Session Information
23 SES 14 C JS, Education Leadership for Curriculum Change
Joint Symposium NW 23 and NW 26
Contribution
The question of what drives curriculum change has for decades been an issue among educational scholars working in the field of curriculum theory (CT). Due to the globalisation of the curriculum field (cf. Andersson-Levitt, 2008), issues of how to address, understand and explain the role of transnational forces and actors as drivers of change have become central to the field (Nordin & Sundberg, 2014). As a result of this ’transnational turn’ it is necessary for scholars in the field of curriculum studies to reinvent their analytical tools (cf. Young, 2013; Deng, 2015) in order to be able to analyse curriculum-making as a complex and multi-layered practise taking place in a complex interplay between transnational, national as well as local arenas and a diversity of endogenous and exogenous forces and determinants. In response to this expressed need for scholars working in the field of CT to reinvent their analytical tools (cf. Deng, 2015) the aim of this article is to turn to discourse-institutionalism (DI) developed by Vivien Schmidt (2008, 2010, 2011, 2016) in order to examine its methodological potential and to develop an analytical framework for analysing curriculum change in the light of the ‘transnational turn’ within CT. We make use of Schmidt´s distinction between a coordinative and a communicative policy discourse. Somewhat simplified the coordinative discourse refers to the interaction among different kinds of policy elites while the communicative discourse refers to the interaction between these elites and the public. Furthermore, we make use of Schmidt’s stratified understanding of ideas at different policy levels, from philosophical ideas that are very stable over time, to programmatic ideas that changes somewhat easier to policy ideas who can change rapidly in order to capture the transformation of ideas travelling between different arenas and used by different actors. The different kinds of ideas we relate to the five different categories arenas (where?), actors (who?), content (what?), language (how?) and legitimation (why?). Combining these different categories facilitates a coherent analysis of curriculum change as simultaneously content and discursive interaction between different policy actors at different policy levels. Ongoing research on the most recent Swedish curriculum reform, Lgr 11 is used to provide empirical illustrations of how the framework and its concepts can be used for theoretical analyses and methodological designs especially focusing travelling curriculum policies on ‘competencies’.
References
Anderson-Levitt K.M. (2008).Globalization and Curriculum. In: Connelly F, Michael F. He, MF and Phillion, JA (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, pp. 349-368. Deng, Z. (2015). Content, Joseph Schwab and German Didaktik. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47(6), 773-786. Nordin, A & Sundberg, D (red.) (2014). Transnational policy-flows in European education – the making and governing of knowledge in the education policy field. Oxford: Symposium books. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2008. Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideasand Discourse. The Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 303–326. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2010. Taking Ideas and Discourses Seriously: Explaining Change Through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth ‘New Institutionalism’. European Political Science Review, 2 (1): 1–25. Schmidt, V. (2011) Speaking of change: why discourse is key to the dynamics of policy transformation. Critical Policy Studies, 5(2), 106-126. Schmidt, V. (2016). The roots of neo-liberal resilience: Explaining continuity and change in background ideas in Europe’s political economy. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 18(2), 318-334. Young, M. (2013). Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: A knowledge-based approach. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(2), 101-118.
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