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What type of global community and citizenship? Tangled discourses of neoliberalism and critical democracy in curriculum and its reform
Steven P. Camicia and Barry M. Franklin
Countries around the globe are responding to the pressures of globalisation, standardisation, accountability and market rationality. In curriculum reform, we theorise these pressures as neoliberal cosmopolitanism because they are intended to promote a new type of entrepreneurial citizen that navigates an increasingly interconnected global community. However, there is resistance to these pressures by educators who promote a global community based upon principles of critical democracy and multiculturalism. Because public schools are a powerful regulatory force in society, this curriculum struggle between neoliberal and democratic intents is increasingly significant. It is a struggle that defines the size, scope and qualities of our future global community. We used principles of critical discourse analysis to examine brief examples in two countries, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. Our examination illustrates how, although these countries have very different contexts, curriculum often sends competing messages related to neoliberal and democratic intents. Our analysis has implications for curriculum reform and changing understandings of our global community.
Traditionally, citizenship education has been predicated upon notions of a citizen as grounded in local and national communities. However, these notions are challenged by increased awareness of the network of power relations, as well as suspicion of Western discourses that are intent upon collapsing citizenship education into notions of âimagined consensusâ. These notions are a move towards constructing what Anderson (1991) calls an imagined community. Education has been a tool for perpetuating national myths that construct and maintain imagined consensus in, on the surface, the name of national unity. Postcolonial theorists mine below this surface to show how such intents to gain consensus, name, classify and sort serve to perpetuate relations of domination and subjugation (Bhabha 1994; Said 1979; Spivak 1996; Willinsky 1998). Discourses of community, whether local, national, or global, direct curriculum reform and the notions of community contained within curriculum.
The stated intents of citizenship education have been related to visions of how local and national communities could thrive. Currently, the opportunities and constraints related to the intensifying effects of globalisation are fostering new visions in education and curriculum. Whether local, national, or global, what and who thrives in these different visions of community has been a constant point of curriculum contention as stakeholders struggle to have their views prevail (Camicia 2007, 2010). Pinar (2004) writes that, âthe school curriculum communicates what we choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present, what we hope for the futureâ (20). The public school curriculum sends powerful messages to students about the qualities and scales of the communities in which students are preparing to participate. In other words, citizenship education is connected to a political economy of social, cultural and economic relations related to sometimes competing visions of community. Rury and Mirel (1997) describe the term âpolitical economyâ as recognising that:
It is naĂŻve to suggest that economic and social or cultural relationships are not closely related to the distribution of political power within society. Consequently, both political and economic dimensions of critical social problems must be considered simultaneously if one is to understand how these dilemmas have evolved. (49)
In this article, we examine the political economy of curriculum reform related to sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping visions of our global community. What do curriculum reforms indicate about the ways that global community and citizenship is defined? How do these definitions influence educational settings around the globe? How do different regions around the globe interact with increasing opportunities and constraints related to globalisation and curriculum reform? Are the reactions to these pressures to embrace market rationality, standardisation and accountability? If so, are there sites of resistance that emphasise emancipation, diversity and social justice? Or, is curriculum a mix of sometimes competing intents?
Education related to understandings of a global community is on the rise internationally in educational settings ranging from early childhood education to business and teacher education programmes at universities. However, the understandings of the global community and cosmopolitanism are diverse (Todd 2008) and the intents of the various global education curricula reflect this diversity (Parker and Camicia 2009). One of the most striking tensions in curriculum reform within this area concerns shifting understandings of communities, states, nations and as a result, citizenship and education for citizenship. While there is general agreement concerning the need to prepare citizens to effectively navigate this shifting terrain of cultural and economic formations related to globalisation, there has been increasing caution concerning the intents of such reforms (Burbules and Torres 2000; Burman 2008; Camicia and Franklin 2010; Popkewitz 2007). This caution is spawned by new understandings related to the effects of market rationality upon schools around the globe. In this article, we examine two cases in two separate locations on the globe to better understand how educators and educational researchers are struggling to better prepare their students for various visions of our global community.
The power of discourse and the discursive field
Discourses surrounding education for a global community indicate new economic and cultural formations about the size, scale and qualities of rapidly changing communities. We use the term discourse because we find it helpful in examining how these formations appear in what people say within a web of power relations and âtruthsâ concerning community. St. Pierre (2000) states: âPoststructural theories of discourse, like poststructural theories of language, allow us to understand how knowledge, truth, and subjects are produced in language and cultural practice as well as how they might be reconfiguredâ (486). From this theoretical orientation, the languages and cultural practices of current curriculum reform efforts can help us understand how such reforms construct or maintain âknowledgeâ, âtruthâ and âsubjectsâ. Foucault provides the central framework for examinations of discourse and its functions in a variety of social settings. For example, his analysis of discourse has influenced areas such as poststructural feminist discourse analysis (Butler 1999; Lather and Smithies 1997; Spivak 1996), postcolonial discourse analysis (Pratt 1992; Said 1979) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992; Jäger 2001; Luke 1995â1996). There are many definitions of discourse, but in the analysis we use in this article, we find Millâs (1997) definition helpful:
A discourse is not a disembodied collection of statements, but groupings of utterances or sentences, statements which are enacted within a social context, which are determined by that social context and which contribute to the way that social context continues its existence. Institutions and social context therefore play an important determining role in the development, maintenance and circulation of discourses. (11)
Extending our recent work (Camicia and Franklin 2010), we examine examples related to curriculum reformers in the Philippines and the United Kingdom, as well as how these examples illustrate the influence and power struggle of two discourses, those of neoliberal cosmopolitanism and democratic cosmopolitanism. In our new work reported on in this article, we add one more heuristic to our analysis, the concept of a discursive field.
Steinberg (1999) describes a discursive field as containing, âgenres that can be seen as contextually related when groups construct diagnoses, prognoses, and calls to action, and are partly structured in ongoing processes of hegemonyâ (748). In this view, discourses do not carry the same weight because they are embedded in a larger political economy that favours one discourse over another. Dominant discourses create and maintain a kind of gravitational pull on marginal discourses, a pull that seeks standardisation, assimilation and efficiency. The competition between dominant and marginal discourses is governed by rules that Foucault calls âorders of discourseâ (1981). In what follows, we first describe what we mean by neoliberal cosmopolitan and democratic cosmopolitan discourses. Next we report on our analysis of how these discourses appear to operate differently within different cultural and global locations and contexts.
Neoliberal cosmopolitan and democratic cosmopolitan discourses
In our previous work (Camicia and Franklin 2010), we propose that the identification of two discourses is helpful in understanding curriculum reform under new pressures and constraints of globalisation. One discourse is neoliberal and the other is democratic. These discourses have a global dimension related to the concept of cosmopolitanism. We define cosmopolitanism as an allegiance to a global community or human family (Appiah 2006; Nussbaum 1996). However, the meaning of cosmopolitanism is contentious. Anderson (2005) illustrates the complexity of notions of national and cosmopolitan communities. His examination highlights how increasingly global movements of media and humans during the end of the nineteenth century fostered new structures of social relations and transnational understandings of the nation state and a global community. The construction of national and global communities is complex. Both colonial and anti-colonial discourses influenced such constructions.
Another point of contention surrounding cosmopolitanism is grounded in the conceptâs complicity in the hegemony of Western ideology in creating an imagined consensus concerning the concept of âhumanityâ. Todd (2008) challenges current moves towards consensus in prominent views of cosmopolitanism in favour of an agonistic form of cosmopolitanism that constantly places universalist notions of humanity and morality within the process of deconstruction. In this view, the concept of a global community would be ethically grounded in the ability to recognise difference. Andreotti (2010) examines the use of postmodern understandings to emphasise two strands found in the literature, one focusing upon âcognitive adaptionâ and another on âepistemological pluralismâ. Both foreshadow new perspectives that, âalign in their conceptualization of knowledge, learning, reality and identities as socially constructed, fluid, open to negotiation and always provisionalâ (6). It is this view that we extend to our understanding of the discourse of critical democratic cosmopolitanism in curriculum reform.
There is considerable debate about how our global community might be related (Fine 2007). Within this debate, we attempt to identify two discourses while struggling not to reduce the plurality of understandings of a global community to yet another binary. The two discourses of cosmopolitanism, one neoliberal and one critical democracy, do not have a binary relationship but are blended, complex and embedded in a dynamic network of power relations.
A neoliberal cosmopolitan discourse emphasises a global community that is best related by market rationality. Students and workers are most efficiently related in this global community through technologies of standardisation, surveillance and accountability. The best students and workers are self-motivated entrepreneurs. In contrast, a critical democratic cosmopolitan discourse emphasises a global community that is best related by principles of social justice and an ethics of recognition (Camicia and Bayon forthcoming). Students and workers communicate through what Habermas (1990, 1996) terms as communicative action and deliberative democracy. In their communication with each other, global citizens aim at reaching an understanding of other global citizens rather than adhering to strictly strategic communication such as that found in the economic sphere. We add that communicative action is based upon a deep commitment to multiculturalism, critical awareness of global power asymmetries, emancipation and social justice.
The two discourses that we name here, neoliberal cosmopolitanism and critical democratic cosmopolitanism, reflect different views concerning the types of global communities that are reflected in curriculum and curriculum reform. In what follows, we add more complexity to our understanding of these discourses by proposing that these discourses often morph further depending upon the discursive field in which they influence curriculum reform. We conceptualise each region in which we provide examples as functioning with a unique discursive field related to globalisation. This allows us to identify neoliberal and democratic discourses as having unique characteristics depending upon the regions/contexts in which they operate.
Navigating the discursive fields of globalisation in two locations
During our work that was occurring while we were writing this essay, we both encountered illustrative examples that point to the ways in which market discourses are acting to colonise state and civil discourses. The research conducted by Camicia, at Southern Leyte State University in the Philippines, and Franklin, on the English Teach First initiative, provides illustrations of how an examination of discursive fields is helpful in understanding curriculum reform.
The concept of the discursive field adds another level of complexity to our analysis of the influences of globalisation, neoliberal cosmopolitan discourses, critical democratic cosmopolitan discourses, power relations, concepts of global community and curriculum reform. In what follows, we illustrate the functioning of the discourses of neoliberal cosmopolitanism and critical democratic cosmopolitanism in the global initiatives at Southern Leyte State University in the Philippines and the curriculum of the Teach First program in the United Kingdom. We briefly interpret the discursive fields in which these discourses operate in these two locations and contexts. The purpose of these distinctions is to move closer to addressing the concerns of critical theorists who point out that dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism function to reinforce Enlightenment principles and Western hegemony (Popkewitz 2007). In other words, neoliberal and critical democratic discourses mean different things in different regions of the world.
The interplay between neoliberal and democratic discourses in educational reform is most visible in the appearance on the scene of a host of private sector initiatives that operate as partnerships between the state and the market but also bring into play a third sector that seems to stand in-between. Here, we are referring to civil society or what Nicholas Rose refers to, citing John Keane, as ânon-state activitiesâ (Rose 1991, 168). While there is strong agreement that these activities include associations such as clubs, churches, citizen groups and other non-government organisations, there is some debate as to where the economy fits in. There are those who see processes of economic production as part of civil society although recent conceptualisations that recognise the growing and seemingly independent role that markets play in modern life view the economy as a separate sphere (Habermas 1992; Rose 1991).
In effect, states, civil society and markets constitute what the sociologist Margaret Somers refers to in her interpretation of citizenship rights as âa triadic assemblage of shifting institutional and discursive relationships and strugglesâ for, in our case, control over the terrain of educational reform (Somers 2008, 20). Giving these three spheres of activities distinct labels may lead one to conclude that they are separate when in fact they are connected. In this vein the impact of neoliberalism under conditions of globalisation has been to allow market rationales to colonise and overly influence the discursive fields of not only the state but also civil society. As a result, the ability of both the state and civil society to interject the kind of countervailing discourses that can restrain market rationales ceases to exist (Somers 2008). Under conditions of globalisation, we have seen the balance role of the state become attenuated as it embraces the same logic as the market. The same is happening within civil society. In the realm of educational reform, then, market discourses trump the critical democratic cosmopolitan discourses that could provide a countervailing force to neoliberal cosmopolitan discourses.
Southern Leyte State University, Philippines
The Southern Leyte State Universityâs (SLSU) vision is expressed in one line: âSLSU shall be a globally competitive and values-motivated institution for social transformationâ. While not unique in terminology, the discursive field in which this statement exists is significantly different than the context of the UK-based discursive field that we describe in the next section. The difference between the Philippines and UK cosmopolitan discursive fields is due in large part to a long history of the two nations related to colonial relationships. This difference can be examined as it is embedded in a complex network of power relations related to neoliberal cosmopolitan and critical democratic cosmopolitan discourses.
The teacher education campus of SLSU illustrates the tension that exists between these discourses within the context of the Philippines. The words âglobal competitionâ are written in classrooms and kiosks across the ca...
