Abstract
Our increasingly globalized and networked world is having a major impact on the nature and structure of education systems. We have moved from an era in which education systems were nation-centric in character to one of greater internationalism. Inward student mobility, new knowledges, advances in cognitive sciences, powerful technology platforms, and changes in economically – valuable competencies are leading us to fundamentally rethink curriculum and pedagogy. Further, international comparisons of student performance between countries and their education systems conducted by international organizations (e.g., IEA and OECD) have caused countries to reconsider their own forms of educational and curriculum policy against those which do differently or better. Many countries have embarked on curriculum reform to equip students with the understanding, skills and dispositions needed for participating in an increasingly competitive economic environment, via specifying competencies and outcomes across different school subjects in the curriculum (Yates and Young 2010). Across the globe many nations have been actively borrowing and adapting a common set of ideas about curriculum reform – promoted by international agencies like World Bank, UNESCO and OECD – into their particular contexts and situations (Anderson-Levitt 2008). The process of globalization has resulted in homogeneity on the one hand, and diversity and heterogeneity on the other – through hybridization “mediated and refracted by local variation and response” (Luke and Carrington 2002, p. 55).
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Notes
- 1.
It can be argued that the curriculum reform as a response to globalization had actually started in 1987 (see Chap. 2).
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Deng, Z., Gopinathan, S., Lee, C.KE. (2013). Introduction. In: Deng, Z., Gopinathan, S., Lee, CE. (eds) Globalization and the Singapore Curriculum. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-57-4_1
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