The OECD’s Global Competence Project: Equivalences and Erasures in the Politics of Culture

• In Event: A Critical Analysis of Global Competence and Other 21st Century Skills: Gaps, Fissures, and Erasures within OECD PISA

Proposal

In 2014 the OECD-PISA’s Governing Board approved the addition of a set of global competence measures to its well-known Programme of Student Assessment (PISA) that was first launched in 2000. Two framing texts were released - Global Competency for an Inclusive World (OECD, 2016) and Preparing Our Youth for a Sustainable and Inclusive World (OECD, 2018) – both supporting the idea that students need to acquire ‘global competences’ to meet the challenges offered by an increasingly connected and culturally diverse environment. Nevertheless, despite framing the same set of measures, the 2016 document was later withdrawn without explanation and is currently not available on the OECD official website. In a way, the two documents were not meant to be complementary but rather equivalent, so that one can be erased.

In our paper, we argue that the establishment of such a relationship of equivalence, which eventually leads to a tacit substitution, highlights the existence of a central friction in the OECD definition of global competences, and that’s around the concept of culture. More precisely, we contend that the plurality of perspective required by a cultural approach hardly fits the limited view of culture implicitly assumed by the PISA, i.e., a culture tied to economic development. Accordingly, we analyse these two documents to provide evidence that the OECD’s Global Competence Framework is made unstable by the deep morphic incongruence that characterizes its conceptual framing.

To identify and visualize these discursive shifts, we combine Critical Realism with Network Text Analysis. Following Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer (2014) our analysis approaches discourse as a social fact and this entails a double movement: on the one hand, we investigate the semiotic conditions that make social events possible while, on the other hand, we strive to identify the non-semiotic conditions that underpin the emergence of discourses. From this perspective, then, the comparison between two texts should not reduce them to a list of linguistic elements, but rather emphasize and operationalize their complexity as signifying wholes. In these terms, we argue that Network Text Analysis meets such theoretical needs. By mapping documents as semantic networks, this method enabled us to individuate significant semantic shifts and rearticulations in the discourse around global competences.

Substantively, findings highlight a dramatic change of approach between the two documents, mainly portrayed by (a) the simplification and polarization of the semantic universe surrounding global competences and (b) the disappearance of culture in favour of knowledge economy proxies. Accordingly, the OECD’s Global Competence Framework and assessment tool appears both controversial and unstable. It is controversial because of its uneasiness around the concept of culture, and it is unstable as it is evident that, in terms of semantic configurations, 2016 GCIW and the 2018 PYISW have very little in common with each other. Finally, the ideal global citizen that emerges from the OECD’s Global Competence Framework is a subject whose competences can secure a high degree of extraction and exchange of value within an ideal global market; a market measured by one single standard.

Authors

• Michele Martini, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Susan Lee Robertson, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge