Curriculum Making in Europe

Policy and Practice Within and Across Diverse Contexts

Mark Priestley, Daniel Alvunger, Stavroula Philippou, Tiina Soini, Mark Priestley, Daniel Alvunger, Stavroula Philippou, Tiina Soini, Mark Priestley, Daniel Alvunger, Stavroula Philippou, Tiina Soini

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781838677374
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Responding to profound social, political and technological changes, recent global trends in education have included the emergence of new forms of curriculum policy. Addressing a gap in the literature, this book investigates the ways in which curriculum policy is influenced, formulated, and enacted in a number of countries-cases in Europe.
This important collection uses the concept of 'curriculum making' as an analytical tool to explore the processes and phases of curriculum policy reform experienced across countries. Drawing first on international perspectives and then presenting a series of country case studies, written by internationally recognised curriculum specialists, the chapters explore curriculum making as an activity that occurs across multiple layers of educational systems, through a continual interplay of the global and local. Concluding with a comparative analysis of the contextual factors that shape curricular practices in different contexts, this book is a must-have resource for educational policy makers, researchers, teachers and teacher educators across the globe.

1

National Curriculum Making as More or Less Expressions of and Responses to Globalization

Bob Lingard

Introduction

This chapter, which reflects on the changing global, regional and national contexts of curriculum making, can be seen as a type of ‘curriculum criticism’, as Green (2018, p. 265) has put it. One aspect of such an approach to curriculum scholarship, which draws on literary criticism, is to regard a curriculum text as a ‘(con)text’, ‘a text made up of a range of other texts, related, similar, present, absent, actual, virtual….’, which precipitates the question, ‘How then will we read it’. This chapter will argue that one way, and I stress only one way, to read national curriculum developments over the last 30 years or so, is as expressions of and responses to globalization. Simultaneously, national curriculum documents are very much about the nation. As Green (2018, p. 265) has observed, when writing about the first national curriculum in Australia constructed 2008–2010, ‘It is our epic poem, our grand narrative, our best account of who we are and who we hope to be, and indeed of our past, our present and our future’. This is a poetic rearticulation of Anderson’s (1991) argument that school curricula, specifically the production of universal literacy (and I would add universal numeracy), have been central to constituting the imagined community which is the nation, as well as producing national citizens. This is the view of curricula as a national project.

The argument of this chapter, though, is that the nation has changed in the context of globalization; it remains important but works in different ways with effects in curricula. Contexts in the curriculum criticism proffered in this chapter, then, will focus on the changing imbrications of local, national, regional and global relationships and their expressions and responses in curriculum development (Lingard, 2021a). Here, we also need to consider the more recent rise of new nationalisms and related ethno-nationalism. These are evidenced, for example, in President Trump’s America First and Make America Great Again slogans and in his anti-multilateralism (e.g. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and from the World Health Organization (WHO)), and also in Brexit and fractures within the European Union. The Covid-19 pandemic has also encouraged, amongst the political right, anti-multilateralism and a kind of anti-globalization. There have also been left criticisms of neoliberal globalization from the green movement and anti-racism projects. These developments have challenged to some extent neoliberal globalization, which was almost hegemonic from the end of the Cold War, with impact upon the working of the nation-state and real effects in education (Lingard, 2021a, 2021b).

This idea of curriculum text as (con)text is inclusive of Bernstein’s (1971) much-quoted insight that there are three central interrelated message systems of schooling, namely, curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation, which sit in a symbiotic relationship with each other. Changes in one affect the practices of the others. Systemic policy in education has tended to deal more with the curriculum and evaluation message systems, than explicitly with pedagogy. As the chapter will demonstrate, the enhanced significance of international large-scale assessments and complementary national assessments has had very real impact on the enacted curriculum in classrooms. Moreover, pedagogy is central to the enactment of the intended curriculum, curriculum (re)design, as it were (Green, 2018, p. 272). As Gerrard and Farrell (2014, p. 639) note, ‘Teachers enact, animate, interpret and in some cases ignore, resist and dismiss, the policy directives handed down to them’, including curriculum frameworks. In the Australian national curriculum context, while pedagogy is not specified, it is certainly framed by ‘achievement standards’ and ‘content specifications’ outlined in the Australian curriculum and conceived as the domain of teachers’ professional expertise (Gerrard & Farrell, 2013, 2014).

In what follows, I first outline some background matters in relation to curriculum. I then consider the significance of curriculum as one of the message systems of schooling in the context of international and national large-scale assessments set against globalization. I then analyse the global context of national curricula; the rescaling of curricula as expression of and response to globalization. Finally, I consider some new developments with the potential for globalising curricula, namely, the involvement of EdTech companies and the datafication of schooling with potential for a kind of privatization of curriculum. It will be suggested that the global pandemic and the schooling of young people at home has been an impetus for these emergent developments.

Background

The introductory chapter to this collection by Priestley, Philippou, Alvunger and Soini argues, correctly in my view, that we must regard curriculum as a concept covering multiple social practices across various sites of curriculum activity. These social practices or activities now work across multiple sites, stretching across what Thijs and van den Akker (2009, p. 9) refer to as the supra, the macro, the meso, the micro and the nano. These cover the international or global activities that now help frame national curricula (context), the national and systemic levels of activity, the meso referring to the school level, the micro enactment of the curriculum by teachers in classrooms, and the nano that references students and their personal courses of learning. In all of this, they stress curriculum making, curriculum in a state of becoming, a practice, being made through practice, through enactment. This adds a temporal dimension to the various scales and spatialities of contemporary curriculum making. This is what Green (2018, p. 266) sees as a second component of curriculum criticism, notably, the scale at which curriculum is realized. It will be argued here that there are global and regional scales (e.g. EU), in addition to the national, now involved in or at least affecting curriculum making.

The heuristic proffered by Priestley and his colleagues adds in a granular way more sites of activity to the more common kind of description that sees curriculum working at institutional, programmatic and classroom levels (Deng, 2011); they add, the supra as the global context of context of national curricula above the institutional, and the nano as the students’ enactment of curriculum in classrooms. They also reframe van den Akker’s account of levels of curriculum making as sites of activity. They also accept teachers as curriculum workers (Mockler, 2018), enacting curriculum through their professional pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986), professional judgement and practical knowledge. The use of enactment here instead of implementation is intended to pick up on teacher agency in respect of curriculum. Pedagogical content knowledge refers to the intimate and necessary interweaving of curriculum content and pedagogical practices to facilitate student learning and development that also takes account of the school and student contexts and the broader purposes of schooling. In this broadest sense, pedagogical content knowledge is somewhat akin to the German concept of Bildung. It is also important to realize that, just as there is a significant national and cultural aspect to national curricula, so too is there to pedagogy (Alexander, 2008).

Priestley and his colleagues, in their heuristic, emphasize different sites of activity and do not specify institutions. This enables broader applicability as to the curriculum in different European nations analysed in this collection (Finland, Scotland, Sweden, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Czechia, Portugal, England and Ireland). They are also not applying a hierarchy of curriculum making in diagrammatically representing curriculum making from the supra to the nano sites of activity, rather they note the multiple directionalities of curriculum making and the need at times to backward map from classroom practices (the micro and nano levels in their heuristic) and acknowledge curriculum effects that work in that direction.

I chaired the curriculum authority in the state of Queensland (Queensland Studies Authority) for a few years from 2001. Teachers from the three schooling sectors, teacher unions, parents as well, and also school leaders, were all represented on the Governing Board of the Authority. Teacher voices from the classroom were expressed at these meetings and were part of the construction of the macro framing of curriculum in the state. As well, I subsequently chaired the Curriculum Committee of the Governing Board as an ordinary member of that Board, representing universities, and did so at the time of the implementation of the national curriculum, agreed to by the states, territories and national government from 2010 (see Savage, 2016a). Here, the committee consisted of mainly classroom teachers and school leaders. From the outset and across various iterations of the draft national curriculum and its initial implementation, they offered severe criticisms of the national curriculum that it was over-crowded. Eventually, both federal and state governments responded to such teacher criticisms, with a reduction of content being one result. At the time of writing this chapter, another review has just been established to attempt to overcome once again the crowded national curriculum. We might see these examples as indicative of a bottom-up redesigning of the national curriculum in Australia as it was enacted in Queensland. In a more top-down way, Savage (2016b) has shown how, since the first iteration of the national curriculum in Australia in 2010, the national text has been increasingly mediated by the state and territory level curriculum agencies; in Priestley and colleagues’ framework, this is an example of the activity at the state site of curriculum making (state and territory curriculum authorities) mediating the text produced at the national site of curriculum making.

With the globalization of the economy and the breaking down of nationally imposed tariff barriers after the end of the Cold War, education policy has been economized as a quasi or surrogate economic policy still under the jurisdiction of the nation. Quality schooling delivered through quality curricula, quality teachers and quality pedagogy in this policy move have been regarded as central to producing the necessary quantity and quality of human capital to ensure a competitive national economy in the global one (OECD, 2015). This focus has also been situated in the context of much policy talk of the rise of a knowledge economy. This has been a globalized policy discourse, but always played out in different nations, and also in supranational bodies like the EU, in path-dependent ways with curricula effects.

Contexts, global and national, however, are not the only factors affecting curriculum. For example, the field of curriculum studies across the last decade or so has been revitalized by the arguments coming from certain sociologists of education about the importance of disciplinary knowledge in curricula, powerful knowledge, not simply the knowledge of the powerful (see Priestley & Biesta, 2013; Wyse et al., 2013; Wyse, Hayward, & Pandya, 2016). Michael Young’s (2008, 2013, 2014) social realist work has been centrally important here concerning the need to bring disciplinary knowledge back in to considerations of curriculum.

In that context of developments in curriculum studies and globalization, some nations have strengthened the disciplinary knowledge focus of their curricula. The Australian national curriculum is a good case in point (see Reid & Price, 2018). At the same time, it has been argued that schools need to ensure students have what have been called twenty-first century skills in the context of globalization. In Australia, these have been included in the national curriculum as general capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities. Young (2014, p. 10) talks of a binary in curriculum frames between an emphasis on ‘how children should be’ and ‘what they are expected to know’, while Yates, Woelert, Millar, and O’Connor (2017) have argued similarly that there is a dichotomous tension in contemporary curriculum development between a focus on what students should know (e.g. disciplinary knowledge) and what students should become. In Scotland, the Curriculum for Excellence has stressed schools need to produce young people who are successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors; a focus on what students should become (see Biesta & Priestley, 2013). In some such developments, citizenship is broadened in the context of globalization to include global citizenship. In that context, it is interesting that the OECD included a global competency item in the 2018 PISA test. The enhanced significance in national policy terms of the OECD’s PISA has resulted in much emphasis in school policy being given to literacy, numeracy and scientific literacy. Whatever the focus of national curriculum, there is today a way in which globalization is articulated as the context of new curriculum developments. Indeed, the global might be seen now as the ‘context of context’ of national curricula (Peck & Theodore, 2015). The supranational governance of the EU has also been reworked in the context of globa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Curriculum Making: A Conceptual Framing
• 1  National Curriculum Making as More or Less Expressions of and Responses to Globalization
• 2  ‘Sites’ of Curriculum Making in Cyprus: Tracing the Emergence and Transformation of Expert Teacher-Subjects
• 3  The Ongoing Curriculum Reform in Portugal: Highlighting Trends, Challenges and Possibilities
• 4  Post-Socialist Curricular Reform in Czechia: Multiple Actors and Their Blame Games
• 5  Integral Curriculum Review in the Netherlands: In Need of Dovetail Joints
• 6  The Case of Curriculum Development in England: Oases in a Curriculum Desert?
• 7  Curriculum Reform in Scottish Education: Discourse, Narrative and Enactment
• 8  The Craft of Curriculum Making in Lower Secondary Education in Ireland
• 9  Understanding Transnational Curriculum Policies and Curriculum Making in Local Municipal Arenas: The Case of Sweden
• 10  Shared Sense-Making as Key for Large Scale Curriculum Reform in Finland
• Conclusions: Patterns and Trends in Curriculum Making in Europe
• Index