Educational policy and notions of citizenship in four asia-pacific societies

The future schooling scenarios prepared by the OECD/CERI (OECD, 2001) are the focus of this article, first because they provide a useful tool for futures thinking in educational settings and, second, because they provide an analytic framework to investigate how notions of citizenship are embedded in educational policies and in the organisation of compulsory schooling. This article outlines the scenarios developed by the OECD/CERI, describes how these were used to conduct a survey of educational policy-makers in the Asia-Pacific region and then uses the scenarios as a framework to investigate the embedded nature of citizenship characteristics in educational policy positions. Examples will be drawn from four societies in the Asia-Pacific region - New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan.