Euro-Asian Encounters on 21st-Century Competency-Based Curriculum Reforms

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. Introduction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Euro-Asia Encounters on 21st-Century Competency-Based Curriculum Reforms: A Historical and Cultural (Re)Turn

      • Weili Zhao, Daniel Tröhler

      Pages 3-17

3. The European Picture: Christian Protestant Ideals and Curriculum Reforms

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. The Transformation of Christian Missions to Educational Colonization, or Motives of Speaking and Listening in the One-Sided Euro-American-Asian Dialogue

      • Daniel Tröhler

      Pages 21-40

   3. From Knowledge and Bildung Toward Competences and Skills in Finnish Curriculum Policy?: Some Theoretical, Historical, and Current Observations Related to Finland

      • Tero Autio

      Pages 41-56

   4. Historical Trajectories of the Contract-School Model in Norway

      • Kirsten Sivesind

      Pages 57-84

   5. Globalization and Localization in the Shaping of the Danish Public Education System: Recontextualization Processes in Four Historical Educational Reforms

      • Christian Ydesen

      Pages 85-109

   6. Fixing the Future: Public Discourse on the Implementation of Education Standards in Austria

      • Bernadette Hörmann

      Pages 111-132

   7. A Critical Review of the Competency-Based Curriculum in Spain

      • Ana Sánchez-Bello

      Pages 133-146

   8. Competence-Based Curriculum Reforms in the Context of University Engineering Education in the Post-Soviet Lithuania—Hope or Disappointment?

      • Rūta Petkutė

      Pages 147-160

4. The East Asian Picture: Confucian Ideals and Curriculum Reforms

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 161-161

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   2. Nationalism and Globalism as Epistemic Entanglements: China’s Suyang Curriculum Reform as a Case Study

      • Weili Zhao

      Pages 163-173

   3. Unpacking the Global-Local Entanglements in Hong Kong’s Curriculum Reform

      • Min Lin, Yundan Zheng

      Pages 175-194

   4. Competency-Based Curriculum Reform and Its Making of Korean Global Citizens

      • Ji-Hye Kim

      Pages 195-210

   5. A Holistic Model of Competence: Curriculum Reforms for Pre-school Education in Singapore

      • Sandra Wu, Charlene Tan

      Pages 211-227

   6. The Global Inside the National and the National Inside the Global: ‘Zest for Living,’ the Chi, Toku and Tai Triad, and the ‘Model’ of Japanese Education

      • Keita Takayama

      Pages 229-247

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.

• Globalization and Localization of Education
• Transitional and International Curriculum Studies
• Competency Curriculum Reform
• International Policy Borrowing
• Confucian Educational Culture
• Protestant Educational Culture
• Curriculum Reform in Asia
• European Curriculum Reform
• School Curriculum Reforms
• Curriculum History

• Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

  Weili Zhao

• Institute of Education, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

  Daniel Tröhler

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.

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