Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum

Williamson, B. 2013. Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum.

Unpublished draft paper. University of Stirling.

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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Unpublished draft paper, University of Stirling, August 2013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



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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



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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



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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,



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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.



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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



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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.



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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.



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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



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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-



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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Global.edu: Globalising education policy and the future of the curriculum

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