This symposium highlights directions for future comparative research on ‘curriculum change’ in Europe and US. To this end we ask, first, how curriculum change as educational leadership may be theoretically conceptualized by education theory (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015; in press). Second, how may discursive institutionalism as the latest branch of neo-institutionalism (Schmidt, 2016) provide perspectives that add to non-affirmative education theory regarding curriculum research. Third, how should methodological issues be dealt with in comparative research given the multi-level nature of educational leadership for curriculum change (Sivesind & Wahlström, 2016). Differently put: how does non-affirmative educational theory relate to discursive institutionalism? How should empirical research on ‘curriculum as policy’ be framed by education theory and/or institutional theory? What possibilities does discourse analysis provide for multi-level, comparative research?
The symposium start from observations regarding contemporary challenges in present-day curriculum change and development around the globe (Nordin & Sundberg, 2014). We assume that modern curriculum making to a considerable extent still is a nation-state project. Within such a framing curriculum theory and research has perceived the curriculum as a policy document reflecting what sort of cultural, economic and political citizenship is promoted, through shared, public policy discourse, both critical and hegemonic. The ‘reinvention’ of the nation state, due to a conglomerate of issues related to ‘globalization’, has presented complex challenges for nation-state driven curriculum making (Paraskeva, 2011; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015). First, we have recently witnessed an increasing focus on nationalism and related issues, and, simultaneously, cosmopolitanism has been at the fore in new ways as an educational ideal. Second, we identify a tension between an increasing orientation towards labour-market driven ‘competencies’ and education as increasingly recognizing cultural identity and questions of meaning. Third, increasing cultural pluralization within each nation-state is parallelled by increasing harmonization of educational ideals and curricular contents across nation-states. Globally we can identify an ongoing harmonization regarding curricula and evaluation. Nation-state curricula have both been decentralized and recentralized: while developments in decentralized systems like those in the US and UK have reflected increasingly general and federal ambitions, traditionally centralized systems, like those in large parts of the rest of Europe, have decentralized curriculum work. Evaluation policies have to some extent come to replace the curricula as steering policies.
Here ‘educational leadership’ receives a wide definition. Educational leadership for curriculum change are activities occurring on several levels of the education system. In this symposium we consider it relevant to develop an understanding of how the dynamics between, within and across different levels may be approached. As transnational institutions of different kinds have challenged the nation-state perspective later curriculum research and theorizing has partly responded by turning into investigations into how policies travel horizontally between policy systems and how meaning translate between levels(Steiner Khamsi, 2004). To an increasing degree all this is conceptualized as much as policy research as educational research or curriculum theory. The intention of this symposium is therefore to explore 1) how nation state based curriculum change and related educational leadership on multiple levels is conceptualized in and by educational theory, 2) in what respects discursive institutionalism may offer a complementary approach to understanding how educational policies, ideas and values (curriculum) relate to administrative processes on different levels. The papers in the session are developing methodologies that use DI as part of comparative inquiry on these contemporary challenges and changes. This symposium will examine different meanings of change as they occur through ‘evolutionary’ and ‘revolutionary’ processes. DI provides analytical tools for understanding and examine the dynamics of change, it does not provide an explicit methodology for empirical analysis of these dynamics.
allenges and changes.
