Curriculum theory - a driving force for school equality? A re-scaling and re-theorizing of equality

Within the domain of education policy, a global education policy field emerged in the beginning of the 2000s, with policy effects within national education policy and policy processes. The global education policy field implies the relocation of some political influence outside the nation with effects inside the nation. This relocation of political influence to domains outside the nation might be seen as a form of meta-governance (Lingard & Rawolle 2011). The most obvious meta-governance can be localized to the OECD and the most obvious meta-governance tools can be identified to the PISA measurements. Based on the PISA results, including the student, teacher and school leader surveys that goes with it, the OECD form a global education policy, maintaining “international standards” (OECD 2015).  Simultaneously, a system of independent schools with private owners was developed in Sweden. The purpose of this paper is to highlight key questions on how to analyze schooling in a perspective of democracy and equality (jämlikhet), containing helpful concepts dealing with both re-scaling and school segregation. Historically, curriculum codes (Lundgren 1983) and educational conceptions (Englund 1986) have been analyzed over time, illustrating different roles of education for different periods. Further, curriculum theory has been developed mainly within a critical national explanation model with the state as a main actor. Today, curriculum theory needs concepts for analysis of the meaning of democracy and equality in relation to ongoing educational reforms in real-time, in order to be relevant actors in encountering societal challenges. Moreover, curriculum theory needs to include concepts coping with both a transnational level and a local, private level. The research question is, with what concepts can educational- and curriculum reforms be analyzed, capturing perspectives of democracy and equality at different levels of the institutional system?  

Methodologically, this paper is a conceptual contribution to an analytic framework for curriculum theory, to address aspects of democracy and equality on different levels and areas of policy reforms. Theoretically, the paper draws on a distillation of three concepts by John Dewey on creative democracy and nationalism (Wahlström, in print) and Nancy Fraser’s (2008) three-dimensional theory of justice as re-distribution, representation and recognition, arguing that curriculum theory needs a solid ground for analyzes of equality in a transnational as well as a very local landscape. Moreover, to re-formulate curriculum theory from a nation state level to a transnational level, the discursive institutionalism developed by Schmidt (2012) has proven to be helpful (Wahlström & Sundberg 2018; Sundberg & Nordin 2018). The conclusions will point at the need of a renewed discussion of the conceptualization of equality of schooling within curriculum theory. The responsibility rests not the least on the Swedish researchers within the field, since the Swedish state has abandoned its former ideals of equality by promoting an old solution of differentiation between schools, albeit in a new design of independent schools. The theme of the paper refers to the second question in the Nordic congress theme, on how researchers take responsibility for the understanding of education in society.