A ‘Globalised’ Curriculum –International comparative practices andthe pre-school child as a site of economic optimisation
Globalisation is often referred to as a state of affairs describing the acceleration of international trade and the impact of ideas and strategies diffused across national borders, thereby calling into question the future role of the nation-state and how it can secure economic growth. It thus describes some of the challenges facing present society which bring about new demands, especially in relation to the production of knowledge and human capital(Brown & Lauder, 1997; Crossley & Watson, 2003; Winther-Jensen, 2004).In this sense, education becomes central to globalisation, facing the modern curriculum with the need to produce flexible learning agents. Intergovernmental organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) use the notion of globalisation not only as something to be examined, but as a self-evident fact. Thus, they prescribe the manner in which member states are to respond to this idea of globalisation through, for example, education (Rizvi & Lingard, 2006). On the different national political scenes large comparative surveys such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) andProgramme for International Student Assessment (PISA)[i] provide schemes and scales that are used to localise the position of the nation in what is seen as a global competition. Thus, the numbers within the different international surveys and their rankings work as a grid of interpretation(Popkewitz, 2012). They provide a rationalised and quantified scheme of what is perceived and acted on as evidence– evidence of what works and who is ahead in what is naturalised as a global knowledge economy(Wiseman, 2010). As such, the international surveys, and the way they are taken up by the media and political parties, are simultaneously embedded in and are producers of a certain logic in whichglobalisation is seen as a process outside education, which yet again poses certain (inevitable) challenges or demands in relation to the forming of curriculum.
The purpose of this article is to examine globalisation not as a process outside education, but as an internal part of curriculum. Dissolving the boundaries between the outside and the inside of what constitutes a curriculum, in this case, means to open up the idea of globalisation as an ‘Education Gospel’(Grubb & Lazerson, 2006) –a repeated mesmerisingsongabout the nation at risk and the glad tidings that education reform will bring salvation. From a historical perspective, the articulation of salvation narratives as part of educational reform is not a new phenomenon(Popkewitz, 2008). However, the repeated articulation of globalisation and the prescription of manners used to respond to this idea of globalisation entail a certain tune and through this tune a certain production of curriculum develops.Thus, in this article globalisation is analysed as a problematisation in a Foucaultian sense (Foucault, 1990), that is, as a complex of attentions, worries and ways of reasoning which producewhat is possible to think of as pedagogical content and as thenature of the child.‘Globalisation’ is in this respect a power/knowledge complex: Through the repeated articulation of globalisation and the comparative variables that are put forth as being important to know about, our thinking in relation to curricular activities isshaped and defined.
This perspective on globalisation and curriculum is raised through an example of early childhood curriculum in Danishearly childhood education and care (kindergarten and nurseries for children aged 1-6 years). In 2004 a law called ‘Educational Plans’ was passed,requiring the nursery teachers to describe how their daily activities meet the standards of six areas of learning (personal development, social development, science, body and movement, language and communication, culture and expression) (The Danish Parliament, 2004). One of the arguments behind the law was that due to globalisation, Danish kindergartens and nurseries had to put a stronger emphasis on learning (as opposed to babysitting and care). They had to ‘make use of’ the fact that almost 95% of Danish children attend a kindergarten or nursery and thus convert children in to lifelong learners from an early stage(The Danish Government, 2005).
Rather than accepting globalisation as an external force putting certain demands on the development of anearly childhood curriculum, this articlewill analyse how the pre-school child as a curricular variable comes into being through‘globalisation’,understood as a problematisation. By using the phrase curricular variable, I mean to emphasise that the pre-school child emerges as a variable that can be known and accounted for – not through the vocabulary of care – but in terms of curricular categories such as learning goals, means, methods and outcomes; and in terms of revenues related to the optimisation of human capital.Or put differently, the pre-school child becomes a site of economic optimisation related to curricular interventions. As such, the article will analyse the ways in which the curricular variable of the pre-school child is shaped and defined, how it formed as a nature to be optimised,and how its shape and definition can be understood in relation to the repeated gospel of globalisation as it is carriedforth by international comparative surveys such asPISA.
Theoretical Framework and Materials
The theoretical framework is drawn from Michel Foucault, thus exploring the way objects are shaped and defined through processes of knowledge, which are again attached to attributions of the subject, marking and categorising it in relation to these attributions(Foucault, 1982). From this perspective,knowledge and power are closely interrelated. Power is not conceived as restriction or dominance, but as a complex or formation which must be analysed in its operations: The way practices, techniques and historically established systems of reason merge and shape what is possible to think(Foucault, 1976, 1984b). What emerges or appears as a relevant object of knowledge – a variable of interest – can as such be analysed as an operation of power, that is, a process through which the object/subject is shaped, categorised and ascribed certain attributions, whichdefines ways to think about and take action in relation to the phenomenon in question. The notion ofproblematisationis, in relation to this perspective, an analytical lens to expose the operation of power/knowledge. It is a way to focus on a complex of attentions, worries and ways of reasoning that poseproblems, challenges and solutions analysing the characterisations, definitions and attributions put into play as they define and redefine objects and subjects. Foucault expresses it as a matter of interest in‘... the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed’(Foucault, 1990, p.11). Present problematisations are thus constituted by practices and systems of reason that are historic in the non-evolutionary sense of trajectories that can be traced to configurations across different fields(Castel, 1994; Foucault, 1984a).
To analyse ‘globalisation’ through the analytical lens of problematisation means, then, to focus on the way it is put forth as a challenge in relation to education, the way solutions are formed and how this shapes the child as acurricular variable.It also encompasses the effort to trace the knowledge-producing practices and the established systems of reason that, reproduced and transformed, provide principles for these ways of thinking. Thus, ‘globalisation’ understood as a problematisation shaping the child as a curricular variable is not an articulation performed on a clean slate. It entails a grid of interpretation which is historically linked to relations between ways of thinking and perceiving phenomena such as the nation, the child’s nature and curriculum(Baker, 2010; Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2007). It is as such that ‘globalisation’ is analysed as being internal to curriculum: ‘Globalisation’ is at work in the way the objects/subjects of curriculum are shaped, just as the very idea of curriculum entails ways of thinking that make it possible to perform‘globalisation’ through the comparative scales, schemes and measures in terms of learning outcomes. As Hamilton (2009)shows, the very term curriculum is historically linked to a concern related to the management of classes within schooling: A matter of structuring a whole by breaking this whole into subjects and sequence. Thus, it becomes possible to think of curriculum through concerns or problematisations that lie beyond its own boundaries. Likewise, curriculum makes it possible to think and know– in this case early childhood education– through ideas of sequence, a structured whole, etc.
The analysis will be based on documents related to the Law of ‘Educational Plans’. This entails the law itself, regulations issued as a result of the law, descriptions from the website introducing the law, andhandbooks produced for the national courses introducing the law and instructing the nursery teachers how to follow it. Furthermore, two handbooks about globalisation produced by the government in office at the time of the law’s introduction are used as they inscribe pre-school and ‘Educational Plans’ as a central solution in relation to this phenomenon. The documents are read as monuments (Foucault, 1972, p.7), that is, they are analysed not as a description of a phenomenon or an affair, but as pieces of work exposing rules of reason. They are chosen as they constitute the official texts produced in relation to the reform within the first two years of its operation[ii]. Moreover, to trace the practices and systems of reason forming the problematisationof ‘globalisation’, I draw on a range of literature describing and discussing the discipline of comparative education as a field of knowledge. In line with the argumentation of Thomas Popkewitz (2008, p.21), the point is not to review this literature or to describe the history of comparative education. Rather, the point is to explore some of the changes in the systems of reason, operating within comparative practices of education, and as such to analyse the reproduction and transformation of the logic at work in the international surveys.
The analysis will be carried out through three analytical steps: First, the focus will be directed towards the construction of the child as a curricular object/subject embedded in the law of ‘Educational Plans’. The characteristics, attributions and desires ascribed to this curricular variable will be the centre of attention. I will point to the construction of the ‘entrepreneurial child’: A ‘whole child’ whose potential can be optimised by working on its six areas of learning. Secondly, these ascriptions and the importance of the pre-school child as a curricular object/subject will be traced to the so-called Togo-shock, a Danish landmark exposing ‘globalisation’ as a problematisation formed throughinternational comparative surveys. Thirdly, to trace the reproduction and transformation of some of the systems of reason at play in ‘globalisation’, the focus is directed towards the field of comparative education and tohow relations between the nation, education and the child are embedded within this field, from which the international comparative surveys derive.
‘Theentrepreneurial child’ as a curricular variable
In Denmark early childhood education and care came under public legislation in 1964 and expanded considerably in the 1960s and 1970s when women increasingly entered the labour market. Thus, the governmental concern has primarily been a matter of providing enough places in kindergarten and nurseries to allow for more mothers to enter the workforce, whereas the content of early childhood education and care has been left to the nursery teachers to plan and conduct. Care has been a central term used in the development of early childhood education in Denmark, and the outsourcing of care has been discussed in relation to creating a larger workforce (Andersen, 2005). One could say that the enhancement of productivity has always been central to this area. However, prior to the law of ‘Educational Plans’ productivity was mainly articulated in terms of increasing the (female) workforce, not articulated in terms of the child.
The reform of the ‘Educational Plans’ is the first national curriculum within early childhood education and care in Denmark[iii]. Each pre-school now has to set up clearly specified goals addressing means and methods of learning and explaining how its daily activities meet the child’s full development within the areas ofpersonal competence, social competence, language skills, the competence of body and movement, the competence of nature and science, and the competence of cultural expression and cultural values. Documentation of how these learninggoals are achieved is to be produced by the nursery teachers (The Danish Parliament, 2004).
Drawing on a Foucaultian framework, the national curriculum of ‘Educational Plans’ can be said to embed a certain construction of the curricular variable of the child. That is, the child as a subject/object of knowledge is shaped and categorised in particular ways. The child is constructed as a creature of a specific nature with an ability and desire to learn:
‘Children are born with a natural desire to learn, and they learn the most when they are actively engaged.’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs and the Department of Social Service, 2005b, p. 48)[iv]
‘Learning’ in this way marks the natural processes through which the child conducts or realises itself. In this sense, a child’s inner self can be described in terms of ‘potentials’ and ‘dreams’ that they need to ‘develop’, ‘realise’ and ‘try out’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs, 2004a, 2005; Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs and the Department of Social Service, 2005a, 2005b):
‘[Children]need the opportunityto pursue small ideas, create their own projects and experience that the children and adults they are spending time with in pre-school recognise them for their contributions.’ (Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs, 2005)
The child’s dreams and potentials are, thus, realised through the active exploration and creativityand in the projectsthey carry out in their environment. Here, dreams are emptied of any connotation of the condition of sleep or the unconscious. Rather, dreams mark an inner seed in the child which can be brought into full bloom in terms of projects or creations recognised as contributions. The character of pedagogical work is as such established as an activity of guidance and support for releasing the inner qualities of the child – a ‘midwife’as stated by the Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs (2005), or an entrepreneurial consultant, which is another term used:
‘[As a nursery teacher] you have to approach the child like an entrepreneurial consultant. He would never come with the answer, but would start by asking ‘what are the ideas and dreams of this company?...What kind of future would you like to create?’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs and the Department of Social Service, 2005b, p. 37)
Thus, the nursery teacher facilitates and creates ‘learning environments’which enable the child to create and construct. The specified goals and the documentation of their achievement is, in line with this idea of facilitation, a process that is to create ‘co-ownership’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs and the Department of Social Service, 2005b, p. 10) and to make the child aware of its own ‘creations’ and ‘contributions’ and give it the satisfaction of ‘progress’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs, 2004a; The Minister of Social Affairs, 2003)[v].
Using Michel Feher’s idea of human capital as a mode of subjection (2009), I will argue that the child is, in this context, made into an entrepreneurial subject – one who invests in ‘himself’in the sense of making the inner realm valued and allocating it in accordance with such matrices of valorisations (Feher, 2009, p. 30f.). The matrices of valorisation can here be understood as what is perceived and valued as acts of learning, construction and creation within the framework of the six areas constituting the ‘Educational Plans’. That isthe areas of personal competence, social competence, language skills, the competence of body and movement, the competence of nature and science, and the competence of cultural expression and cultural values.Thus, optimisation of capital is not so much a matter of the immediate profit that can be traded from the accumulated potential. It is about appreciation – about increasing or optimising the stock value of the capital to which the child is identified (Feher, 2009,p.27). In this case, that optimisation could be the dreams turned into creations recognised as acts of cultural expression and personal competence.
As such, optimisation entails the act of appreciation, that is, of making visible and valuing the progress being made or the competence developed.
‘Thinking through the perspective of learning means that knowledge about the ways in which children learn is applied to the concrete practice of nursery teaching. The core question of developmental psychology, ‘How do children develop as a general pattern?’, is transformed into the question ‘What does this particular child learn?’’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs and the Department of Social Service, 2005b, p. 8)
The act of documentation is as such central to the ‘Educational Plans’. It is about specifying goals within the six areas of learning and providing documentation of how these goals are achieved. In and through documentation the child is appreciated through the categories marking it as a natural child. What the particular child learns in terms of the ideas it has turned into projects, etc., is documented or appreciated.
Moreover, optimisation as a matter of appreciation can be seen in the way the pedagogical content of the ‘Educational Plans’ is articulated. Optimisation is not a matter of adding skills or transmitting knowledge to an empty jar. It is about valorising and making progress out of what is already there:
‘The type of learning which goes on in pre-school is not about passing a subject, it is something broader and more existential.’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs and the Department of Social Service, 2005a, p. 19)
The six areas of learning thatmake up the categories in which goals, means and activities have to be outlined are broad and existential in the sense that they encompassnot what has to be taught or transmitted, but the natural qualities of the child’s development. Howard Gardner (1983) and the idea of intelligence as multiple rather than singular works as an implicit reference in this idea of the natural qualities of the child (Plum, 2012). The existential character of the curriculum is a reference to the idea that knowledge is not something to be transmitted. Rather, as a seed it already resides in the child. Moreover, it is not a matter of a singular, cognitive intelligence; it is a curriculum that encompasses all the dimensions of being human, namely what is specified as the six areas of learning including social, personal, cultural and other aspects.What is at stake here, I will argue, is a rearticulation of the child-centred movement and its relation to the concept of intelligence: On the one hand standardised tests are opposed as a violation against the individual and unique child. On the other hand, the cartography made possible by the idea of multiple intelligence is embraced as a way to understand and facilitate the unique nature of the child, as opposed to the schooling of the masses (Christensen, 2008, p. 34f,42,112ff; Walkerdine, 1984, p. 164,182). The idea of intelligence as multiple in this way seems to enlarge the concept of intelligence making it possible to constitute all the aspects of being human. Thus, the nursery teachers are encouraged to work with what is termed the ‘whole child’(Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs, 2005, p. 2). Its wholeness is constituted by the six parts in relation to which the nursery teacher is to interpret, specify goals and document the processes of learning that take place. As such, the idea of curriculum as a whole being structured into subjects takes on a distinct form: It is the wholeness of the child – its natural interior – that is being structured into parts.