Post on 08-Jan-2023
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
1
Global.edu: Globalising education
policy and the future of the curriculum
Ben Williamson, University of Stirling
Unpublished draft paper, University of Stirling, August 2013
Abstract
Globalisation is increasingly being taken as the context and rationale for changing education
policies. As the school curriculum has become the site for renewed interest, it too is now
being influenced by “global policy speak”—a particular way of thinking and talking about
education that is suffused with the language and imagery of global networks and new
information and communication technologies. I term this way of thinking “global.edu.”
Education policy is also being made and done at a global scale, as government policymakers
share and “borrow” policies from one another, and as “outsiders” such as international
agencies (e.g. UNESCO, the World Bank), charitable organisations, and multinational
businesses seek to influence education. The future of the curriculum is therefore a globalising
concern. This paper will trace some of the global trends generating “global.edu” and identify
how this is influencing and shaping efforts to reimagine the future of the school curriculum.
Introduction
Educational policies increasingly travel the world. As they do so, they exert effects
on key elements of schooling such as assessment, teaching methods (pedagogies),
and the curriculum (the knowledge taught in school). In this paper, I explore some
emerging global trends in educational policymaking and focus on how these are
affecting decisions about the knowledge to be included in the school curriculum. In
particular, I emphasise the prominence given to ideas about a “global knowledge
economy” and the increasing technological saturation of the world in education
policies relating to the future of the curriculum. This is what I term “global.edu”—a
contemporary way of thinking about curriculum policy that is suffused with the
language and imagery of new information and communication technologies and
global networks. The future of the curriculum is therefore a globalising concern. This
paper will trace some of the global trends generating “global.edu” and identify how
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
2
this is influencing and shaping efforts to reimagine the future of the school
curriculum.
A globally networked world?
What is globalisation? Though a highly contested term, there is some agreement
amongst globalisation theorists that contemporary societies and cultures are
increasingly being squeezed together, connected and compressed so that the world
is becoming one place and one system (Cohen & Kennedy 2007). Globalisation
therefore applies to the whole range of social relations, cultural, economic and
political. From the cultural perspective, for example, Thomson (2008) argues that we
are increasingly “mesmerised” by enchanting cultural ideas, commercial brands, and
mass media that circle the world at high speed. In crude terms, while twentieth
century industrial capitalism was all about the factory and physical products, in the
twenty-first century we are experiencing a funkier form of “cool capitalism” which is
all about pleasure, consumption, creativity, lifestyle, and entertainment—
characterised by global brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonald’s, Apple and so
on (McGuigan 2009), and more recently by social media brands such as Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter etc.
The cultural enchantments of globalisation for well-off westerners have been
mirrored by agony and uncertainty in the economic and political domains. The
collapse of the banking system worldwide in 2007-08 showed the fragility of the
globalisation of finance. And events such as 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
the waves of unrest unleashed across the middle east since the Arab Spring are all
indicative of an increasingly complex global political situation. Moreover, individual
nation-states are losing their political autonomy to the influence of supranational
organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) (Held 2000).
For the sociologist Manuel Castells (2009), these global trends mean we are now
living in a “network society” characterised in particular by the information
technology revolution at the end of the twentieth century and rapid development of
of digital networks of communication in the early twenty-first century. At the centre
of Castells’ account is the contention that we have left the “industrial age” behind
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
3
and have entered the “information age.” The network society is the global social
structure of such an age. He argues:
The core activities that shape and control human life in every corner of the planet are
organised in global networks: financial markets; transnational production, management, and
the distribution of goods and services; highly skilled labour; science and technology,
including higher education; the mass media; the Internet networks of interactive,
multipurpose communication; culture; art; entertainment; sports; international institutions
managing the global economy and intergovernmental relations; religion; the criminal
economy…. Globalisation is better understood as the networking of these socially decisive
global networks. (Castells 2009: 25)
Digital communication technologies are accelerating globalisation processes in the
early twenty-first century, culturally, economically and politically, and this is having
effects on how we as individuals and communities engage in the world, and how we
think and talk about ourselves, our everyday lives, and our identities.
It is against the backdrop of these globalising trends and activities that education
should also be understood as increasingly globalised. Education and educational
policymaking is taking place in a so-called “information age” or a “digital age”
which is characterised by being globalised, networked, connected, creative, cool,
saturated with software devices (Loveless & Williamson 2013). These things are
changing how the future of education is imagined and how educational policies are
made in order to transform those imaginings into realities.
Globalising education policy
In Globalizing Education (Apple, Kenway and Singh (2005) it is argued that education
is now being influenced by global concepts and concerns such as interconnectedness,
networks, flow, speed and volume, virtuality, fluidity, flexibility, mobility, and
reconfiguration. These concepts and concerns have translated into what Ozga and
Lingard (2007) describe as policies that look increasingly homogenous in education
systems around the world—or “universalising policy trends.” According to Ball
(2008: 25) “global policyspeak” has produced “a particular way of thinking about
education and its contemporary problems and purposes” and “policies are ‘made’ in
response to globalisation.” Dale (2007) writes that globalisation affects educational
policy by increasing levels of policy “borrowing,” “harmonisation,”
“dissemination,” and “standardisation” across different education systems. In
Globalization of Education, Spring (2009) argues that the shared language of
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
4
globalisation has entered into the language of schooling and is influencing local and
national policymakers as well as school leaders, teachers, and the educational media.
According to the book, some of the components of educational globalisation include:
1. The adoption worldwide of similar educational practices, including curricula, school
organisation, and pedagogies
2. Global information technology, e-learning and communications
3. Intergovernmental and nongovernment organisations that influence national and local
educational practices
4. Multinational corporations that produce and market educational products, such as tests,
curricula and school materials
Additionally, in Globalizing Education Policy, Rizvi and Lingard (2010) note trends
such as:
5. Increased networking and partnership between government (public sector) and commerce
(private sector)
6. The privileging of business as a model for educational improvement, management and
modernisation
7. A new policy vocabulary of economy, efficiency, entrepreneurship, and management
8. The rise of a “global field of comparison” using numerical data and league tables to measure,
evaluate and compare the educational performance of countries, including new international
tests as performance indicators of different nations’ potential global economic
competitiveness—leading to the production of “policy as numbers”
These points indicate how the globalisation of educational policy involves a range of
influences from commercial organisations as well as other global agencies.
Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Murdoch’s NewsCorp, and myriad other
private sector businesses, all promote their own educational products and seek to
influence policies (Spring 2012), while supranational organisations such as the World
Bank, IMF, OECD, and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation) are also heavily involved in promoting new educational
models and techniques around the world (Spring 2009). In addition to this, there has
been an explosion of interest in education amongst venture capitalists,
philanthropists and charities, social enterprises, entrepreneurs, management
consultancies, political think tanks, and wealthy foundations, often working together
in networks, and major “edu-businesses” like Pearson who market and sell
educational products worldwide in a marketplace worth billions annually (Ball
2012). Globalising education policy is not just a matter of government policy, then,
but the result of a complex of global relationships and interactions between
governments, intergovernmental agencies, multinational businesses, philanthropy,
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
5
entrepreneurship, and civil society. All of these aspects of the globalising of
education policy are captured in the term “global.edu”—a particular way of thinking
about education policy that is characterised by the language and imagery of global
networks.
Policy for a global knowledge economy
Perhaps the most important aspect of global.edu is the concept of the “global
knowledge economy.” The knowledge economy has become the dominant policy
narrative underpinning educational reform globally and is shared across
governments, commercial businesses, and all kinds of philanthropic and
entrepreneurial organisations. The basic argument behind the concept of the
knowledge economy is that in the industrial era, wealth was generated through the
production of material goods. However, in a globalised world and an informational
era, higher economic and cultural value is placed on immaterial things like
intelligence, ideas and knowledge than manufacturing or physical products.
Consequently, greater emphasis is put on education and schools to teach the skills
associated with “knowledge work” and the production of ideas, knowledge and
information rather than material “stuff” (Ball 2008). The knowledge economy
requires high-skills workers who can do high-tech work, and “flexible specialists”
who can adapt to fluctuations and changes in the demands of markets.
Many education policies worldwide are now made with reference to the “realities”
of the global knowledge economy and the pressures of globalisation. Owing to the
needs of the knowledge economy, schools, colleges are universities are required to
supply smart, highly-skilled individuals with “soft skills” of flexibility, creativity,
problem-solving, innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement, risk-taking,
entrepreneurship, teamwork and “collective intelligence” (Lauder et al. 2012). These
new kinds of learners are to be produced through techniques and curricula which
are concerned to develop the skills and dispositions—and thus to improve the stock
of “human capital”—thought necessary to the knowledge economy (Rizvi & Lingard
2010). Education policy has therefore increasingly come to be seen as the best
economic policy—educating learners to be able to produce valuable wealth-
producing knowledge is central to economic growth and competition. This is what is
meant by educating for the development of human capital—producing people who
can add value to the economy through wealth-creating work.
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
6
Beyond the immediate economic arguments about education for the knowledge
economy, there are wider cultural concerns too. In the globally networked, cool
capitalist world, education is transformed into a way of life:
In the “knowledge economy,” education occurs across a whole lifetime in an unprecedented
variety of social sectors, institutions and media: not just schools, community colleges, and
universities, but also businesses, broadcast media, [and] the Internet.... Education, in other
words, is now a decentralized field where no one institution individually corners the market
and where we encounter a dizzying dispersion of the kinds and scales of learning.... (Lui
2004: 22)
There has been an explosion of education, as young people are encouraged to see
themselves as “lifelong learners” constantly improving themselves, investing in
themselves, optimizing their personal portfolios, and upgrading their skills and
knowledge (both through formal education and through active participation in the
informal culture of learning) in order to participate actively and productively in a
fast-moving and ever-changing globalised world (Rizvi & Lingard 2010).
However, the fallout of the knowledge economy is a global struggle for middle class
jobs. The global jobs market is already congested with well-educated and high-skills
young people all seeking “boundaryless careers,” thus leading to a competition for
“cut-price brainpower” and forcing “students, workers, and families into a bare-
knuckle fight for those jobs that continue to offer a good standard of living” (Brown,
Lauder & Ashton 2011: 7). The cultivation of a small elite of creative star producers
in the knowledge economy is at the expense of the “cognitariat”—those with high
cognitive skills and qualifications but few prospects in the jobs market—who face an
uncertain and anxious future as skilled “perma-temps” (Newfield 2010). This
suggests that while the knowledge economy is a seductive idea, its actual effects on
educational policies globally have turned out to be dangerous and damaging to
students’ expectations and prospects. In addition, Ball (2008) argues that the global
policyspeak of the knowledge economy has eroded the idea of education as being
about values and ideals, and replaced them with ideas about the optimization of
skills and profit.
In line with this, critics are increasingly concerned by the trend towards “policy as
numbers” (Grek 2009). This involves using numerical data of various kinds to
inform policy developments. For example, the OECD administers a Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA) which measures the performance of
children from countries all over the globe in maths, literacy and science at the end of
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
7
compulsory schooling. The results of these tests are then used as performance
indicators of each country’s potential economic competitiveness. As a result, national
education systems can be put under pressure to improve if they fare poorly in the
global comparison. This creates hierarchies of national education systems in a global
policy arena. Countries with high-ranking performance, such as Singapore and
Finland, attain iconic status within the global policy arena, and become beacons
attracting policymakers and politicians from other countries eager to emulate their
successes. For critics, the emphasis on international policy competition comes at a
cost for children and teachers. As Ozga et al. (2011) have provocatively put it,
performance tests like PISA “transform” individual children into numbers and
comparable data in a global economic competition. The knowledge economy is to be
constructed through the competences of individual children aggregated together as
national performance data. The requirements of data have encouraged a decline in
teaching and learning and a reduction of curriculum coverage to content that can be
tested, examined and measured (Ozga & Lingard 2007; Rizvi & Lingard 2010). In
2015 PISA will also test “collaborative problem-solving” and make “greater use of
computer-based testing” through a partnership with the multinational education
publisher Pearson (Hartley 2012). These developments demonstrate the growing
global policy emphasis on generic skills and the significant involvement of networks
of multinational agencies and commercial businesses in policy processes.
Although the idea of the knowledge economy appears fragile a full five years into
the global economic downturn, Lauder et al. (2012) argue that there are good reasons
for believing it will persist in global policy language because no viable alternatives
have appeared. The policyspeak of the knowledge economy is not just a historical
product of the economic boom years, but a continuing influence on policy thinking
for education in the future. The language and imagery of global.edu persists despite
the downturn.
The future of the curriculum
How do the pressures of globalisation and the knowledge economy which underpin
the emergence of global.edu as a significant contemporary way of thinking about
educational policy play out in ideas about the future of the school curriculum? If
globalisation is viewed as a problem (because it creates new economic, cultural and
political pressures and concerns), then the curriculum may be viewed as a possible
solution. The curriculum is a good example of how policy talk of globalisation is
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
8
producing a set of generic policy solutions that are increasingly being shared and
borrowed across national borders, although not identically.
Understanding how globalising educational policies are influencing the curriculum
is important because the curriculum is a microcosm of the wider society outside of
school. It is the “intellectual centring” of schooling and it states “what we choose to
remember about our past, what we believe about the present, what we hope for the
future” (Pinar 2004: 20). Curriculum reform is now taking place in a more globalized
policy context within which new educational ideas, trends and fashions are being
borrowed, copied, interconnected, harmonised, and hybridised across distant and
local sites, the public and private sectors (Rizvi & Lingard 2010). Ideas about the
future of the school curriculum are being generated both by government
policymakers and outside the formal institutions of the state, by think-tanks, non-
profit organizations, non-governmental and quasi-governmental organizations,
charities and voluntary groups, and the philanthropic outgrowths of corporations
(Williamson 2013).
So, for example, it is possible to see a great deal of symmetry between the
curriculum policies of Anglophone countries as geographically distant as Scotland
and New Zealand, South Africa and Australia (Priestley & Biesta 2013). While the
various curricula have many of their own idiosyncratic features, they are also
evidence of increasing levels of global policy borrowing. A major global policy trend
has been the emergence of a new “language of learning,” or the “learnification” of
the curriculum (Priestley & Biesta 2013). Instead of focusing on school knowledge
and the subjects, there has been a shift in curriculum policy to focus on the technical
and social aspects of learning, generic skills, learning outcomes, and capacities and
competences, rather than mastery of subject knowledge. Terms like curriculum have
been replaced with the popular slogans of “personalised learning,” “learning styles,”
“learner choice” and “learning centres,” and policy has increasingly been emptying
out content from the curriculum (Young 2008).
Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence is illustrative of these trends. Its focus is on
learning outcomes and on the “capacities” of “successful learners” who possess
“enthusiasm and motivation for learning,” “determination to reach high standards”
and “openness to new thinking and ideas,” and who can “think independently and
creatively,” “make reasoned evaluations,” and “link and apply different kinds of
learning in new situations.” The language of successful learners, confident
individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors in the Scottish
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
9
Curriculum for Excellence is mirrored in the New Zealand curriculum which
stresses key competencies of thinking, managing self, relating to others, and
participating and contributing (Priestley & Biesta 2013).
Part of the emphasis on learning has been the shift to a concern with so-called “21st
century skills” and “competences” for the knowledge economy. The themes of
global networks and information and communication technologies associated with
global.edu are evident in the globalizing of curriculum policy. The curriculum of the
past, organised as discrete bodies of subject knowledge, has come under siege from a
curriculum of the future characterized by the promotion of generic skills and flexible
learning to meet the perceived demands of the global knowledge economy for more
flexible workers. Worldwide, more curricular emphasis has been put on soft skills,
competence, thinking, brainpower, and other categories of “know-how,” rather than
“know-what,” since most knowledge contained in the curriculum is presumed to
become outdated very quickly in a globally fluid and fast-changing era (Brown,
Lauder & Ashton 2011). Less emphasis is placed on the control and dissemination of
knowledge by educators and there is more investment on the part of the learner in
the psychological capacity and behavioural disposition to hands-on, active problem-
solving and knowledge construction. The soft skills and behavioural competences
promoted by the knowledge economy narrative are an amalgam of technical and
psychological skills, capacities and abilities, or a unification of the inner-focus of
“mind and character” with economic purpose (Lauder et al. 2012). Much of this
reinvention of the curriculum has been shared among different national educational
policy systems and is supported by the major international organisations like the
OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO, as well as by the European Union.
A number of interesting curriculum developments have emerged in response to this
shift in language from curriculum content to psychological competence and capacity.
The change in the global policy language around the curriculum has made it
possible for a range of new providers and organisations to get involved in
curriculum invention. Let’s look at some examples.
Opening Minds
Opening Minds, launched as a pilot project in the UK in 1999 by the Royal Society of
Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and by 2012 active in over 200 UK schools,
is based on a competencies approach that:
refers to a complex combination of knowledge, skills, understanding, values, attitudes and
desire which lead to effective, embodied human action … at work, in personal relationships or
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
10
in civil society.... Competence implies a sense of agency, action and value ... [T]he spotlight is
on the accomplishment of ‘real world tasks’ and on a multiplicity of ways of knowing – for
example, knowing how to do something; knowing oneself and one’s desires, or knowing why
something is important, as well as knowing about something.
Flexibility in the Opening Minds curriculum allows learners to concentrate on
interconnected contemporary topics, community sources and real cultural contexts.
In practice, Opening Minds is usually arranged as thematic cross-curricular projects,
with learners given greater apparent control over the selection, sequence and pace of
their learning. It emphasises the active, creative, meaning-making potential of the
individual, and combines an entrepreneurial vocabulary of initiative, risk, team
work, and brainpower with a softer discourse of community values, empowerment
and cultural diversity.
Learning Futures
Learning Futures is another UK programme that aims to support students to “work
and thrive as the world grows more interconnected, the environment becomes less
stable, and technology continues to alter relationships to information.” It was
developed by the philanthropic Paul Hamlyn Foundation in collaboration with the
Innovation Unit, a non-profit spin-out from the former government education
department. Learning Futures reimagines the future of school as a “learning
commons,” a “base camp” and a “hub that creates connections” amongst a web of
“extended learning relationships.” In 2012 Learning Futures collaborated with High
Tech High, a network of San Diego charter schools assembled to meet the challenges
of preparing individuals for the high-tech workforce, to produce guidance on
“project-based learning.” The booklet speaks of project-based learning being
“passion-led,” “fun,” “exciting,” and “inspiring.” It should have “real world”
relevance, stretch students’ “intellectual muscles” as “expert learners,” and “ignite
students’ imaginations.” Its project-based pedagogy involves “designing, planning
and carrying out an extended project” using “digital technology” to “conduct
serious research, produce high-quality work,” and to “foster a wide range of skills
(such as time management, collaboration and problem-solving).”
Moreover, “Learning Futures schools are seeking to develop pedagogies which
transform the identity of the learner from ‘recipient of information’ to thinking (and
being) like a scientist, geographer, artist, entrepreneur” and which also shape “how
students think, feel and act in school.” Here there is both an appeal to the technical
skills associated with particular professions and professional identities, and a more
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
11
affective appeal to students' psychological, cognitive, emotional and behavioural
capacities.
A review of competencies curricula and other “wider skills” frameworks has shown
how such psychological concepts, and the perceptions, thoughts and actions they
shape, have been reworked in terms of the human capital required for innovation in
the knowledge economy. The report surveys the range of “new smarts,” “creativity,”
“orientations,” “capabilities” and “capacities,” “dispositions to learning,” “multiple
intelligences,” and the “mental and emotional habits of mind” which are required “if
innovation is to be effectively developed in young people” (Lucas & Claxton 2009:
4).
New Basics
The New Basics programme developed and trialed in Queensland, Australia also
blended a progressive agenda with the problematics of twenty-first century
globalization. It promoted “futures-oriented categories for organizing curriculum,”
and a way of “managing the enormous increase in information that is now available
as a result of globalisation and the rapid change in the economic, social and cultural
dimensions of our existence.” The New Basics curriculum requires the solution of
“substantive, real problems” in learners’ worlds, “integrated, community-based
tasks,” and involves teachers as mentors scaffolding the activities of novice students.
Family, locality, history, civic institutions and scientific understanding are
established as the “old basics” or the foundations to which the new demands of
diversity, global communities, global forces, and new technologies must now be
added. The New Basics project documentation speaks of “new student identities,”
“new workplaces,” “new technologies,” “new times,” “new citizenship,” “new
knowledges,” and “new epistemologies” in order to construct its futures-oriented
curriculum. Rejecting the curriculum as a “central authority” based on “economies
of scale for publishing, distribution and implementation of texts using print media,”
the project advocates for “using online, interactive technology for local, regional and
global curriculum development and renewal” and the “rapid prototyping,
development and revision” of more specialised materials based on “economies of
scope.”
Quest to Learn
Quest to Learn is a “high school for digital kids” in New York City. The school's
curriculum emphasizes “systems thinking” and “learning about the globally
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
12
networked world” as a “set of interconnected systems.” Q2L students are described
as “sociotechnical engineers” enabled to “think analytically, and holistically, to
experiment and test out theories, and to consider other people as part of the systems
they create and inhabit.” It reimagines school as a “node” within a network that
spans in- school, out-of-school, local and global, physical and digital, teacher led and
peer driven, individual and collaborative learning spaces. The curriculum is
organized as integrated interdisciplinary knowledge domains instead of separate
subjects, each focused on “researching, theorizing about, demonstrating, and
revising new knowledge about the world and the systems of which it is composed.”
The integrated domains of the Q2L curriculum are described like this:
“The way things work” integrates science and math and involves taking different kinds of
systems apart and modifying, remixing, and investing systems of their own
In the “being, space and place” domain, students study time, space and human geographies
as forces that shape the development of ideas, expression and values through combinations of
social sciences and English language arts
“Codeworlds” blends language arts and math and computer programming and involves
students decoding, authoring, manipulating and unlocking meaning through the
interpretation of symbolic codes ordering our world
“Wellness” situates personal, social, emotional and physical health within systems of peer
groups, family, community and society
“Sports for the mind” emphasizes the fluent use of new media across networks for a
productive career, prosperous life and civic engagement in the 21st century
The interdisciplinary curriculum is delivered through problem-based “missions,”
“levels,” and “quests” which are organized according to basic videogame
architecture.
Q2L mobilizes highly interactive pedagogies, modelled on dynamic social
psychological understandings of tool-mediated learning and the interactivity of a
dynamic system. It emphasises learning through “inquiry,” “experience” and
“learning community,” along with a vocabulary of open systems, networks, self-
organization, nonlinearity, connectivity, complexity, dynamism and interactivity.
Q2L's “evidence-based inquiry curriculum” is modelled to drop learners into
“inquiry-based, complex problem spaces that are scaffolded to deliver just-in-time
learning.” The pedagogies of the Q2L curriculum stress complex networked
interactions and dynamically webbed learning, with students as knowledge
producers, organizing and constructing knowledge as they interact with one another
and with technologies and media.
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
13
P21
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) is an advocacy coalition for education
reform in the USA with members from all the major multinational computing, media
and educational services corporations. The mission of P21 is to promote “21st century
student outcomes” and it defines these in terms of life and work in the global
informational and economic landscape. P21 has wide acceptance in the business
community, was initially funded in 2002 with $1.5million from the US Department
of Education, is connected to many state departments of education through its State
Leadership Initiative, and in 2011 produced bipartisan policy guidance on “21st
Century Readiness for Every Student” which was introduced in US Congress.
In the P21 vision, the necessary skills and “multidimensional” abilities to be
mastered include:
creativity and innovation, including creative thinking and acting on creative ideas
critical thinking and problem solving, including the ability to use reason, to use systems
thinking, make judgments and decisions
communication and collaboration, including team work
information, media and technology skills, including information management, media
analysis, the creation of media products, and using ICT for research and appropriate
networking
life and career skills, especially flexibility and adaptability, initiative and self-direction, social
and cross-cultural interactions, productivity, and leadership and responsibility
These are all framed by “interdisciplinary 21st century themes” which address global
issues, finance, economics, business and entrepreneurship, civics, and personal and
environmental responsibility.
“Curriculum 2.0”?
The examples above of new approaches to the school curriculum all act as responses
to the perceived problems and pressures of globalisation, and the demands of the
knowledge economy in a technologically saturated world. But for some educational
thinkers, the future of the curriculum might actually lie in the abolition of the school
altogether. The internet itself is conceived in some cases as a more effective “learning
institution” than school. These ideas have been attractive to think tanks which seek
to influence the way that policymakers think about education and the curriculum.
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
14
For example, researchers from the think tanks Futurelab and Demos have written
about a “post-school era” in which “schools wither away as young people
increasingly learn through networks, drawing on personal and domestic digital
technologies as sources of learning and ways of connecting with others,” and the
emergence of a “Curriculum 2.0” that acknowledges “experiences such as
collaborative learning, personal development, self-monitoring, creativity and
thinking skills” (Facer & Green 2007: 52).
The idea of a “Curriculum 2.0” is the ideal curricular form for a “WikiWorld” where
the vocabulary of learning is full of terms like “networked learning,” “connected
learning,” “cooperative learning,” “lifelong learning” and so on (Suoranta & Vaden
2010). New methods of learning based on peer-to-peer distributed systems of
collaborative work, open source and mobile networks, de-centred pedagogies, and
self-driven learning have been articulated as characteristic of successful styles of
learning in the network-based age. For advocates of connected learning, it has
become increasingly desirable to see “something as dispersed, decentralised, and
virtual as the Internet being a learning institution” in itself, providing “a greater
degree of fluidity and access to participation than at traditional educational
institutions” (Davidson & Goldberg 2009: 10).
However, the pleasures of more connected forms of learning in a WikiWorld are not
unproblematic. Some critics have argued that learners are now increasingly exposed
to the hidden curriculum of commercial culture, a culture which may be
ideologically aggressive and “miseducative.” For example, Molnar (2005, 81) argues
that the miseducative “curriculum of our culture, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365
days a year, is advertising.” Therefore, a global competition has been established
between the competing resources offered by the global corporate curriculum of
consumer-media culture and that of schooling (Kenway and Bullen 2005). The
“corporate curriculum” and commercial pedagogies of consumer media culture have
become the most successful teachers in an increasingly globalised world. As a
consequence, critics argue, the curriculum is now increasingly to be organised
around technologically-enhanced consumer choice, customisation and marketization
(Hartley 2012).
Finally, there are indications emerging of an even more radical approach to the
future of the curriculum. This is the idea of “automated curricula” delivered through
sophisticated “learning analytics” systems. In a paper prepared for UNESCO,
Buckingham-Shum (2012) has described learning analytics as a “digital nervous
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
15
system” for education, an artificial “brain or collective intelligence” that can measure
and interpret a learner’s activity, provide real-time feedback and adapt the learner’s
future behaviour accordingly. Learning analytics involves the collection and
interpretation of data produced by and gathered on behalf of students, and then
employs computational techniques of data mining, interpretation, and modelling, in
order to assess academic progress and predict future performance. A particularly
notable example of such a system is inBloom, produced by a non-profit organization
with philanthropic support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and
technical software support from Amplify, an offshoot of Murdoch’s News Corp.
inBloom brings together data analytics to track students’ progress and identify
learning resources suited to their individual needs. As its website announces,
“inBloom enables a wide range of applications to use student data more effectively
and efficiently, with the ultimate goal of unleashing innovation in the marketplace
and making personalized learning a reality.” The aim of some learning analytics
development is to create fully-automated, or at least semi-automated pedagogic
systems that are tailored or personalised to each learner’s level of need and ability.
The applications of learning analytics include tailored course offerings, predictive
modelling, learner profiling, and the design of automatic “tutoring systems” and
“intelligent curriculum.” An intelligent curriculum can use student data to become
“smart” enough to predict, and assist, the learner’s progression through course
materials. Learning analytics has the potential to produce a new kind of computer-
mediated “auto-curriculum.” The auto-curriculum is a curriculum not made up of
pre-existing knowledge, but a curriculum based on self-learning software that can
get to “know” the learner and act as a digital tutor autonomous of the human
teacher.
Conclusion
This paper has reviewed some of the key ideas about globalisation that now
routinely influence educational policymaking, and explored how the new global
policyspeak of the global knowledge economy, global networks, and new
technology has begun to affect ideas about curriculum policy. I have used the term
“global.edu” to refer to the contemporary saturation of policy with the language and
imagery of global networks. Global.edu captures issues such as the intensification of
the language of business in education policy, the participation of networks of diverse
“outsiders” in making education policy, the problems facing high-skills “perma-
Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.
Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.
16
temps,” the “learnification” of the educational policy vocabulary, and the global rise
of “policy as numbers.”
In this context of global.edu, some recent and emerging examples of new curriculum
projects have been explored briefly to illustrate what the future of the curriculum
might look like. Globally, curriculum policy is being made to reflect the perceived
need to cultivate the soft skills, generic competences and learning capacities
associated with a technologically-saturated knowledge economy, and it is being
done not just by governments and their education systems but by a much wider
range of commercial and charitable providers. Some of these organisations are
generating or promoting even more radical ideas about the future of the curriculum,
including ideas about the internet itself as a learning institution in a post-school era,
a networked “Curriculum 2.0,” and about the construction of an “auto-curriculum”
through artificially intelligent learning analytics systems.
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