Provincializing the OECD-PISA Global Competences Project

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

Proposal

A great deal is currently made of the need to insert ‘the global’ into schools to engage learners with pressing global challenges. Developing global competences and becoming a global citizen are viewed by International Organizations (IO), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and selected governments as a way of promoting a more open and inclusive world through education, and a means of realizing the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.7 - global citizenship - by 2030 (UNESCO, 2018; Auld and Morris, 2019).

In 2014 the OECD added global competences to the 2018 cycle of PISA data collection. This was followed by two framework reports released in 2016 and 2018, outlining the issues, the underpinning model, and details of the assessment strategy (see OECD 2016, 2018). In 2018 the OECD added a set of global competence measures to its PISA program, and reported on the outcomes in November 2020. In this paper I explore the provenance of the idea of global competence underpinning the OECD-PISA Global Competence framework and measure. The official account by the OECD references the OECD PISA Governing Board, Expert Panels, National Teams and Consortia engaged in the creation and delivery of this assessment tool. However, in this paper I problematize this narrative and sketch out an alternate genealogy.

I show that a web of US-based overlapping connections and interests operate in the shadowlands of the formal OECD PISA processes, and that it is this set of networked interests who have been very influential in shaping the OECD’s model of global competence. To make these visible, I first map out this web of individual and institutional relationships, projects and interests, and sets of overlapping connections. Second, I deploy a genealogical approach to the idea the globally aware student that has informed the OECD’s model of global competence. I trace this back to the 1970s and Hanvey’s (1976) call for a global perspective. This is picked up in the 1990s by Harvard experts in the 1990s as a cognitive construct: ‘global consciousness’, a ‘disposition’, and ‘global competence’, with its radical possibility of ideology critique effectively neutered. Third, I explore what this mapping and genealogy of an idea tells us about its world view and ideational assumptions. I argue it is a US-centered liberal political project aimed at advancing US state and corporate interests. In Chakrabarty’s (2000) terms the OECD’s global competence is best understood as provincial. Its ideational project is the cultural production of the new worker citizen able to participate in the global economy who, at the same time, learns to mediate the consequences of unequal outcomes by managing their effects.

Author

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