Session Information
Session 8C, Internationalisation of higher education (2)
Papers
Time:
2004-09-24
11:00-12:30
Room:
Chair:
Tony Brown
Discussant:
Tony Brown
Contribution
The issue of curriculum restructuring in higher education has become a focus for national policy development in many European countries. One important backdrop is the Bologna Declaration. Norway is a country positioned within, and inevitably shaped by, a European nexus of higher education institutions where this curriculum change takes place. Higher education produces, distributes and reproduces knowledge and traditionally it has given access to knowledge that has been societally powerful. Curriculum can be viewed as a signpost for analysing the changing discourses of knowledge and pedagogy in higher education. The two overall questions addressed in the paper are: What kinds of curriculum models exist in today's higher education? What are the main discourses behind these models? Theoretical and analytical framework The curriculum is situated on a macro, meso and micro level and there are lots of different stakeholders on the international, national and institutional scene taking part in the discourses. They represent contesting and conflicting perspectives and are therefore important in order to understand the implementation process of intended curriculum policy. The curriculum is viewed as a social construction where the process of decision-making is seen as a socio-political and a cultural process (Goodson 1997; Ensor 2002; Karseth 2002; Slaughter 1997) In the paper, inspired by Ensor (2002) among others, I present four discourses in order to analyse whether there has been a shift in the curriculum policy in higher education. The discourses represent different aims for higher education and emphasise different perceptions of knowledge and pedagogy. The four discourses described are the disciplinary discourse, the vocational discourse, the learning process discourse, and finally the credit transfer discourse. The central research question is which discourses are evident in the curriculum debate and in the decision making processes on different levels. Methods and data sources The empirical focus is on policy documents on national and institutional levels and formal curricula, syllabuses and teaching plans. Different educational programmes have been selected for empirical investigations. They represent liberal programmes as well as professional programmes. Results and the importance of the study The analyses show that on the national and institutional level decisions have been made which have great impact on the construction of the curricula in Norwegian higher education. Norway has reached central objectives set up by The Bologna Declaration; the adoption of a common framework of readable and comparable degrees, the introduction of a new grade structure and the ECTS-compatible credit systems. The findings indicate that the disciplinary discourse, which frames the curriculum traditions within the university, is strongly challenged by a credit transfer discourse. The new curricula rest on values emphasising flexibility, employability and transferability. Accumulation and exchange of credits becomes an overall aim in the structure of higher education. In a disciplinary discourse the legitimating authority is the knowledge structure and the concepts of the discipline. The legitimating authority within a credit transfer discourse is the need of the market and its different stakeholders. The vocational discourse, traditionally advocated by vocational education is also challenged by the credit transfer discourse. It is confronted by arguments about exchangeability and generic skills in contrast to uniformity and specific skills related to a specific occupation. The theoretical contribution of this study is to show the necessity of deconstructing the main discourses when analyzing the implementation of curriculum reforms References: Ensor, P. (2002) 'Curriculum', In N. Cloete,(et al. eds.) Transformation in Higher Education. Global Pressures and Local Realities in South Africa. Lansdowe: Centre for Higher Education Transformation, pp 270-295. Goodson, I. (2002) The Changing Curriculum. New York: Peter Lang. Karseth, B (2002) 'The Construction of Curricula in a New Educational Context'. In Amaral, A, Jones, G, Karseth, B (ed) Governing Higher Education: National Perspectives on Institutional Governance. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht 2002: 121- 140. Slaughter, S. (1997) 'Class, race and gender and the construction of postsecondary curricula in the United States: Social movement, professionlization and political economic theories of curricular change'. Journal of Curriculum Studies vol. 29, nr. 1, pp. 1-30.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.