Conference Agenda

This study examines how Shanghai’s curriculum policy has been influencing teachers’ understanding and enactment of curriculum from a critical perspective. It reflects how the powerful group benefits from current curriculum by influencing the educational culture. It also seeks to identify the Western educational ideas which challenge Chinese education and have a substantial influence on Shanghai's curriculum development. The study was conducted from a critical perspective based on João M. Paraskeva’s Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT) and Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory when understanding culture.

ICT believes that education is never neutral but is instead shaped by forces. According to ICT, curriculum is not simply a set of instructional materials or lesson plans but is instead a complex social and cultural artifact that reflects and reinforces power dynamics in society. Apple (2000) and Giroux (1989) also viewed curriculum as developing and reviving forms of consciousness that allow for the maintenance of social power and social control without the need for dominant groups to use overt dominance methods. Therefore, educational research that is truly critical must consider how education interacts with economic, cultural, and political power (Apple, 2000). In this study, culture is the focus. Additionally, teachers, whether consciously or unconsciously, are aiding the dominant group in this domineering conduct (Giroux, 1989). This study tried to identify the level of dominance by analyzing teachers’ perceptions of curriculum.

Culture, according to Stenhouse (1971:55), is ‘‘a kind of mental common denominator, a shared store of complex understandings achieved between mind and mind. It comprises the ideas generally accepted within any group. Education is essentially a group process in schools or classes depending upon communication.’’ However, from a critical perspective, the question locates at ‘who shapes the culture or who’s in the leading position of shaping the culture?’ To answer this questions, Stuart Hall’s work must need to be mentioned. Culture, according to Hall (2007), is a site of interpretive conflict. It changes continuously throughout history as a result of the ongoing "play" of power. The prevailing cultural order is "produced" and "reproduced" by the powerful group for their own purposes. The dominating processing is aided by the media (Ibid, 2007) where curriculum policy is one of in dominating the educational culture. Hall’s (2007) Reception Theory claims that producers encode (create/insert) a range of signals into media texts, which consumers subsequently decode (understand). Simply enough, what we see is a "re-presentation" of what the producers want us to see. Audiences or readers interpret messages into one of three categories: Dominant Messages, Negotiated Messages, or Oppositional Messages, depending on whether they fully or partially agree with the producers. By identifying different categories of messages, this study shows how teachers have been struggling with the current educational culture.

Additionally, the risk of Eurocentric culture is another point raised by ICT. The dissemination of hegemonic forms of Western knowledge, according to Paraskeva (2016:241), "are precisely the institutionalisations of a linguistic or cultural epistemicide." Since 2004, Shanghai has been promoting the concept of "suyangjiaoyu" (TMES, 2004). This concept was heavily influenced by the OECD's and the USA's twenty-first-century competencies-skills frameworks. Shanghai’s curriculum has been enthusiastically embracing these Western epistemic presumptions as an "advanced and scientific" process that will enable Shanghai's curriculum to catch up with the West. But simultaneously, it turns China into "a silenced and different genealogy of thought" (Paraskeva, 2016:80). Shanghai’s curriculum must be decolonized in order to promote "cognitive justice" and "ecologies of knowledges" (Santos, 2016). In this study, teachers' responses reflected which parts of Shanghai’s curriculum have been deeply influenced by the West and which aspects, as they believe, should adhere to traditional Chinese educational ideas.

The study focuses on the present reform of Swedish Upper Secondary School curricula and in particular the revision of the subject Psychology. Since 2021, the Swedish National Board of Education is in the process of implementing a grading reform where the course grades that were previously valid are to be replaced by subject grades (Skolverket, 2023). Consequently, the various school subject syllabi must be revised so that each level in a subject build on the previous ones. Today's Swedish curriculum system is made up of various separate courses, which may differ from each other in content, although within the same subject area, and each of which is graded separately throughout the upper secondary education. An underlying reason for the subject grading reform is, among other things, to dispose of the fragmentation of subjects that arose with the course grading system and to open up for more acceptable planning conditions for teachers and students. In order to be able to implement the new grading reform, all Swedish syllabi for upper secondary school must be reworked. For some school subjects such as for instance civics or language, the subject content and structure will be largely the same as before. For other subjects, including Psychology, a major revision is required where the subject content is revised in its entirety. This work is currently underway and is expected to be completed in 2024. I will describe and discuss and problematize aspects of tradition, focusing chiefly on the work with the school subject psychology.

The research questions concern how a subject change in terms of purpose with the subject and how this can come to light in a curricular revision. In this study special attention is paid to the new formation of the subject Psychology, in relation to existing traditions within the subject Psychology and consider it as a subject for Bildung, as a subject for proficiency, and as a subject based on experience. This approach to study subject reforms has been previously applied on other subjects such as Swedish (Hultin, 2008). The public drafts of the syllabi for Psychology, from January 2023, will be analyzed in relation to the historic formation of the subject (Blåvarg 2018; Blåvarg, manuscript). Also, the outcome of the current referral procedure, where authorities, organizations and other stakeholders can comment on the proposals, and consequential changes that the referrals give rise to, will be considered in relation to the existing traditions.

In this paper we trace notions of ‘curriculum’ as emerging in sociopolitical and historicized contexts, where both constancy and change are possible, through the life histories of Greek-Cypriot primary teachers across six cohorts that correspond to different periods (late 1950s-2010s). By tracing such narrated notions, we highlight how they are connected to an institutional context marked by both change and constants. Inquiring into the various definitions of ‘curriculum’ in the literature, we note that it was used in education (along with class) to organize the whole multi-year course (in all years and subjects) by the principles of disciplina (a sense of structural coherence) and ordo (a sense of structural sequencing) in some of the first European universities (Hamilton, 1989/2009). This rationality of organizing and planning schooling through curricula or different types, tracks and grades also informed the spread of mandatory public schooling through which curricula were mobilized as a mechanism of modernist governance of populations by nation-states (Ball, 2013). In such contexts of administration and governance ‘curriculum’ has largely been conceptualized as institutionalized text, embedded in various practices, but materially manifested in the form of official curricular documents, (subject-area) syllabi, guides or frameworks, plans (of content or subject-matter), course outlines, programmes of instruction, timetables for any or all subjects. These constitute what Doyle names ‘programmatic curriculum’, locating it between its ‘societal’, and ‘classroom/instructional’ representations of curriculum (1992a; 1992b) or between Deng, Gopinathan and Lee’s (2013) ‘policy’ and ‘classroom curriculum making’ because it ‘translates the ideals and expectations embodied in the policy curriculum into programmes, school subjects, and curricular frameworks’ (p. 7). How the programmatic curriculum is specifically materialized, its ‘technical form’ Luke, Woods & Weir (2012) argue, is replete with power issues: inspired by Foucault’s (1972) ‘grids of specification’, ‘that is an institutional structure for mapping human knowledge and human subjects’ (Luke et al., 2012, p.3), the technical form has implications for the selection, classification and hierarchization of important and valued school knowledge; grids do this as they ‘divide, contrast, regroup and derive what will constitute, now, from the unlimited possibilities available’ the curriculum. The technical form also has significant ramifications for teacher professionalism because ‘high definition, or extremely elaborated, detailed and enforced technical specifications and low definition, that is, less elaborated, detailed and constrained curriculum act as degrees of central prescription’ (p. 7, authors’ emphasis) and constrain or enable it; respectively they encourage or discourage ‘teacher and student autonomous action, critical analyses of local contexts, teachers’ bending and shaping of curriculum to respond to particular students’ needs and to particular school and community contingencies’ (p. 7). Such problematizations of ‘high definition’ forms could be inspired by a distinction between the institutional and the instructional context, the latter situated, diverse, contingent and unpredictable, materialized as ‘classroom’ or ‘enacted’ curriculum which ‘entails transforming the programmatic curriculum (embodied in curriculum materials) into “educative” experiences for students’ (Deng, Gopinathan and Lee, 2013, p. 7). Pragmatist, historical, (auto)biographical and poststructural approaches (e.g. Doyle, 1992a; Pinar & Grumet, 1976/2015; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992), for instance, have been problematizing bureaucratic and managerial discourse through which curriculum is constituted as a regulative apparatus to achieve consistency, conformity and control of how teachers and students should be acting and performing in schools; instead, the ‘complexity of curriculum making at the societal, institutional and classroom levels’ (Deng, 2021, p. 1670) requires our empirical attention; we argue that in this study we highlight the complexities of translating the programmatic into the instructional curriculum by tracing how teachers narrate its enactment over the last 60 years, in an institutional context where central prescription has been constant, yet changing.