Europe,transnational curriculum movements and comparative curriculum theorizing

Abstract

This reflective essay on the papers in this special issue of EERJ on Northern European curriculum analysis discusses issues of comparison and scale, and the significance of global and local specificities in curriculum research. Drawing on comparative examples from outside Europe, the essay draws attention to some commonalities of the European positioning from which these analyses begin, in particular the questions about governance, policy process and constructions of citizenship engendered today both by the formation of the EU and by the impact of OECD activities on it. The article argues the need to recognize different types of curriculum analyses and purposes, and particularly the salience of both big picture and closer-up detailed perspectives, and discusses the contribution these articles make to addressing both. It considers further issues about two matters raised by these contributions: the significance of moves to more competency and outcomes-centred curriculum forms, and the usefulness of a focus on constitutional origins as a basis for understanding the citizen-formation curriculum agendas of different nations.

A visitor to education research conferences in different parts of the world might take away two somewhat different impressions of curriculum, curriculum inquiry and curriculum theorizing today. On the one hand they would see a huge growth in attention to the transnational and global as a basis for analysing what curriculum does and should do: the impact of PISA and the OECD and other forms of international comparative assessments, the discussions and international projects concerned with 21st century skills, the rise of new journals and associations explicitly concerned with curriculum discussion across national boundaries (the European Conference on Curriculum Studies, the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum, the journal Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, to name but a few). On the other hand they would also find a large number of papers which from an outsider’s perspective might seem to be specifically national and even parochial in their concerns, examining as they do in great detail the most recent policy developments or curriculum debates and controversies taking place in a national or sub-national (state, district) context. Where globalization scholars might make dismissive references to ‘methodological nationalism’ in relation to work which dares to take seriously the detail of national environments (though this was not quite the thrust of the original argument by Robertson and Dale (2008) in using this phrase), the small scale and local also matters, as feminist scholars once had to remind us (Smith, 1988). The phrase ‘the devil is in the detail’ is heard often among those affected as new policies are rolled out, and it reflects the importance of some continued focus on national or local policy detail in terms of how these carry or govern particular curriculum practices.

It is not surprising that curriculum scholars have been struck by some growing global developments and apparent convergence in changing curriculum policies; but a ‘global’ perspective or god’s eye ‘view from nowhere’ – to use Donna Haraway’s memorable phrase (Haraway, 1988) – can be equally limited or a priori in its explanatory form. The issue is not whether the object of study is one country, two countries, Europe or an international comparison. Rather, it is how do we understand (or test our explanations of) the processes both outside and within particular settings that are driving curriculum policy and practice? What forms and scale of comparison are useful and for what purposes?

The articles in this special issue are located in neither a sweeping global assessment nor an inherently national one: they are engaged with both in the analyses they each offer. They study in detail developments within particular national contexts, but with an aim that inherently has some comparative agenda and an explicit concern with wider international movements, agencies and pressures in relation to curriculum. In doing so they stimulate a range of questions about curriculum and the work of curriculum scholars today. What is the purpose of the kinds of analyses they (and we) offer? To whom do these articles speak? What is the value of selecting intra-Nordic developments or single country developments over time as the unit of comparison?

It is evident that new international trends are at work in the moves to learning outcomes, benchmarks, ‘competencies’ and the like. But, as these articles show, it is not necessarily the case that these have similar substantive force in countries with different kinds of curriculum history, economic situation, regulatory framework and national political cycle. To test explanations of the drivers or sources of curriculum reform there is, as these articles show, a need to consider not just the circulating language (rhetoric) of the policy texts and the international agreements, but the more detailed provisions through which expectations of ‘learning outcomes’ or ‘competencies’ are brought into being. To consider the effect of particular agencies such as the OECD or of Europe 2020, it is relevant not only to take into account the extent to which particular countries appear to take up their language and protocols, but also to look to intra-national comparison over time, the degree of change from what has gone before.

The articles here are specifically concerned with curriculum policy, and Wahlström and Sivesind refer in their introduction to ‘tensions between curricula as policies and curricula as educational practices adopted by teachers and students in schools and classrooms’. But this interest in policy (and in policy/practice relations) is itself a form of thinking about curriculum that is location specific, arising from countries that have a history of formal state policy frameworks for curriculum, as distinct, for example, from the history of curriculum in the USA, where strands of curriculum theorizing flourish (reconceptualist theorising in particular) that have very little origin in or concern with ‘policy’. Methodologically, too, the articles here represent a particular form of curriculum inquiry. They use different conceptual tools, but the Nordic articles in particular work with a strong desire to classify: to set up a schema or grid, and locate elements of national curriculum activity systematically and comparatively in that. This approach offers ways of seeing that might otherwise pass unnoticed, and it forms a contrast with a lot of more directly normative, overtly political and discursive curriculum analysis that is evident in journals such as Journal of Curriculum Studies and Journal of Education Policy, and is seen in other analyses, such as that of Lundahl et al. (2010) in this journal. (Tröhler’s opening argument about curriculum history takes a historical rather than classificatory form, though it too speaks to some of the same purposes.)

A focus on curriculum policies usually incorporates some detailed attention to texts, language and formal frameworks, and Nordin and Sundberg caution that ‘curriculum texts [change] much more rapidly than programmatic ideas, and both much more quickly than the philosophical ideas, cultural norms and ideological discourses underpinning them’. This caution to treat carefully issues of rhetoric in the policy documents is borne out by the careful analyses in these articles of the different frameworks and imperatives in which ‘competence’ and even ‘learning outcomes’ are actually embedded in different countries and at different times. Conversely, the language of documents can sometimes understate and belie their actual impact. The PISA testing programme, for example, was formally constructed as a service to national economic thinking that was designed to lie outside (not challenge) national forms of curriculum and curriculum authority (Dale, 2008). In practice, of course, the programme has been highly consequential for those national curricula.

A big question that all the Nordic articles implicitly address (and explicitly address in the case of Mølstad and Karseth) is the extent to which the move to a language of competencies and learning outcomes is representing a decisive move away from traditions associated with the didaktic – a time when education could be thought about in terms of broader purposes and aims and when there was somewhat more of a consensus about the kind of curriculum content through which teachers could be expected to bring those aims into being. Interestingly, Mølstad and Karseth’s conclusion is that this move away from seeing curriculum primarily as a carrier of (national) culture and rather as a vehicle for (international forms of) measurable outcomes or particular competencies is happening more decisively in Norway than in Finland, a conclusion which Sivesind, Afsar and Bachmann’s analysis of the recent Finnish reforms as a story of considerable continuity tends to support.

One of the challenges for curriculum analyses, especially comparative ones, is not just which country or countries are the unit of analysis but what is examined within the frame. In relation to Finland, for example, much attention has been given previously to whether its achievements are carried less through ‘curriculum’ policies as such and more by the education and status of teachers (Sahlberg, 2010). Where teachers are highly educated into disciplinary identities and expertise, moves to emphasise new competencies will have different forms of enactment than where they are trained in and for particular ‘competency’ purposes. Australia has a number of examples of attempts to introduce new curriculum subjects or frameworks that failed to have a strong impact, at least in part because teachers themselves had other identities and views of what mattered: ‘Australian Studies’ in the 1980s in Victoria; ‘Essential Learnings’ in the 1990s in Tasmania; and Outcomes Based Education (OBE) in the following decade in Western Australia (see Yates et al., 2011).

In this special issue two articles (by Wahlstrøm, and Nordin and Sundberg) discuss Sweden’s move to reinstate more conservative forms of subject-oriented curriculum in the light of PISA results and that this, somewhat ironically, moves them away from the concern with non subject-based competence kinds of frameworks that the OECD now appears to be promoting. This raises interesting issues in relation both to curriculum policy as process and to current debates about curriculum substance (I will return to the latter shortly). In terms of policy, process and politics the Swedish moves are a salutary reminder (in the face of those who see everything through a lens of ‘global’ movements) of the continued salience of national political activity. Incoming governments of different political hue tend to need to deliberately define themselves in contrast to the government they succeeded. Subjects versus integrated studies, differentiated versus common curriculum, what is centralized and what is devolved in curriculum frameworks and governance, are all potential instruments for use in this kind of party political differentiation. Nevertheless, the extent to which governments of different party origin are now also seen to be often taking up some common language about curriculum (‘evidence’, ‘competency’, ‘economic importance of education’) also tells its own story (Yates, 2013). So, through an international lens, the current waves of curriculum reform bear some impact of the transnational in their comparative benchmarking anxieties and the drive to ‘learning outcomes’. However, specific national history and party politics also plays out in the details, and these may sometimes be particularly relevant to what happens as practice in schools: the moves in the UK to institute or reject a national curriculum; the continued different underlying norms of the Scottish and English curriculum (Priestley and Biesta, 2013); the reactions in the USA which interpret introduction of ‘common core standards’ for curriculum as an extension of ‘big government’.

As Wahlstrøm’s analysis implicitly suggests, there is also a question of just how coherent are the EU forms of globally circulating reforms, both in terms of the difference between the ‘traditional’ key competencies, and the ‘transversal’ competencies and their implications for the organization of curriculum; and in the relationship between curriculum aspirations and assessment and reporting practices. She notes that the ‘EU framework of key competencies in itself represents a tension between the meanings of ‘knowledge’ and ‘competence’ (p309). On the one hand there is a clear move to emphasizing outcomes rather than inputs in the new frameworks, but on the other hand Wahlstrøm shows that the accompanying emphasis via PISA on assessment and comparisons between countries in relation to ‘standards’ drives some new focus on what is to be measured, and, in the Swedish context, this has produced a more rigid form of ‘knowledge requirements’.

In the past decade in Australia we could find the rise of Asia and its education achievements (especially in Singapore and China) much referenced as a rationale and model for education action (Australia, 2012; Jensen et al., 2012) at the same time as many delegates from those countries were either coming to learn from Australian curriculum and pedagogic practices, or were employing experts from Australia to help reform those systems. Similarly, the Australian Government used OECD rationales and PISA results as arguments for reform action on schooling, yet invited as advisor the director of the New York school system, a system ranking lower in its results on those same measures, though presumably with a similar philosophy of management to that to which the government aspired (Yates, 2013). There needs to be some caution therefore with single strand explanations of a curriculum policy process or even of the impact of the transnational and global moves.

In addition, from different locations what is being drawn into the frame as a focus for curriculum reform and policy analysis has different inflections. In Europe the curriculum reflections are particularly concerned with, on the one hand, the national historical traditions compared with the new EU and OECD led focus on outcomes and competencies; and, on the other, changed forms of authority and governance within this. From an Australian and North American perspective another strong bi-directional focus currently at work is that between the ‘Asian’ traditions (though that term is an unfortunate conflation which glosses considerable difference in traditions within countries of that region) and ‘Western’ ones. The forms of didactic curriculum and teaching in Asian countries and their apparent effectiveness and rapid rise are much scrutinised by politicians and the press in Australia and North America, while those same countries in turn examine science and what is facilitated by the ‘active’ teaching modes in Australia and North America (see, for example, Clarke and Xu, 2008; Li et al., 2011; Hogan, 2011; Luke, 2011; Jensen et al., 2012)

At this point, having said something about two issues pertinent to curriculum theorizing more generally (questions about ‘what comes into the frame?’ and about the location from which the writer speaks), I want to return to the very substantial arguments made in the article by Daniel Tröhler which have much to say to these questions. Tröhler is concerned with curriculum history rather than the more recent changes related to outcomes, the OECD and ‘globalization’ that are the focus of the other contributions of this special issue. He makes a case for a focus on constitutions (or, rather, constitutional origins) as a way of seeing some of the deeper or more subtle differences that underpin arrangements of schooling and curriculum in different national settings. Doing this provides not only an identified starting point and overarching frame that has comparative purchase, but also a frame for attending to detailed specificities of different countries. These differences may be explicit and quite concrete yet puzzling (different choice of core subjects as in Tröhler’s illuminating comparison of 19th century Germany and France). Or the approach may offer extensive and subtle new ways of understanding national constructions of citizenship revealed by considering the constitution/curriculum couple.

This argument, I would suggest, has particular resonance in Europe where, as other contributions to this special issue reflect, a central question of the 21st century is precisely how pre-EU national constitutional and citizenship forms are being changed or maintained or set in conflict with new forms of Europeanization. It is a comparative framework that can also be used as an interesting new lens on curriculum constitution (and re-constitution) in other parts of the world. I would argue, however, that it does not have identical salience in these. For example, as Tröhler himself notes, extending the frame to the UK requires identifying cultural and legal foundations not built on an explicit constitution or origin story for the nation. The country where the constitution is most visibly the touchstone of cultural norms and appeals is the USA, but the USA is unusual internationally in the ongoing visibility of this origin story and the extent to which major education reforms often are tested legally in terms of the constitution. Singapore is an example of a nation of more recent origin where constitution and curriculum are also very tightly coupled and explicit in their constructions of citizenship (see, for example, Hogan, 2011; Tan, 2011). In Australia, by contrast, although curriculum over time has been marked by considerable attention to and rethinking of what being an Australian citizen implies, this is only marginally related to or even constrained by the constitutional provision. Like the USA, Australia is constituted as a federation, with education (until recent changes) largely left undefined in it, as one of the areas delegated to state law-making.

Located myself in a country that is a ‘periphery’ rather than a ‘centre’, and in sociological traditions of curriculum theorizing that are more overtly political and normative than classificatory, I am stimulated by Tröhler’s attention to the big-picture questions of what kinds of citizens are presumed and formed via curriculum in different nations. Tröhler’s big picture is one that attends to continuities over time, across changes of government and that nestles within (gives cultural form to) wider movements beyond the nation. In Australia, some similar distinct continuities can be found in state differences within the nation, relating to different state origins (some convict-based, some ‘free settlers’) and demographics, and continuing to some extent even as they take up a new national curriculum framework and new legal national underpinning of that (Collins and Yates, 2009; Yates et al., 2011).

Within historical accounts, historians grapple with and argue for insights to be gained by attention to continuity compared with change. In curriculum studies I think we have tended to focus much more on change than on continuities, at least of the kind which Tröhler takes up. I am stimulated by the possibilities of a comparative focus on the constitution/ curriculum and citizenship formation that this work offers. At the same time, as one formed in the political challenges to curriculum of the 1970s, I am struck by an absence to this kind of story: the impact of the major social movements of the 20th century – feminism, anti-racism and post-colonialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminism in particular most strikingly took up the perspective on curriculum with which Tröhler is concerned, what kinds of citizens are being formed via curriculum, and, in many countries, it had a significant effect on how both the historical constitution and the curriculum were subsequently interpreted and enacted.

Tröhler’s article is different in form than the four Nordic articles I discussed earlier, in its prioritizing of the question of what kinds of citizens are being formed by curriculum as compared with questions about policy, process, knowledge and governance; and in its de-prioritizing of the movements that are happening most recently. These different perspectives are not simply alternative or contending answers to the same question about curriculum or even what kind of a thing is curriculum or curriculum theory. Looking at the contributions to this special issue in toto returns us to questions I noted earlier: what is the purpose of the kinds of analyses they (and we) offer?; and to whom do these articles speak?

While Tröhler’s article has foregrounded the formation of the person that is enacted via curriculum, this is also an undercurrent in the contemporary debates about the shifts to a ‘competence’ or ‘capability’ approach (Yates and Grumet, 2011; Yates, 2012). Nordin and Sundberg note in this issue, in this regard,

At the transnational level there is […] a widespread consensus about the need for a conceptual turn from a content-based to a competence-based understanding […] Leaving the old idea of knowledge as content is described as a necessity if the EU idea to become the most powerful knowledge-based economy in the world is to be fulfilled. Put in another way, according to the EU as well as the OECD there is no other option for the member-states than to adapt to this conceptual turn.

In other words, the conception of curriculum is an economist’s vision of what curriculum should produce as its outcome, and the interest in ‘competence’ rather than ‘content’ (rather than school subjects or knowledge) as an agenda for schools derives from that. There seems to be widespread take-up of a certain outcome vision in EU and OECD documents and agencies of the ideal education product of the 21st century – a digitally-savvy, flexible, entrepreneurial, life-long learner, able to work in teams with people of different cultural backgrounds. However, the related question of what forms of curriculum, teaching workforce and governance actually produce such capabilities (let alone more traditional skills and knowledge that may also still be needed) is still in some contention, at least to some degree. A vision of the capacities that would be valuable in the 21st century is not the same as a theory of the curriculum that would bring these into being. In the heyday of moves to ‘progressive’ child-centred curriculum in the UK in the 1970s, Sharp and Green (1975) found that children who were flourishing were having their learning subsidised by direct teaching input from parents out of school. Furthermore, Hogan’s (2011) comparison of Singapore and USA implicitly argues against a reading that sees competency and performance as inevitably binary and the only options for curriculum.

In the curriculum literature there is a debate rather than a consensus about the ‘conceptual turn’ identified in these articles as now being so widely taken up in policy. Muller (2000), Young (2008, 2009), Wheelahan (2010) and others have argued the case for the deeper capacity produced by a ‘knowledge-based’ curriculum rather than one built on generic competencies and, more specifically, that curriculum should be based on the reliable and specialised forms of knowledge that rest on disciplined and disciplinary forms of inquiry. They argue that this kind of specialized knowledge has a power for students in their post-school world that is not made available by curriculum backward mapped from the postulated worker of the 21st century in the form of outcome competency standards.

In earlier writing, Bernstein’s (1971) structuralist analysis of collection and integrated codes would similarly caution about assuming that an openness or integrated form at one stage of education necessarily produces more of that at the next. He pointed out that the integrated code (‘transversal competence’ in today’s terms) needs to rest on a large amount of consensus about the integrating idea or ideology as well as much explicitness about the criteria of assessment – and is likely to produce common performances (‘mechanical solidarity’ in Durkheim’s terms) rather than the more open and flexible capacity of the ‘specialized’ collection code as its outcome. Some sense of this is apparent in Mølstad and Karseth’s analysis when they conclude that the Norwegian curriculum’s competence aims ‘may narrow the range of deliberation on what the school subject should constitute and further reflections on what this matter can and should signify to the student’ and are ‘formulated as predictable performances’ compared with those of the Finnish formulation.

The contributors to this special issue agree that the curriculum policies they analyse are framed within a widely noted contemporary orientation to an economic, competencies-focused and learning outcomes perspective on curriculum. In the postscript of his original article on collection and integrated codes, Bernstein noted of integrated codes that they

…rest upon a closed explicit ideology. It should then follow that this code would stand a better chance of successful institutionalization in societies where (a) there were strong and effective constraints upon the development of a range of ideologies and (b) where the educational system was a major agency of political socialization.

(Bernstein, 1971: 68)

Today, the attention being given by the OECD and EU to education reflects these bodies’ own recognition of the second of Bernstein’s points, the significance of education for marking out dominant political agendas. The detailed comparative analyses in this issue help to explore further the first of Bernstein’s points: what is actually not closed or is at work differently in different national settings within what seems from other vantage points to be a simple shifting consensus.