The conference theme of promoting ‘freedom, education and development for all’ masks an ambiguity regarding which particular elements of this thing, education, are the carriers of these purposes. Is it qualifications and their exchange value? the substance of the learning and its cognitive or competency power? the identities and values and confidence or lack of confidence formed through education?

Economists measure education as black box: outputs against participation. Researchers of minority and disadvantaged groups argue, alternatively, that the substantive education experience can blight opportunity, self-confidence, perceived ability for many. Sociologists today debate too whether ‘development’ is best seen as competencies, or capabilities, or disciplines and forms of knowledge. They question whether ‘freedom’ is a foundation for education development, or an outcome whose achievement requires some disciplined learning and limitation of freedom. And in what is learnt as history, or citizenship, or ‘values’, we might ask what does freedom mean, and what does it mean to have a curriculum devoted to producing ‘citizens of the whole world’?

In this symposium, researchers with longstanding programs of work on curriculum (see refs) will draw on their current curriculum research in different national and international settings to identify the forms and substance of curriculum shaping in these times, and to reflect on these in relation to the broader conference themes. They focus both on the new kinds of regulatory frameworks being developed and on substantive developments in curriculum policies: their conceptualisations of knowledge and the purposes of education, as well as how they relate to development and opportunity for individuals

The questions addressed in the symposium are highly salient in the European context, reflected in the recent call for papers for a special issue of EERJ on curriculum, whose questions include:

• Are national education futures still produced within curriculum texts and discourses?
• Do key agencies share common ideas and mores in deciding upon the “what, “how” and “why” of teaching?
• How is knowledge transferred and translated between the global and the local?
• Are European wide standards being created in curriculum and instruction?
• Is curriculum still a viable idea?

The symposium addresses what kinds of freedom, values, citizenship are being promoted and impeded by current emphases on form, auditable frameworks, measurement. What is happening to the substance of education?

References:

Karseth, B. & Sivesind, K. (2010), Conceptualising curriculum knowledge within and beyond the national context, EJE, 45 (1), 103-120.

Muller, J. (2006), On the shoulders of giants: verticality of knowledge and the school curriculum. In R. Moore (et.al.) (ed.) Knowledge, Power and Educational Reform. Routledge.

Yates, L. & Grumet, M. (ed.) (2011) Curriculum in Today’s World: configuring knowledge, identity, work and politics. London, Routledge World Yearbook of Education.

Yates, L., Collins, C. & O’Connor, K. (ed.) (2011), Australia’s Curriculum Dilemmas: state cultures and the big issues. MUP.

Young, M. (2008), Bringing Knowledge Back In  Routledge.

Young, M. (2010), Alternative education futures for a knowledge society, EERJ, 9 (1), 1-12.