Curriculum on the European policy agenda: Global transitions and learning outcomes from transnational and national points of view

Introduction

As technology and expertise dissolve the states’ borders that separate policy-makers in different countries and challenge the institutional boundaries between policy and research, the history of modern education shows numerous examples of globalization and internationalization. The curriculum field is no exception; there is a long and extensive history of scholars and civil servants who have exchanged and transformed ideas about curriculum across countries. Over the last several decades, this exchange has become a major concern, which has been intensified through expert networks and public–private partnerships (Steiner-Khamsi, 2015).

Situated within historical reform trajectories, efforts to keep up with the processes of Europeanization and the changing demands of a world society, this special issue draws attention to curriculum making processes as both transnational and national projects. The issue focuses, in particular, on the ways in which education for young students (between the ages of six and 16) has been formed by policy dependent on formal, substantive and discursive fields and decisions.

The first European efforts to conceptualize education as a public project and a course of study for the common good did not begin as a political project; instead, this movement first appeared in academic literature during the 16th and 17th century. One of the most illustrative examples was that of Wolfgang Ratke (1967 [1612–1664]), an enlightenment scholar who wrote about a public schooling with grades and content long before these ideas were realized. However, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the concept of the curriculum evolved as both an idea and an institutional practice, different from cursus as a place or content for teaching individual students (Hamilton, 1989). Currere, stemming from the Latin running, course, implied a more systematic and enduring pursuit of education, offered to portions of populations concerning materialized and institutionalized practices, developed along with the invention of textbooks and school buildings (Reid, 1992).

This broadened, systematized and disciplinary approach to education was furthered by royal and sacral power to provide public education for both rich and poor during the 18th century in Europe, which led to the introduction of formal requirements and systems. More significantly, the later invention of state administration during the early 19th century and the adoption of national constitutions allowed the strongest steps toward the establishment of school systems for young students, and following that, a series of curriculum documents appeared. In some European countries, these documents were regarded as national by their distribution and authority, such as in states dominated by one language and one church.

However, independent of national authority, curriculum was considered from the beginning of the 19th century to be a state-administrative affair, formalized as ongoing courses with starting points, when students were enrolled, and end points, when students completed. Within this arrangement, a formal curriculum served to legitimize, sequence and select subject matter relevant for educating the younger generation (Hopmann, 1999).

More concrete, a formal curriculum described what to teach students during a study course and, in some cases, also methods and ways in which to judge the completion of a course through, for example, examinations. From this approach, curriculum documents were rhetorical by character, developed for groups of students and designed to persuade and guide local school authorities and professionals on how to prepare and organize school teaching (Künzli, 2000). This rhetorical orientation led to the notion of public schooling as a cultural-practical enterprise (Deng, 2009; Popkewitz et al., 2001; Willbergh, 2015).

This special issue examines the curriculum as it historically evolves within the 21st century as part of transnational and national educational policy. The first article by Daniel Tröhler demonstrates how the development of school systems within European countries correlates with European history and is formed by constitutional demands, rather than as a purely national or global enterprise.

The following four articles show, through various examples and theories, how national curricula from Sweden, Norway and Finland reflect contemporary problems in today’s society, which are informed by policy and research and are developed both transnationally and in other countries. In a sense, the national curricula in all of these countries can be said to belong to a North-Continental tradition, involving long-established state curricula that are content- and method-based in their teaching approaches (Hopmann, 1999). We argue that ongoing reform efforts in these three countries provide new opportunities to observe transnational policy transitions and their implications within the curriculum field in great detail. Both Sweden and Finland recently published new national curricula to be implemented over the next few years. Norway has also recently revised its national curriculum according to the terminology and institutional logic of the European Framework for Life-Long Learning (European Commission, 2012).

Overview of the articles

In this special issue, all articles refer to reform documents in order to analyse conceptual transitions within the context of European policy initiatives. In the first article, Tröhler examines the role that constitutions play in the construction of national—and, thereby, loyal—citizens, along with the need to create school legislation to implement constitutional expectations. He also points to the symbiosis between the nation and the constitutional state, as well as the implications of the cultural differentiation between individual nations and states and their overall curricula. Tröhler ends his article by envisioning transnational curriculum history as an academic field emancipated from both national and global research agendas.

By analysing both European Union (EU) policy documents (from 2003 to 2010) and the national Swedish curriculum, Wahlström illustrates, in the second article, how a third wave of European policy discourse is emerging, emphasizing an increasing interest in compulsory schools and curricula. Further, while the transnational policy agenda for school education is characterized by competencies, such as The Programme for International Student Assessment, and an emphasis on transversal skills, Sweden is moving partially towards a model of pedagogic performance, with a central focus on school subjects. In contrast to the second wave outlined by Lawn and Grek (2012), in which states are situated to negotiate transnational policies within their own countries, the third wave is characterized by an increased focus on and acceptance of the EU’s involvement in national systems for compulsory and secondary schools, curricula and assessment.

Wahlström draws on the concept of methodological cosmopolitanism (Beck and Grande, 2010) and on text analyses of European policy documents and national curricula based on Chouliaraki and Fairclough’s (1999) critical discourse analysis and their concept of recontextualization. Following Bernstein (2000 [1996]), the pedagogic consequences of the widely accepted knowledge concept of competence can be related to two main pedagogical models: the competence model, which focuses on objects, and the performance model, which focuses on outcomes. By analysing transnational documents from the EU and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Wahlström points to signs of ‘voluntary convergence’ and ‘national divergence’ in relation to transnational policy aspirations within the two intergovernmental organizations (Bieber and Martens, 2011).

Nordin and Sundberg (the third article) base their analysis on Vivian Schmidt’s (2011) discursive institutionalism, using this concept to explore curriculum changes in Sweden within the nexus of the transnational and national policy fields. Their study also analyses EU documents, demonstrating how the programmatic idea of organizing school knowledge in terms of competencies has become influential in the Swedish curriculum. Furthermore, they show that, unlike many European countries, competences in the Swedish context have become synonymous with a strong subject–content–knowledge orientation. The authors argue that discursive institutional contextualization is necessary to explain curriculum changes in the nexus of the transnational and the national, tracing discursive processes of coordination and communication to analyse why some discourses prevail and become institutionalized while others do not. Coordination, thus, refers to the processes coordinating the ideas of the political elite, while communicative processes describe how these ideas are shared with the public (Schmidt, 2011).

The fourth article, by Mølstad and Karseth, represents a cross-national comparison of the national curricula in two Nordic countries: Norway and Finland. Drawing on curriculum theory from the Central and Northern European curriculum traditions (Gundem and Hopmann, 1998), along with the Didaktik (Hopmann, 2007; Künzli, 1998, 2000) and Anglo-Saxon curriculum traditions (Westbury, 1998), they conclude that learning outcomes are not incorporated into Norwegian and Finnish curricula in the same way and that the governing role of learning outcomes operates differently in the two countries. In the Norwegian curriculum, content is subordinated to other educational components, such as objectives that specify competence and assessment directives. In Finland, on the other hand, content, objectives and learning outcomes are all considered important; however, they are considered in a more differentiated way, such that ‘content’ refers to teaching processes as teacher–student interactions, rather than outcomes. This leads to an important discussion about how a particular matter, as outlined within a curriculum, relates to teaching as a practical enterprise in which professional judgements are considered crucial for encouraging meaning-making processes among teachers and students within the classroom.

In the fifth article, Sivesind, Afsar and Bachmann focus on the Finnish example. Their analysis covers two reform decades within a single country, analysing three national curricula from 1994 to the present, as the country is on the cusp of a new curriculum reform (to be launched in 2016). Theoretically, variations of policy and research contexts, both local and global, are taken into account in an attempt to understand the interpretations and modifications of transnational policies taking place when new curricula are formulated and revised on behalf of the state in a single country. By referring to Steiner-Khamsi (2013) and Niklas Luhmann (2000), the authors explore the ways in which the different components of the national Finnish curriculum reflect a mix of reform programs, which both constrict and facilitate transnational policy. They also interpret the ways in which the curricula from the different reform periods presume normative closeness and cognitive openness between past and future orientations to education reform. By applying a conceptual framework to a comparison of the curricula, the authors conclude that the new national curriculum for basic education, which will be implemented in 2016, represents a cognitive openness toward future outcomes, which are formulated as transversal skills, and, at the same time, a normative closure (i.e. through the formulation of aims for teachers and their teaching in schools and classrooms). A normative closure and a cognitive openness lies in the fact that the curriculum delimits its boundaries by being teaching oriented, fixating processes, rather than products (Hopmann 1999).

In the last article Lyn Yates shows how transformations and new trends for curriculum making and design are not just a European phenomenon but also appear worldwide as problems to be solved both globally and locally. Her article serves as an ‘outroduction’, summarizing and commenting on the findings and interpretations of the first five articles, and pointing towards future research issues and problems significant in both transnational and national policy contexts.

Why curriculum is important

As Yates and Young (2010) noted in their special issue of Globalisation, Knowledge and the Curriculum, the term ‘globalization’ is relevant to curriculum-related issues in the sense that it signals the appearance of an important transnational influence across international institutions and networks within both local and regional contexts. The common global trend is often defined in terms of a neoliberal movement, which emphasizes such concepts as markets, choice and accountability (Yates and Young, 2010). However, transformations also depend on practices located within individual school systems and countries, implying a down–up approach to understanding reform (Yates, 2009).

In a more recent special issue of the European Educational Research Journal on the restructuration and renewal of European curricula, Sivesind et al. (2012) highlighted Europeanization and cross-national comparisons as central features of the transitions currently taking place; these transitions are creating resonances in particular within national educational policy, school reform and the curriculum field. In addition, these transitions are centred on the concept of a knowledge economy and the evaluative modes of governing.

In line with Yates (2009), the authors argue that the policy field of Europeanization has been rather well researched; however, they note that less attention has been paid to the pedagogical changes of what counts as knowledge within local contexts. Sivesind et al. (2012) pointed out the ambiguity of concepts central to European education policy, such as competence and qualifications, noting that there are several European models (rather than a single clear point of view), for what is considered to be valid knowledge. A core European focus is on the personal competences that students should be expected to achieve during their years of study. Thus, Europeanization is characterized more by its goals and expectations of learning processes and outcomes than by its formal conditions for how to provide good teaching for all students. In the same special issue Sundberg and Wahlström (2012) argued that transnational policy transitions with their scripts and standards lead to a de-nationalization of curriculum making, however, not reducing the significance of cultural and deliberative dimensions which are of core value in curriculum work.

In their introduction to an anthology on curriculum policy and practice, Priestley and Biesta (2013) wrote about newly emerging curriculum developments in English-speaking countries, such as the UK, New Zealand, Australia and the US. They pointed to contradictions in the underlying philosophies of curriculum development, such as between the pragmatic and sociocultural rationales of competence-oriented reforms and the highly instrumental and top–down prescriptions derived from the same policy initiatives. As a result of these contradictions, both schools and teachers are forced to respond to contradictory demands, as well as to decide what to teach (since this is no longer defined by a national curriculum). Consequently, there are possible unforeseen implications of replacing knowledge and/or content with generic skills in formal curricula (see also Yates and Collins, 2010; Young, 2008).

This special issue builds on these themes, with a specific focus on the policy transitions that are taking place in Europe. The Nordic countries are known for their welfare policies, which combine constitutional state power and comprehensive regulation with decentralized policy and implementation; this pattern is mimicked in the top–down–up approach of these countries’ curriculum reforms. However, due to this model, as is demonstrated by four of the articles, the Nordic curricula move in different directions, each following its own reform cycle despite globalization and European reform initiatives. Thus, in the Nordic context, we can observe, for example, the Swedish national curriculum shift from competence-based documents with a focus on aims or goals to performance-based documents with a focus on what to learn and how to assess and improve outcomes while the Finnish national curriculum simultaneously withdraws from a competence orientation (in the early 1990s) to move to a more content-driven and interpretative orientation of school reform. Norway, the third country examined within this special issue, is currently positioned in the middle, focusing on competence aims which cover all elements without any particular focus on content, performance or results.

As shown in comparative studies over time and across countries in all of the articles the reform elements described within curricula are similar; however, the understanding of core concepts changes over time, and these concepts also differ across countries with respect to their interpretation and the educational consequences of how they are understood from cultural points of view. Differences also exist in other areas, including the ways and degree to which curriculum making is organized by political goals set by the government and informed by scientific expertise within administrative boards and agencies. Governmental structures and decision processes are significant for understanding variations in local particularities, even when curricula tend to cover more or less the same topics and issues. Thus, though similarities exist (cf. Telhaug et al., 2004), for this special issue, it is the variations in the different countries’ curriculum strategies that are of central interest, primarily with regard to understanding how transnational and national policies are interrelated within particular contexts and modified to address reforms in different contexts. Although they discuss the issue from somewhat different perspectives, all of the articles address the following key areas and common positions:

Although the articles refer to curriculum theory as one point of departure, they simultaneously draw on different epistemologies and methodologies, thereby contributing to different frameworks and providing a variety of lenses for understanding and exploring how curriculum making respond to and re-contextualize processes and expectations beyond a national context. However, by placing curriculum theory on the research agenda, the authors expand their discussions beyond the underlying philosophies of reform; rather, they also seek to examine how a national curriculum constitutes its own policy field by creating and combining substantial elements into a program for school reform that could potentially connect with the transfer of national and transnational policy. Thus, the core components in a curriculum, which reflect the aims, subject matter and organization and evaluation of teaching and learning, refer to—but are not identical to—similar components and concepts in, for example, assessment policy and globalizing reform programs developed by supra-national organizations.

A basic premise of transnational education policy is the idea of specifying expectations for learning through benchmarking, and of highlighting best practices and the implications of comparative surveys (Steiner-Khamsi, 2013). What is often not problematized in this discourse of ‘best practices’ or ‘policy borrowing’ is what happens if best practices or common concepts are implemented in educational systems that are essentially dissimilar. Can any school system be said to be roughly the same as another? What characteristics need to be in place for two school systems to be perceived as similar?

According to Steiner-Khamsi (2013), these problems are rarely addressed within a transnational policy context, since they are, by definition, local rather than global. Not surprisingly, it is easier to establish what appear to be similarities between school systems from a distance than it is from a position within the actual systems. A range of globalization studies are currently examining how related global discourses, processes and institutions are affecting educational practices and policies in local contexts (Spring, 2008). However, beginning with a local or national starting point makes it possible to compare one country’s educational system with another’s or to compare one country’s school system with transnational policy trends in a more complex and nuanced way.

Against this scope and research orientation, the articles within this special issue show how histories and discourses beyond the national realm are expressed through curriculum documentation (consisting of such texts as: national curricula; legal acts and circulars; and white, green and grey reports) that connect, but do not necessarily align, teaching and learning with international assessment and/or national legislation. A common underlying theme of the different positions is the exploration of tensions between curricula as policies and curricula as educational practices adopted by teachers and students in schools and classrooms.

Thus, the articles centre on whether—and, if so, how—transnational policy expectations are being nested by curriculum documentation by recognizing the purposes and practices of education. Against this background, the authors in this special issue move away from a perspective that sees national systems solely as reflections of the local within a globalization perspective (or that considers the global solely from a top–down perspective). Instead, as both Nordin and Sundberg and Wahlström argue in this issue, national and transnational policy processes are nested, resulting in both convergences and divergences in terms of what are considered core issues within the curriculum field.

Finally, challenging the dominant policy view that a formal curriculum is merely an expression of what should be learned and assessed in terms of skills and knowledge, the articles in this special issue suggest different approaches for conceptualizing how curriculum matters are changing in relation to both national reform initiatives and transnational discourses. The articles show that both transnational and national educational policies are becoming more interdependent, compared to the policies developed during the first decade of the 2000s; however, the ways in which this interdependence is manifested in different national and local arenas remains an open question and a subject for empirical and historical research.