Transcript Curriculum for Excellence, Higher Education and

Curriculum for Excellence,
Higher Education and Citizenship
le goes here
Jim Moir
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CfE and the Citizenship Controversy
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CfE and the Citizenship Controversy
• CfE risks moulding
children into obedient
‘do-gooders’.
• Too much emphasis
on apolitical forms of
citizenship.
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CfE and the Citizenship Controversy
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CfE and the Citizenship Controversy
• Collaborative ways
of working.
• Citizenship as
something “you
live”.
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CfE and the Citizenship Controversy
• Not enough to
raise money for
charity.
• What about
reasons for
poverty or
political change?
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What Kind of Citizenship?
• Biesta (2008, 2013) offers a critique of the “responsible
citizen” capacity within CfE.
• He considers four different aspects of citizenship.
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What Kind of Citizenship?
• Individualistic more than collective:
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–
knowledge and understanding for decision-making
skills, competencies, and personal qualities
values and dispositions
being an ‘effective citizen’ (creative, active, enterprising)
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What Kind of Citizenship?
• Social more than political
– participate in political, economic, social and cultural life.
– engaged with the community (voluntary work,
engagement in local matters).
– respect for others, understand different beliefs and
cultures, engage with ethical issues.
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What Kind of Citizenship?
• Active citizenship
– experiential learning but tends to be vague.
– activity at what level: social or political?
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What Kind of Citizenship?
• Community and plurality
– geographical
– cultural
– political
• Biesta concludes that the Scottish approach runs the
risk of depoliticizing citizenship.
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CfE and The Process Curriculum
• CfE explicitly moves away from a centrally prescribed
curriculum.
• This is allied to a modified process curricular model
based upon a flexible and open-ended engagement
with learning rather than a pre-determined content
driven model.
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CfE and The Process Curriculum
• A process curriculum is therefore founded upon:
– democratic values
– structured learning activities that enable students to
develop a sense of inclusion and citizenship.
• This develops a reflexive stance on learning and the
ability to question matters such that enquiry is seen
as open-ended.
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CfE and The Process Curriculum
• Bernstein (1971) characterised this kind of curricular
reform as a move from a:
– ‘collection code’ in which subject boundaries are relatively
fixed
– towards an ‘integrated code’ where subject boundaries are
permeable and less strong and where there is a focus on
interdisciplinary study
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CfE and The Process Curriculum
• On the face of it, this can be considered as a shift
towards transformative education, where there is
less specialisation and more integration of learners
and knowledge.
– towards organic social integration (Durkheim (1893) where
social roles arise through differences between people and
their own engagement with education.
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CfE and The Process Curriculum
• CfE is arguably perhaps more in line with the spirit of
the ‘democratic intellect’ (Davie, 1961) in
maintaining a focus on the development of the
citizen.
• This has the potential to link up well with higher
education and the development of ‘quizzicality’ or
‘criticality’ (Limond, 1984)
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Curriculum for Excellence and
Scottish Higher Education
GUNI 2013 report asks:
– What kinds of knowledge,
knowledge epistemologies and
knowledge ecologies are required
to transform the world into a
place of peace, happiness, justice
and equity for all citizens of the
world?
– What roles, if any, can higher
education institutions play in this
regard?
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Curriculum for Excellence and
Scottish Higher Education
• Perhaps Scotland’s much admired ET approach can
go some way to delivering more transformative
learning experience.
• There is considerable scope here for to reforms
dovetail with CfE and its concern with ‘active’
citizenship.
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Curriculum for Excellence and
Scottish Higher Education
• As pupils move from the Senior Phase there is an
expectation that HE in Scotland will have to meet the
needs of these ‘new’ learners through adapting or
altering their curricula and course provision.
• This process has already begun in many institutions,
and in some cases pre-dates concerns with CfE.
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Curriculum for Excellence and
Scottish Higher Education
But…
• The focus is in many was still individualistic through
its concern with the development of students’
capacities or attributes.
• There are questions about the sociological impact on
HE and in what ways can the focus on the
development of certain attributes can be squared
with diversity and plurality.
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• Capacities and attributes have become associated
with citizenship and have been applied to various
contemporary issues:
– national economic development,
– environmental sustainability and responsibility,
– global trends in information technology.
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• A central aspect of this focus on the development of
citizenship is that of the development of the
autonomous authentic self.
• Anders Petersen (2011) – ‘authentic self-realization’
and the pathology of depression when people fail to
maintain a sense of self-development.
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• The flip side of this - the drive to develop capacities
and attributes as a discourse that normalizes the
focus on citizenship as the achievement of authentic
selves.
• Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) The New Spirit of
Capitalism – the emergence of a new ideological
commitment to capitalism based on self-realisation.
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• Critique of capitalism has taken two broad forms:
social and artistic.
– The social critique has involved exposing the exploitative
nature of capitalism in terms of such aspects as poverty,
social injustice, and rampant individualism.
– The artistic critique has focused on the ways in which
capitalism reduces people to being cogs in an economic
machine and thereby, delivering a technocratic and
dehumanized society.
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• The artistic critique is concerned with the oppression
of individual creativity, autonomy, spontaneity, and
authenticity through the relentless pursuit of
standardisation.
• Capitalism (through neoliberalism) has absorbed this
critique by stressing the need for individuals to seek
self-realisation through the various inter-connecting
spheres of life (in work, through education, at home).
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• This new form of ideology requires that individuals
consider themselves as an ongoing ‘projects’ of
authentic self-realisation.
• This is attained through activities that allow this
aspect of the self to be developed in the workplace,
private life, leisure, and through education.
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
• Individuals must learn to develop and deploy a range
of attributes that allow them to be
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flexible
mobile
enterprising
creative
adaptable
malleable
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The Authentic/Active Citizen
“What is relevant is to be always pursuing some sort of
activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to
be always looking forward to, and preparing for,
something along with other persons, who are brought
together by the same drive for activity.”
Chiapello, E. and Fairclough, N. (2002) ‘Understanding the New Management Ideology: A Transdisciplinary
Contribution from Critical Discourse Analysis and New Sociology of Capitalism’, Discourse and Society 13(2),
p.192 .
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Some Questions
• Does this characterisation of modern subjectivity
relate to the common stock of capacities and
attributes as an attempt to specify the normative
content of authentic self-realisation?
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Some Questions
• Does this represent ‘empowerment’ whilst also
normalizing the notion that the student needs to
measure up to capacities and attributes in order to
acquire the human capital necessary to meet the
demands of a rapidly changing world, and with
particular reference to ‘the market’?
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Some Questions
• Does the connection between CfE and HE in Scotland
pave the way for a focus on citizenship and the
democratisation of knowledge?
• Is there a danger that this may be skewed by a
concern with the development of authentic selfrealisation as a route towards the acquisition of
social capital and employability?
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