Future Citizens in Pedagogical Texts and Education Policies. Examples from Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey

Abstract

The aim of this project is to grasp processes of globalization in education policies and in selected pedagogic texts in Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey through a focus on the education of the "right" kind of future citizen. People increasingly move across national borders for longer or shorter periods. The autonomy of nation states is thus challenged and questioned, but they still hedge in and concomitantly close off people in separate national spaces. These simultaneous often contradictory - processes are of great importance for how the right kind of future citizen is moulded in mandatory schooling. Research on transnationalism is a theoretical starting point for this project. Long- or short term migrants create and maintain social relations which cut across national borders, but also law and policies move and are established across such borders. Research on education and nation state building and the globalization of education are important for the project, in order to understand education polices and the governance of education. We will collect and analyze educational documents and curricula for selected subjects like history, civic and religious education, interview politicians with influence over education, as well as teachers and authors of textbooks, and scrutinize selected textbooks in the four national settings. The cases will be used for soft comparison where similarities and differences will be used throughout to generate new insights and deepen the analysis.

Keywords:

Description

Aim and objectives
People today are increasingly moving across national borders for longer or shorter periods and various types of globalisation processes are having major and contradictory impacts all over the world. In addition, more and more societies can be described as multicultural and/or multiethnic. Yet, at the same time, nation states are hedging in, and closing out, people in predefined political and cultural spaces. Both these processes are of great importance for how education moulds and trains the citizens of the future.

The overall aim of the project is to examine, by adopting a transnational perspective, how globalisation processes are expressed in educational policies and pedagogical texts in Norway, Sweden, Syria and Turkey with respect to civic education. The two Nordic countries, and also the two neighbouring countries in the eastern Mediterranean, offer interesting points of comparison, in both historical and geopolitical terms. Each country has its own history and local context, but also exists in a world characterised by migration and mobility. As a result of transnational spread, the countries are also united in sometimes sharing the same citizens.

School remains an important educational arena where the citizens of the future both emerge and are constructed. This project focuses on pedagogical texts in history, civics, religion and geography in the later years of compulsory school. Questions asked are how the "right" citizen is presented and depicted and what values are highlighted at both national and global level. Whose history is made visible and what voices are heard? What groups or categories are identified? Four researchers will answer questions of this kind in the present comparative, multidisciplinary project. The examination and analysis of education policies and texts in a comparative international perspective can shed light on the varying national educational contexts as well as acting as an entry point for analyses of global processes of change of relevance to schools and education. Over and above textual analysis, interviews will also be conducted with educational bureaucrats and politicians and with teachers and authors of textbooks. In additions, short studies will be made of concrete classroom practices.

The specific issues that the project addresses to various bodies of material are:
How are various bodies of knowledge concerning the responsibility of schools to educate and train societys citizens selected and organised?
How are the citizen and the citizens identity constructed in relation to place, nation, language, religion, ethnicity and gender in policy documents for schools and pedagogical texts?
How is the relationship between national and global perspectives treated in relation to the citizen in guidance documents for schools and pedagogical texts?
What civic rights and obligations are given attention and what individuals are included or excluded at both national and global level?

Area overview
This project proceeds from and combines several fields of research: social science research on transnationalism, research on education and nation-building and the globalisation of education, education policy and forms of governance and research on textbooks.

Since the 1990s a transnational perspective on migration and migrants has grown strong. A key aspect of this now diverse and far-reaching approach is that migrants create social fields that reach beyond national borders and maintain social relations across these borders. The analysis of how migrants act and navigate in a world where national borders are still significant in ideological and political terms has been of great importance in the development of this theoretical framework. Applying a transnational perspective, nation states can no longer be understood as central analytical units in studies of migration. Moreover, adopting a transnational perspective has been fruitful not just with regard to migrants but also so as to underline the impact of migration on those staying behind and on the societies that the migrants come to. More and more peoples lives must be viewed in the light of transnational movements and diaspora experiences and this obviously also applies to children and young people in educational institutions. Researchers argue that this perspective is rewarding not just in analysing how people maintain social, economic and political relations across national borders, but also as a means of understanding how policy and soft law move, are launched and are given form across these borders. Education primary, secondary and tertiary is an interesting example of this cross-border phenomenon. While still very much a national matter, the organisation, scope and content of education are increasingly shaped in an international or transnational arena. Research in these fields offers interesting points of entry for analyses of how globalisation processes are expressed and interpreted, but also how they are shaped and reshaped in national education systems and in different local arenas. The present project is a contribution to the formation of knowledge in this area.

Nowadays, the mutual link between the emergence of basic formal education and the emergence of the modern nation state is a self-evident fact. Modern people need education to become citizens, and compulsory schooling is the main vehicle used to provide this. Education has become both a right for the individual and an obligation in relation to society, the nation and the state. A strongly ideological message about the nation and the state has also been spread in basic education.

In Syria and Turkey the state has a monopoly of textbooks and how citizenship education is conducted at all levels of the education system. Sweden and Norway no longer have such a monopoly and in Sweden faith in the ability of the state to govern has also decreased sharply. In recent decades the strong and (over)explicit ideological message of schools and textbooks has been toned down in many northern and western European countries. Instead the training of an international and globalised citizen has been given a more prominent role. Just like his former national counterpart, the international and globalised citizen is seen as an instrument for the economic progress of the nation state (or the EU). To some extent, this shift also applies to Syria and Turkey. Both countries have undergone educational reforms in recent years, and Turkey is under strong pressure from the EU with regard to political reforms and the recognition of minorities. However, basic education in a great many countries continues to have a nationalist agenda. But this is less apparent and is expressed in different ways in, for example, Sweden with its official consensus concerning multiculturalism.

Most formal educational contexts have both national and local guidance documents that regulate classroom practices. Like pedagogical texts, these documents contribute in combination with other media that students interact with on a daily basis, both inside and outside the school world to the shaping of views about what is normal and desirable. The concrete framing of educational policy and guidance documents normally takes place in a national arena, but the interaction with international actors and organisations is becoming increasingly important and essential. This formulation arena is becoming harder and harder to identify clearly. The EU formulates Union-wide educational objectives to address what is described as greater global competition. Like the EU, OECD stresses the importance of lifelong learning in enabling member countries to remain competitive. The aim of World Bank educational policy is also for developing countries to invest in the right education. Today every nation with self-respect seems to be aiming to create "the best school in the world".

But if educational policy is expressed in a similar vocabulary all over the world, there is more variation in forms of governance. Deregulation and decentralisation of the public sector (New Public Management), in which management by objectives is replaced by management for results has become a watchword in many countries, including Sweden and Norway. Devolution of schooling to local government, the independent school reform and a freer textbook market are some expressions of these new forms of governance in the north. In Turkey and Syria basic education is not as deregulated and guiding documents and policies still aim at detailed planning.

In the project we consider textbooks in a broader sense and use the term pedagogical texts. These texts also include images and other media used in classroom environments. As regards pedagogical texts in the Nordic context, the lack of a nuanced picture and a problematising discussion of contemporary heterogeneous societies is often emphasised. Close analyses often reveal various stereotype images that risk consolidating and reproducing prejudices if they are not problematised in the classroom.

Project description
The overall theoretical framework of the project is linked to critical discourse analysis focusing on how the world is created and recreated in texts and speech. Critical discourse analysis provides tools for studying how the citizen and different subject positions are constructed in both text and practice. According to this analysis, school texts, including educational texts and policy and guidance documents, are understood as a social codification of what applies both inside and outside the school world. This theoretical approach opens the way to visualising latent conflicts and discourse struggles.

The field of knowledge and research known internationally as curriculum theory is an important analytical frame of reference for the project. The fundamental questions in curriculum theory of how educational objectives are formulated, how knowledge for learning is selected and the development of methods for teaching contribute analytical entry points for studies of the governance and organisation of citizenship education in schools in the countries included in the project. These questions also draw attention to the tensions between different decision-making levels (international, national, individual schools, local conditions, specific classroom contexts) and different actors (politicians, professionals, citizens in society) and their importance for curriculum issues. The curriculum theory perspective can also be linked to Basil Bernsteins discussion of privileged texts: certain texts are presented as objective truths and guide pedagogical communication, which is of importance in relation to class, gender and ethnicity, for instance.

Method, material - selection
The material consists of national and local policy documents, interview data and pedagogical texts in teaching subjects of importance for fundamental values in society and the creation of self-images and images of "the others". In our view, pedagogical texts in history, civics, religion and geography are of particular interest in this context. In selecting pedagogical texts, it is important to be sure that they are widely disseminated in the education system of the country concerned. The material is limited to a selection of texts from the later years of compulsory school. The reason for this choice of age range is that, at that stage, pupils from different backgrounds are still being taught together, before too much differentiation takes place. Over and above textual analysis, interviews will also be conducted with educational bureaucrats and politicians and with teachers and authors of textbooks. In additions, short studies are made of concrete classroom practices to obtain a context as to how the pedagogical texts are used.

Empirical material from each country will be set in relation to material from the other countries both in the material gathering and analytical phases so as to bring out variations and contrasts as well as similarities and differences. So this "soft comparison" is not intended to be a systematic comparison of the nations based on certain variables. The intention is more to generate new issues on the basis of the different sets of material in order to thereby deepen the analysis. This comparative approach is of central importance in highlighting and laying bare discursive and social structures that may otherwise be difficult to visualise. This way of working means that different perspectives and bodies of material are continuously confronted with one another and that the sets of material collected are analysed jointly by the project group. In combination with a transnational perspective, this way of working is also expected to counter methodological nationalism, which has long been criticised in migration research.

The four project countries provide the opportunity of "soft comparisons" concerning education and nation-building, identity-building processes and the shaping of future citizens linked to questions of language, ethnicity, religion and various cultural values as well as migration. Syria and Turkey have been characterised for decades by major labour emigration, but they are also recipients of migrants and refugees from neighbouring countries, and have considerable internal migration. The Nordic countries are, in turn, mainly recipients of migrants. However, migration to these countries has varied, in terms of both its scale and countries of origin. Both Swedish and Norwegian school curricula stress the importance of a multicultural perspective; however, in practice teaching is still characterised by national framing.

Implementation - timetable
The project is being carried out as a unified study by the research group which includes an ethnicity researcher, a social anthropologist, a sociologist and a political scientist. The composition of the research group reflects broad theoretical and practical experience in research on educational science. Rabo has overall responsibility for the project and responsibility for the Syrian study. Carlson has overall responsibility for the Turkish study, which she will conduct with Kanci. Gruber is responsible for the Norwegian study. Carlson, Gruber and Rabo are working together on the Swedish study.

Other Academic Output

Paper presentation at the ECER-conference (European Educational Research Association) - Urban Education, Berlin September 2011

International advisory group meeting at Stockholm University October 2011