work to understand what we call ‘cross‐field effects’ and for exploring the emergence of a ‘global education policy field’. These concepts are derived from some of our recent research concerning globalisation and mediatisation of education policy. The paper considers three separate issues. The first deals with Bourdieu’s primary ‘thinking tools’, namely practice, habitus, capitals and fields and their application to policy studies. The second and third sections consider two additions to Bourdieu’s thinking tools, as a way to reconceptualise the functioning of policy if considered as a social field. More specifically, the second section develops an argument around cross‐field effects, as a way to group together, research and describe policy effects. The third section develops an argument about an emergent global education policy field, and considers ways that such a field affects national education policy fields.     

Centrifugal schooling: third sector policy networks and the reassembling of curriculum policy in England

This article examines changes in curriculum policy in secondary education in England. It is concerned with recent curriculum policy and reform, and the proliferation of non-government actors in curriculum policy creation. It examines the emergence of a loose alliance of third sector organisations and their involvement in a series of alternative ‘curriculum experiments’. The third sector curriculum policy network revolves around a policy vision of decentralisation constituted by public–private partnership, media-friendliness, social enterprise and an ‘open source’ or network-based organisational logic. It assembles a policy ideal of ‘centrifugal schooling’ which links together ideas about ‘networked governance’ with ‘flexible’ learning and ‘entrepreneurial’ curricula. The article traces and discusses some of the inter-organisational relations, materials and discourses of the third sector network of alternative curriculum policy developments, and provides a case study of a prototypical third sector curriculum programme. It examines the organisational relations and practices by which the project was produced and the conditions leading to its failure.     

The culture of education policy making: curriculum reform in Shanghai

This paper explores the culture of education policy making in Shanghai using the conceptual tool of a ‘global assemblage’. A global assemblage is essentially a collection of ideas and practices that arise from the interplay between a global form and situated sociocultural elements. Focusing on the global form of curriculum reform, this paper explains how the Shanghai municipal government justifies the introduction of the ‘Second Curriculum Reform’ using the global imperative while maintaining its socialist ideology and central control on high-stakes exams. This paper highlights the active roles played by the municipal government and other local educational stakeholders in assembling their own logics, tactics and counter-measures in the contested space of the assemblage. It is argued that the success of the curriculum reform is mediated and vitiated by the sociocultural elements of a dominant exam-oriented culture and the traditional approaches of memorisation, repeated practice and didactic teaching. The complex and unpredictable process of implementing curriculum reform in Shanghai illustrates the culture of education policy making against a backdrop of globalisation as a problem space.     

Educational policy‐making in post‐communist Ukraine as an example of emerging governmentality: discourse analysis of curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003)

Educational policy‐making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post‐communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses – coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses – produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy‐making (with its disparities between ‘democratised’ discourses and ‘Sovietised’ practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality‐in‐the‐making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy‐making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post‐independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999–2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post‐communist Ukraine.     

New scalar politics: implications for education policy

This paper argues that globalisation has implications for research and theory in the social sciences, demanding that the social no longer be seen as homologous with nation, but also linked to postnational or global fields. This situation has theoretical and methodological implications for comparative education specifically focused on education policy, which traditionally has taken the nation-state as the unit of analysis, and also worked with ‘methodological nationalism’. The paper argues that globalisation has witnessed a rescaling of educational politics and policymaking and relocated some political authority to an emergent global education policy field, with implications for the functioning of national political authority and national education policy fields. This rescaling and this reworking of political authority are illustrated through two cases: the first is concerned with the impact of a globalised policy discourse of the ‘knowledge economy’ proselytised by the OECD and its impact in Australian policy developments; the second is concerned explicitly with the constitution of a global education policy field as a commensurate space of equivalence, as evidenced in the OECD’s PISA and educational indicators work and their increasing global coverage. The paper indicatively utilises Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to understand the emergent global education policy field and suggests these are very useful for doing comparative education policy analysis.     

Intercultural dimensions in the (new) curriculum of Cyprus: the way forward

In 2010, the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) in Cyprus introduced a ‘new’ national curriculum for all public schools of the Cypriot republic. The overarching purpose of this study is to examine how the ongoing educational reform in Cyprus could set a different ideological framework, within which intercultural education may be developed and implemented. To this end, it provides a number of important insights into the intercultural dimension of the ‘new’ national curriculum by exploring the formal and the ideological levels of the curriculum. More specifically, it indicates the ways in which the ideological curriculum has been formed by the complex and often counteractive discourses of monoculturalism, multiculturalism and interculturalism due to the socio-historical context of Cyprus. The conclusions of this study assert that further research should be conducted to examine the implications pertaining to teachers’ practice and student learning with regard to intercultural education.     

Educational policy for citizenship in the early years in Australia

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to ‘be a good citizen’. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.     

Working against globalisation: the role of the media and national education in Singapore

This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of ‘reassemblage’, when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced to Singapore schools is one example of ‘reassemblage’, which aims to reinvent subject‐citizens who are perceived as lacking cultural mooring and a national identity. I argue that in the context of globalisation, this cultural experimentation of constructing a national identity and creating a sense of belonging is fraught with ruptures, as ‘youthscapes’ and new communication technologies are potentially the liminal spaces where other sources of identities are up for grabs. These liminal spaces further allow youths to perform ‘elective belonging’ rather than a sense of belonging bound by the ‘national’ and ‘local’.     

‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer …’. The Pedagogical Turn and the Negative Space of Irish Art Education

Current education policy discourse in Ireland, as elsewhere, is replete with reference to innovation, creativity and enterprise. Meanwhile, the ‘pedagogical turn’ is a dominant motif in current discourse in art practice, curating and critique, in Ireland and internationally. This article firstly considers some of the implications of the ‘turn’ as a concept in art and education. In that context, it goes on to address changing patterns of curriculum design, development and reform in Ireland. Next, it describes the evolution of Irish education policy over the past decade in the context of global experiences. The particular experience of art education in Ireland is then considered in the light of the curriculum culture and the wider policy discourses already identified. Finally, some implications of the Irish experience are addressed, in terms of art practice at the edges of art education, and art education at the edges of education practice.     

Researching educational policy and change in ‘new times’: using critical discourse analysis

A number of writers have drawn attention to the increasing importance of language in social life in ‘new times’ and Fairclough has referred to ‘discourse driven’ social change. These conditions have led to an increase in the use of various forms of discourse analysis in policy analysis. This paper explores the possibilities of using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in critical policy research in education, drawing on a larger research project which is investigating the equity implications of Education Queensland’s reform agenda. It is argued that, in the context of new times, CDA is of particular value in documenting multiple and competing discourses in policy texts, in highlighting marginalized and hybrid discourses, and in documenting discursive shifts in policy implementation processes. The last part of the paper discusses how such research might be used by policy activists inside and outside education department bureaucracies to further social democratic goals.     

Disrupting colonial discourses in the geography curriculum during the introduction of British Values policy in schools

The main purpose of this article is to expose and disrupt discourses dominating global development in an English school geography textbook chapter. The study was prompted by a teacher’s encounter with cultural difference in a geography lesson in South Korea. I investigate the issues raised through the lens of a new curriculum policy in English schools called ‘Promoting Fundamental British Values’ which forms part of England’s education-securitisation agenda, a topic of international attention. Following contextualization across research fields and in recent curriculum and assessment policy reform, I bring together theoretical perspectives from curriculum studies and Continental philosophy that do not usually speak to each other, to construct a new analytical approach. I identify three key themes, each informed by colonial logic: ‘development’, ‘numerical indicators’ and ‘learning to divide the world’. The inquiry appears to expose a tension between the knowledge of the textbook chapter and the purported aims of the British Values curriculum policy, but further investigation reveals the two to be connected through common colonial values. The findings are relevant to teachers, publishers, textbook authors, policy-makers and curriculum researchers. I recommend a refreshed curriculum agenda with the politics of knowledge and ethical global relations at its centre.     

Discovering democracy: an analysis of curriculum policy for citizenship education

Citizenship education has become the focus of renewed interest internationally as governments are struggling with issues of national identity in an era of globalisation where there is much ‘talk’ of threats to the legitimacy of nation states. Within this context, the Australian Commonwealth Government took another step in an accelerating trend of becoming involved in curriculum policy with the introduction of its citizenship education curriculum package, Discovering Democracy, in the late 1990s. Legally, education in Australia is a State government responsibility. However, over the last half century, the Commonwealth Government has increasingly set education agendas, justified in terms of'the national interest’ and has achieved them using financial levers which result from the vertical fiscal imbalance between the Commonwealth and the States.

This article examines citizenship curriculum policy processes and practices associated with the enactment of the Commonwealth's Discovering Democracy curriculum package in the State of Western Australia (WA). The study employed a framework of a policy trajectory extending from the Commonwealth Government (macro level) through State (WA) policy enactment (meso level) to individual classrooms (micro level). Documents and interviews with key players, including the Commonwealth Minister for Education, were the main data sources.

Analysis of the policy process revealed the emergence of power struggles as a result of the provision of a national curriculum on citizenship education by the Commonwealth Government, and these struggles occurred at national, State and local levels. These power struggles resulted in extensive transformation of Commonwealth and State level policy intent as the policy enactment proceeded at the classroom level. The study demonstrates the need for better alignment of conceptualisations and discourses in the processes of curriculum development if a greater congruence is to be achieved between expectations and realities in curriculum renewal. Meta‐level issues to emerge from the data, in particular the nature of policy consultative processes and the construction of teacher professional identity, have broader implications for education policy processes in other domains and in other countries.     

The sphere of authority: governing education policy in Pakistan amidst global pressures

The authority of the nation states and their capacity to govern their education policy has been reconfigured by the processes of globalisation. This paper examines recent education policy in Pakistan in order to reveal the nature of national authority in education policy-making in a challenging context. The central piece of analysis is the pre-policy text issued by the Ministry of Education, Pakistan — the White Paper. This analysis is further supported through interviews with senior policy actors and other significant policy texts. The paper identifies several tensions caused by the interaction of global and national education policy priorities and explores how the national government of Pakistan seeks to expand its SoA through ‘soft’ governance approaches despite the material and financial constraints within which it operates.