Chair: Paul Morris, UCL Institute of Education, United Kingdom
Local Chair: Yiannis Roussakis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Many of the longstanding dilemmas which teachers and educators face have their roots in the multiple and sometimes contradictory purposes of schooling. For example: the quest to educate an obedient citizenry has to be balanced against the need to encourage criticality and creativity; promoting skills for employment has to be balanced by a desire to develop social and moral attributes; competition is promoted whilst in parallel seeking to encourage cooperation and compassion. More recent variations of these dilemmas include the quest to educate citizens who will lead the nation to compete in the ‘global knowledge economy’ whilst in parallel expecting schools to ensure pupils are patriotic promoters of their own national and/or cultural traditions. Advances in technology and the rapidly increasing influence of global agencies and of global education businesses and their claim to measure ‘quality education’ creates another layer of complexity. This is manifested in school systems seeking to provide a broad and balanced curriculum which serves the needs of the nation whilst at the same time ensuring rapid improvement in pupils’ performance on cross national tests in a narrow range of subjects.
It is within the concrete manifestations of school curricula that these various dilemmas are sought to be ‘resolved’ and delivered to pupils. Decisions concerning curricula, textbooks, and citizenship education are especially critical and represent the historical outcome of the struggles to control education. Other areas in which such struggles take place at the intersection of the national and the international, include:
- The time allocated to school subjects: how the ways in which decisions about school timetables are made permit, and at the same time, (seek to) constrain contestation?
- The changing value of subjects in systems of high stakes assessment: in what ways what is assessed shapes what is included in, and what is excluded from, the curriculum?
- The content of school textbooks and the politics of who decides which textbooks are used: whose interests are served via certain choices of contents and textbooks, and how?
- The role of common curricula and the medium of instruction: whose language prevails in schooling, and why?
- The overall conception of the ‘good’ citizen that the curriculum seeks to develop: whose vision of what it means to be ‘educated’ is circulated in society, and resisted?
These decisions – and politics of decisions – are central to the operation of school systems and take on added significance in light of the various shifts identified in the Conference rubric. Thus, inter alia, the movement of refugees and migrants across borders, the rise of nationalist and sometimes xenophobic political movements and the emergence of increasingly polarised and populist political environments have had a powerful impact on school curricula and knowledges.
This Working Group will explore these issues with a focus on school knowledges and curricula at all levels of formal education.