Euro-Asian Encounters on 21st-Century Competency-Based Curriculum Reforms : Cultural Views on Globalization and Localization

This book offers a geographically unique cultural comparative lens to examine the issue of transnational curriculum knowledge (re)production. Prompted by the ongoing competency-based curriculum reforms on a global scale, this book examines where global frameworks like the OECD’s core competency definitions are rooted and how they are borrowed, resisted, and/or re-contextualized in various European states with a Christian, foremost Protestant educational–cultural heritage and Asian countries with a Confucian educational–cultural heritage. It highlights the roles that various factors, such as history, culture, religious attitudes, ideology, and state governance play in nation-states’ re-contextualization of global curriculum policies and practices beyond a simplistic and dualistic globalism/power and nationalism/resistance dynamic. In doing so, it provides a global context to better understand individual nation-state’s continuing curriculum reforms and school practices. At the same time, it situates individual nation-state’s latest curriculum reforms and practices within an international community for healthy dialogues and mutual sharing. 

By selecting two educational–cultural systems and wisdom―Christian-Protestant and Confucian―it also offers a springboard for international curriculum studies beyond the usual confinement of geopolitical nation-state constructs. It not only sheds new light on each nation-state’s curriculum policies and practices, but also creates new collaboration spaces within similar and across disparate cultural–educational regions. 

With its wide geopolitical and educational–cultural scope, this book appeals to a global market and can be used in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative education, history of education, curriculum theory, school and society, and curriculum history.

Weili Zhao obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, in 2015, and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is Recipient of the 2019 Early Career Outstanding Research Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism and Education SIG. With academic training in both discourse analysis and curriculum studies, she is interested in unpacking China’s current educational thinking and practices at the nexus, and as the (dis)assemblage of tradition and modernity, East and West. Specifically, her research explicates the historical–cultural–philosophical insights of Chinese knowledge, curriculum, and educational thinking, such as Yijing, Daoist, and Confucian wisdom, and puts them in dialogue with the latest Western scholarship. She has published a number of monographs and articles.

Daniel Tröhler has been Professor of Foundations of Education at the University of Vienna since 2017 and Visiting Professor at the University of Oslo since 2018. His research interests include the international and transnational developments of the last 250 years, with a focus on the 1800s and the Cold War, and relating the history of modern ideas to the history of institutions in the context of a broader cultural history by focusing on (educational) political and educational ideas and their materialization in school laws, curricula and textbooks, comparing different national and regional developments and investigating their possible mutual influences. He has published or edited over 50 books, 100 journal articles and nearly 150 book chapters in seven languages. He received the American Education Research Association’s Outstanding Book of the Year Award in 2012 for his book titled Languages of Education: Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations (2011). He is currently working on the development of an ERC project proposal titled Nation state, curriculum and the fabrication of national-minded citizens.