Transnational Curriculum Standards and Classroom Practices

The New Meaning of Teaching

Ninni Wahlström, Daniel Sundberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351616010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Focusing on the meaning of teaching, Transnational Curriculum Standards and Classroom Practices contributes to a deepened understanding of what it means to be a teacher in an institutional context ranked high on the policymakers' agenda. While the policy literature emphasises efficiency in teaching, educational research demonstrates an awareness of the importance of alternative perspectives on what makes for successful teaching. This book critically examines the conditions and dimensions of teaching as framed in current policy discourse and situates school education in relation to wider societal issues.

Based on a four-year research project financed by the Swedish Research Council and drawing on international policy discourse, as well as international research, the chapters in this book contribute to the knowledge of relations and influences between international educational reform movements, national curriculum reforms, and implications for teaching and learning practices at the classroom level. Offering results and reflections from comprehensive comparative classroom studies, the book makes a distinctive contribution to our knowledge of the implications of policy for teachers and students.

This book should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in the relationship between the curriculum and teaching in a contemporary context, as well as those engaged in the study of education policy, curriculum theory, pedagogy and educational leadership. It should also be of great interest to policymakers and teachers.

1
Transnational curriculum standards, curriculum reforms and classroom practices – an introduction

Ninni Wahlström and Daniel Sundberg

‘Curriculum’ is an ambiguous concept with many connotations. Its traditional meaning has to do with the organisation and sequencing of a course of study (Jackson, 1992). However, what should be the aims of a course of study, and what content should it include? It is at this point that views begin to diverge. Although the curriculum is central to a school’s organisation and actors, it is not created or necessarily sanctioned by internal experts within the school. Instead, decisions about the content and structure of curricula are part of a wider public debate concerning the ideological struggles around public goods in the intersection of political, professional and personal opinions (Levin, 2008). In the Northern European social tradition, these ideological struggles create collective discourses around what schooling is about, which has historically focused on concepts like Didaktik and Bildung. These discourses are expressed in curricula as compromises between different perspectives on the role of education in society, as established by the state and oriented towards citizenship in nation-building projects (Boli, 1989; Englund, 2005). What is significant is that the curriculum is always linked to institutional decision-making. Any such discussion must continually address multiple and interconnected issues: what subject matter is to be taught; what content should be selected; why this subject matter should be taught and this content selected; how it should be taught; for whom it should be useful; and whose knowledge it represents. Today, these questions are crucial as we face social, political and cultural changes that challenge ideas about educating citizens for new futures as well as ideas regarding the core processes of teaching and learning.

Curriculum – a travelling concept

Global processes are transforming educational policy around the world in complex ways and with varying implications for different local arenas. As noted by Jung and Pinar (2016), these arenas can be characterised as institutionally and geographically distinct. However, they also differ in historical, social, cultural and political aspects that may not necessarily correspond with institutional and geographical boundaries. For this reason, the concept of curriculum can never be understood as uncontested or unambiguous. Rather, it is a complex travelling concept that recontextualises its cosmopolitan cause into localisation processes in multiple ways as different elements of its meaning are reshaped and reinterpreted in distinctive new circumstances. Thus, although the term ‘curriculum’ can be said to be used globally, there is a primacy of context in curriculum studies.

The modern interpretations of the terms ‘curriculum’, ‘syllabus’ and ‘didactics’ were derived across Europe by the end of the sixteenth century, at the same time as schooling became institutionalised. At the time, the concepts fit well into the new political discourse of the Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, which was aimed at transmitting a new way of thinking about life and disciplining an entire population (Hamilton, 2015). It was Calvin who initiated the word ‘curriculum’ in the meaning of a course of life (curriculum vitae) rather than as a race for horses and chariots. The French educational reformer Petrus Ramus introduced the term curriculum in the educational sense we know it today, as ‘a regular course of study or training’ in school or university leading to an exam (Doll, 2008, p. 190). Before that time, trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, physics and ethics) were taught with major differences between different schoolmasters. Learning was highly individualised, without being organised in a linear or sequential order (Hamilton, 2015). Doll (2008) draws a line from Ramus to Johan Amos Comenius and his Didactica Magna (1630–1632), which represents a starting point of a European systematisation of education and teaching, over to the efficiency movement represented by Frederick Taylor and finally to the American curriculum theorist Ralph Tyler and the ‘Tyler Rationale’ from the mid-twentieth century. Thus, the still-dominant conception of curriculum in the West, as the organising of knowledge and education, dates back to sixteenth-century Europe.

In the contemporary period, the understanding of a ‘knowledge-based economy’ has provided important premises and an impetus for a global policy model for education, not least for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an important international actor for Western countries. The OECD emphasises the effectiveness of education systems, human capital and the notion of knowledge as a global public good. Peters (2010) argues that concepts such as the ‘knowledge-based economy’ and the ‘knowledge society’ could no longer be thought of only as an expression of neo-liberal thinking; instead, they are ‘complex and openly contested policy descriptions’ that function as a broad framework for local contextualisation and adaptation to preexisting associated concepts through their ‘descriptive and analytical force’ (Peters, 2010, pp. 68–69). Peters identifies three forms of the knowledge economy, the interpretations of which are not necessarily predetermined from a narrow instrumental and economic perspective, but can also open up for a progressive direction through educational processes. The first is ‘the learning economy’, which links school to national innovation more generally. Second, the ‘creative economy’ has the potential to promote participation and peer collaboration through digital media. Finally, the ‘open knowledge economy’ recognises the public benefits of open knowledge production for education. Taken together, learning, creativity and openness also signal alternatives to a narrow economic interpretation. Thus, there is a broad platform of common understanding in the policy field regarding the potential of education for both national and individual development and prosperity. However, such a common point of departure can take many forms and vary considerably, thereby emphasising more restricted or more open aspects of education when they are to be realised in different places and countries.

There is substantial consistency across international analyses of curricula that educational content should contribute to shaping autonomous citizens, improving national welfare and linking nation-states to global development (Benavot & Braslavsky, 2006). Rosenmund (2006) has shown that the rhetoric for making curriculum change sensible and meaningful was quite similar among different nations in the 1990s. Decision-makers around the world focus on the desired outcomes for individual students and for the nation as a whole. Educational content should contribute to ‘shaping the autonomous and, to some extent, cosmopolitan citizen’ for the purpose of increasing national welfare and to open up for increasing global interchange (Rosenmund, 2006, p. 193). From an international perspective, educational reforms seem to emphasise changes in structures and curricula content. An obvious turn in perspective is the shift from a content-centred to a student-centred approach in curriculum development. Therefore, in the policy field of education, the autonomous learner is becoming the new focus in the teaching process. As Walker (2009) notes, in the promotion of the word ‘learning’ instead of ‘education’, it is the individual learner who is responsible for a willingness to learn and for taking initiatives for learning to take place. The OECD has taken a leading role in launching the concept of lifelong learning and in contributing to the global standardisation of lifelong learning by promoting ‘policy borrowing’ and evaluating ‘best practices’ regarding policy initiatives.

Even if there are other aims and possibilities (that are not strictly economic) regarding the interpretation of the OECD documents on education, it is not clear that learning can really deliver what is expected in terms of participation and social inclusion. Furthermore, the rhetoric of lifelong learning in the OECD still focuses on ‘including the unincluded’ and educating for employability and prosperity (Walker, 2009, p. 348). Consequently, another form of transnational trajectory in a knowledge-based economy is the system of accountability and efficiency pressures on schools. Instead of the former government-controlled schooling, education is now also subject to control and accountability from international markets, organisations and civil society. Some researchers argue that this shift has led to a certain withdrawal of the state in some aspects, leaving a gap filled by international organisations and private actors with well-defined packages of policies and management methods, and leaving states increasingly dependent on transnational forces (Meyer & Benavot, 2013). The changing role of the state is represented by a general displacement in the governance of education, from a governmental agenda-setting to a discursive ‘soft’ governance, due to changes in the role of the state, new managerialism and new public/private sector relations (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Thus, educational policy discourses on curriculum governance can be viewed as complex structures for handling, understanding and reformulating global, national and local policy interests.

Global curriculum convergence?

An emergent research question among comparative education researchers is whether processes of educational globalisation also lead to a curriculum convergence (Anderson-Levitt, 2008). World culture theorists point out that nations increasingly adapted similar patterns of core elementary subjects over the course of the twentieth century. At the very least, the official core elementary curriculum has become more similar and has increasingly tuned into global policy learning when it comes to constructing curricula. There are even some patterns alluding to the relative weight of core subjects across countries (Meyer et al., 1992). Yet another area of convergence, and perhaps a stronger one today, concerns the use and development of accountability in output measures and standardised assessments in international knowledge tests like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). One can even ask whether such standardised assessment systems, driven by global policy interaction and competition, are becoming the primary curriculum governing the content and methods of teaching and whether the traditional national official curriculum is beginning to take second place. However, many factors attributed to standards-based reforms differ among countries. This book explores how a standards-based reform takes shape in a specific country. Thus, the research presented in the present book can be seen as a comparative research study in relation to a transnational policy arena. The way in which the concept of ‘transnational’ is used in this project first and foremost denotes international cooperation among member states within international governmental organ-isations like the OECD and the EU.

Superficially, it is easy to think of the global as a large-scale phenomenon ‘out there’, like a floating cloud above nations. As Sassen (2013) points out, it is more productive to think of global convergence as taking place within nations, inside institutional domains that emerged to fill national purposes. Thus, instead of only looking for global models in large-scale projects, it might be more fruitful to conceptualise global education reforms as the expression of joint connections between multiple local transboundary processes. With this expanded view of globalisation, it also becomes possible for educators and researchers to understand the global from well-known areas such as curriculum content, knowledge forms and knowledge tests as well as national education policies. The ‘inside-nations-globalisation’ has changed the spatial conditions of education in terms of travelling reforms which, at the same time, circulate across nations while being locally anchored. There is also a time dimension in travelling reforms, that is, how long a reform has been around. Reforms undergo modifications, and the features of their local origin might disappear; the reform becomes deterritorialised, owned by everyone and no one (Steiner-Khamsi, 2010).

In the early phase of an educational reform, there are only a few ‘borrowers’, while references to the ‘lender’ are still recognisable. In the middle phase, in terms of different national policy actors and national reform processes, followers and borrowers grow quickly in number, and the initial geographic and cultural features disappear. At this stage, the reform becomes decontextualised and denationalised through a common policy rhetoric. In the final phase of the reform, the late adapters to a reform mainly want to establish a connection with ‘a larger, modern educational space’ (Steiner-Khamsi, 2010, p. 334). As globalisation processes go beyond traditional nation-states’ borders and responsibilities and operate within the framing of nation-states, including sub-national spaces, processes and actors, they destabilise ‘the national’, making it possible to speak of denationalised states. The challenge for educators, politicians and researchers thus becomes problematising whether education policy, structures and ‘common sense’ for education, experienced as nationally constructed, still remain national or whether these educational procedures and practices are actually denationalised global processes (Sassen, 2013). As national policy always comprises a combination of borrowing and imitating ideas and trends floating around in a policy stream, these ideas are also translated or recontextualised (Bernstein, 2000) in different political systems and structures.

When discourses move from one arena to another, the different elements in the discourse became reordered, refocused and re-understood. Standards-based education – characterised by a performance-based, output-oriented or result-driven curriculum – is thus not identical when it is enacted in different countries, schools and classrooms. Recontextualisation processes are relevant both between different official policy arenas and between official and pedagogical arenas. A focus on a careful examination and local recontextualisation of policy and its hybrid forms of national and transnational influences should not obscure the fact that there are also general patterns of implications of different transnational policy ideas that influence and displace the meaning of the concepts of teaching and education (Ball, 1998). Thus, both general transnational discourses promoted by transnational organisations and networks and the local recontextualisation and translation of reform concepts need to be recognised in research on educational reform.

There are two main ways of understanding worldwide connections through digital media, travelling, trade, global finance, migration, refugees, asylum seekers and more in the contexts of human capital and cosmopolitanism. The first strand reflects a neo-liberal policy paradigm that places accountability and measurable values at the centre, viewing each individual as a contributor to the nation’s welfare and competitiveness. The second strand includes a universal concern, in that, we have obligations to each other beyond our own relatives and nation (Benhabib, 2006). Moreover, from a local perspective, cosmopolitanism includes respect for legitimate differences among humans and an interest in other people’s lives and beliefs. Appiah (2007) notes the bidirectional obligations of cosmopolitanism, as respect for both universal rights and local differences, through the concept of ‘partial cosmopolitanism’. He argues that it is not necessary to choose between these two approaches, as it is possible to adopt the position that some values must be considered universal while others are understood as local and open to difference. The basic stance of the present anthology is that globalisation must be understood in terms of economic, environmental, communicative and human interdependence and influence whereby the global takes shape in the local. On that basis, the concepts of the global and the local are reciprocal and interdependent, interrelating in a complex web of discourses, relationships and contacts. This includes both transnational educational policy and the diversity represented in each classroom.

Within education, national traditions, cultures and political conditions continue to play a major role in constituting the basic processes of schooling. National patterns of school lessons are, to a high degree, formed by institution-alised norms of actions and meanings that do not necessarily change because of new reforms. This, however, is not to suggest that all classrooms are working in the same way or are adapting similarly to new policies. As evidenced in the empirical chapters in this book, the enacted curriculum displays both common features and variations in classroom discourses that differ among schools, classrooms and teachers.

The critical role for curriculum theory

The aim of curriculum theory (CT) is to explore how educational goals, content and pedagogy are embedded in societal norms and values and how they are shaped and developed through e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of contributors
• 1 Transnational curriculum standards, curriculum reforms and classroom practices – an introduction
• 2 The travelling reform agenda: the Swedish case through the lens of the OECD
• 3 A theoretical framework: from policy to curriculum and comparative classroom studies
• 4 Mapping and tracing transnational curricula in classrooms – the mixed-methods approach
• 5 The recontextualisation of policy messages – the local authority as a policy actor
• 6 The question of teaching talk: targeting diversity and participation
• 7 The selection of content and knowledge conceptions in the teaching of curriculum standards in compulsory schooling
• 8 Curriculum standardisation – what does it mean for classroom teaching and assessment practices?
• 9 From transnational curriculum standards to classroom practices: the new meaning of teaching
• Index