Researching the Changing World of Education
There is widespread debate today about the curriculum and the purposes of schools and universities. This chapter describes the way in which the research project that underpins this book set out to examine questions about knowledge and about policy and ins
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Researching the Changing World of Education
A Google search today brings up 2.3 billion links for the question ‘what is education for?’ The purposes, content and structure of schools and universities are very much in question. The rise of new and vastly different technologies and technological capacity; the reality of global communication, mobility, flows of population, global benchmarking and competition for students and jobs; the breakthroughs and ‘knowledge explosion’ in traditional fields, and the rise of new talk about 21st century skills and new forms of research collaborations to tackle ‘wicked problems’, are all widely evident. Harvard and many other universities now send their students to gain experience in different parts of the world. Across countries of the European Union, or in Australia or in countries of Asia, many previously traditionbound universities make radical reforms to the undergraduate curriculum structure. And in school curriculum, most countries have introduced major reviews and reforms, not just once but repeatedly, over the past two decades. The curriculum literature itself is rife with major debates: ‘reinventing the curriculum’, ‘bringing knowledge back in’, ‘21st century skills and competencies’. The literature on universities also evidences major rifts, debates, dilemmas: should university teaching as we know it be replaced by online forms of learning? What is the purpose of undergraduate education? What forms of specialisation are needed? To what extent should research problems be built from ‘national priorities’ and collaborations with industry, rather than from within a more self-contained academic discourse? In both universities and schools these changes and debates flag important questions about knowledge in the context of education, and about the governance, management and steering of education. These are the focus of this book and the research project on which it is based. In the sociological research literature education policy studies and curriculum studies have usually been considered as separate arenas of theory and practice (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). In what follows, we try to keep both kinds of study in focus. The curriculum inquiry question this project takes up is ‘how should we think about knowledge today?’ (Bok 2006;
© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 L. Yates et al., Knowledge at the Crossroads?, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2081-0_1
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1 Researching the Changing World of Education
Karseth 2008; Tuomi-Gröhn and Engeström 2003; Yates and Young 2010; Young 2008). The education policy and strategy question the project takes up is: ‘is the emphasis on learning outcomes and on auditing and managing education achievements in schooling and higher education distorting and undermining knowledgebuilding?’ (Baert and Shipman 2005; Lamont 2009; Minelli et al. 2006; Power 1997, 2003; Shore 2008). In 2011, the authors of this book set out to take a fresh look at these questions by embarking on a substantial research project with a relatively tight focus, one that we
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