Globalizing Curriculum and Evaluation Policy in the Presence of an Interstate

• In Event: Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Globalizing Policies: Standardization in an Increasingly Nonstandardized World

Abstract

This paper draws on policy studies, systems theories, institutional theories and policy examples to consider educational challenges emerging from recent globalization and cosmopolitanism. We argue that the presence of an inter-state or the cosmopolitan dimension (Beck, 2004) is visible in terms of increasing global harmonization and legitimacy regarding core curricula, evaluation procedures (e.g. PISA), population migrations (increasing multiculturalism), and new versions of colonialism. Further, the semantics of globalization have generated tremendous political and economic pressure to compare educational systems and to mutually learn or borrow from them (Schriewer, 2000; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). Communications regarding the legitimacy of particular systems have contributed to curriculum policy borrowing, a global curriculum discourse, and in some cases, resistance.

Scholars have been studying recent globalizing curriculum policies through varying (and often Western) epistemologies and theoretical logics, frequently drawing on Luhmann’s (1995) self-referential social systems theory, Wallerstein’s (1974) world systems theory, and neo-institutional theory (Meyer & Rameriz, 1987). In the first instance (Luhmann, 1995), educational theorizing is understood largely as a self-referential system of reflection rooted in distinct contextual conditions, intellectual traditions and value systems characteristic of its respective system of reference and context. Applying Luhamnn (1995) to policy studies, Steiner-Khamsi (2004) argues that borrowing (e.g. increasingly global core curricula) does not imply an exact duplication of reform; it draws our attention to processes of local adaptation and modification. In the second instance, Wallerstein (1974) conceived of a world system as a multicultural territorial division of labor that leads to the existence of two interdependent regions: core and periphery. The core-periphery relationship is structural, one with a power hierarchy in which powerful and wealthy “core” societies dominate and exploit weak and poor (e.g. colonized) peripheral societies.

Meyer and Rameriz further suggest the dissemination of a world-level educational ideology which is understood to increasingly influence and shape the conceptions of educational actors and to direct educational decision making (e.g. development of global core curricula). This ideology has emerged from a combination of the key concepts or institutionalized legitimizing myths, including the ideas of individual personality development and citizenship; the equalization of social and political opportunities; economic development and national progress; and a political order guaranteed by the nation state.

We argue that globalizing policy studies provide theoretical logics and analytical tools for organizing new relations among national education, politics, economy and culture so as to meet the simultaneous need to establish, on an individual and collective level, a sustainable yet dynamic sense of belonging to a unified whole (e.g. nation). Understanding the interplay between societal aims and social interactions in schools may help bridge disparate fields of curriculum theory/didaktik (with its focus on societal aims, methods, and planning) and leadership-teaching studies (with its focus on social interactions in schools). Issues of increasing multiculturalism, changing theories of the individual subject in the wake of neoliberalism, relations between ideas and structures, colonialism, and non-Western epistemologies, however, receive less attention. Thus, we argue that policy studies would benefit from a closer dialogue with Western and Non-Western curriculum theorizing and leadership studies.

Authors

• Rose M. Ylimaki, The University of Arizona

• Michael Uljens, Abo Academy University - Finland