School Curriculum: the ethical relation with the other in English and European Policy Reform

Author(s):

Christine Winter(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 06 D, European Policies on the School Curriculum (Part 2)

Paper Session: continued from 23 SES 05 D

Time:

2014-09-03

15:30-17:00

Room:

B336 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Antigone Sarakinioti

Contribution

This study is interested in relations between school curriculum policy constituted in two educational policy spaces – Europe and England. The Open Method of Coordination introduced in Lisbon in 2000 aims to establish common European goals and monitoring of progress regarding education policy within the European Education policy space (Wahlstrom, 2010, p.433). In 2006 the European Parliament and Council recommended that all member states develop the provision for the introduction of the “Key Competences for Lifelong Learning – A European Reference Framework” (EC, 2007). This focus on competency/skill-based curriculum was re-iterated in a 2012 European Commission document “Re-thinking Education: investing in skills for better socio-economic outcomes”.

In 2010 the British Government published a White Paper (DfE) signalling the reform of the National Curriculum in England. Instead of aligning with the European curriculum competency-based framework, the British Government looked to ‘high performing jurisdictions’ like Alberta, Finland, Hong Kong, Massachusetts, and Singapore for guidance (Oates, 2010). The resulting curriculum for English state schools is one focused on a narrow pre-determined range of academic subjects, a prescribed neo-conservative configuration of knowledge and an assessment regime deploying a fine-grained stratification of student performance. The main research question driving the study is: What potential do European and English school curriculum policies carry for the realisation of an ethically responsible curriculum?

Method

The study adopts a deconstructive approach to the reading of key policy documents associated with curriculum reform in each of the two policy spaces. Its three main points of focus are: first, the constitution of curriculum policy problems (policy archaeology, Schureich, 1994); second, the conceptualisation of curriculum knowledge (Winter, 2012) and third, the implications of the policy texts for a just curriculum (Winter, 2014). The curriculum policy analysis draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida who are interested in going beyond ontology or ‘what is’ and ‘what is thought to be’, into realms of being where an openness to the other structures subjectivity. For Derrida, these concerns are tied to the operation of language. He shows that whatever form language takes it serves to deny accurate representation of the object it describes and instead is characterised by deferral and undecidability (Derrida, 1982). Deconstruction allows the cracking open of pre-suppositions surrounding the assumption that words have stable and self-sufficient meanings. Reading curriculum deconstructively makes way for the chain of traces that reveal the incoming of the other, that allow for those who do not fit the discourse to enter, and in so doing, directs us to a ‘justice to come’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 27). Levinas offers an opportunity to engage with a call for goodness that, in the spaces of deconstruction, reaches beyond any doctrinal or totalising rules, principles or criteria governing curriculum through his view that justice arises through the realisation of one’s ethical responsibility to the other (Levinas, 1996). Levinas seeks to move beyond the constraints of totalising curriculum discourses to witness ethics in the encounter between the subject (the ‘I’) and the other. The study understands a just curriculum in three ways. The first is in curriculum knowledge as ‘the symbolic raw material students use, discard or re-write in making meaning for themselves’ (Todd, 2001, p.446). Second, the pedagogical relation involves a process of becoming for the student in which the ‘I’ responds to the needs of the other in such a way that secures her right to be other. Third, an ethical relation with curriculum knowledge allows the teacher and student to develop deconstructive attitudes towards knowledge to go beyond totalising curriculum specifications.

Expected Outcomes

1) Deconstructive reading of key contemporary European and English curriculum policy texts 2) Investigation of the perceptions of curriculum problems that led to the constitution of particular configurations of curriculum policy solutions in the two policy spaces 3) Critical understanding of the different conceptualisations of curriculum knowledge demonstrated in the policy texts 4) Deliberation about the potential of the curriculum policies under examination to realise ethical relations between the self and the other in school settings

References

Derrida, J. (1982) Différance in J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press) pp. 1-27. Derrida, J. (1992) Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” In D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson (Eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice London: Routledge. DERRIDA, JACQUES (1993) Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford California: Stanford University Press) Department for Education, (2010) The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper. London: The Stationery Office. European Commission (2012) Re-thinking Education: investing in skills for better socio-economic outcomes. Communication COM 2012 669 final. Strasbourg: EC. European Communities (2007) Key Competences for Lifelong Learning European Reference Framework Luxembourg: European Communities. Levinas, E. (1996) Meaning and Sense in A.T Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds.) Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press) pp. 33-64. Oates, T. (2010) Could do better: using international comparisons to refine the National Curriculum in England. Cambridge Assessment. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. Schureich, J.J. (1994) Policy Archaeology: a new policy studies methodology. Journal of Education Policy 9 (4), 297-316. Todd, S. (2001) Bringing more than I contain’: ethics, curriculum and the pedagogical demand for altered egos Journal of Curriculum Studies 33 (4), 431-450. Wahlstrom, N. (2010) A European Space for Education. Looking for its Public European Educational Research Journal 9 (4), 432-443. Winter, C. (2011) School Curriculum, Globalisation and the Constitution of Policy Problems and Solutions. Journal of Education Policy 27 (3), 295-314. Winter, C. (2014) Curriculum knowledge, justice, relations: The Schools’ White Paper (2010) in England Journal of Philosophy of Education (in press).

Author Information

Christine Winter (presenting / submitting)

University of Sheffield

Department of Educational Studies

Sheffield

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