ABSTRACT
Simply put, two basic models of thought have been applied in conceptualizing Western education with its interrelated notions of teaching and learning. The one draws on the Anglo-Saxon tradition of curriculum studies, the other on the Continental European tradition of Didaktik (Gundem & Hopmann, 1998). The division is somewhat gross and it does only partial justice to the Latin European Continent (i.e., France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and some parts of Switzerland) and the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). National principles of curriculum study and design may involve their own rather autonomous principles or a blend of elements from both of those models. Indeed, shifts in emphasis may even have occurred from one model to another, as the example of Finland might prove, where the former authoritative curriculum partnership with the German Didaktik has been gradually altered since WWII, to a conception of teaching and learning in terms of curriculum study and design informed mostly by Anglo-American educational psychology-albeit paradoxically, still in the name of Didaktik. Furthermore, most recently, the neat compartmentalization of the two models may be disturbed by worldwide developments in education where its structures and functions have been strongly challenged during the last two decades by what A. V. Kelly (1999) terms “the politicization of the curriculum.” This phenomenon has also become known as the “restructuring education” movement, a kind of globalization of educational institutions in terms of economic metaphors (see, for instance, Carlgren & Klette, 2000; Kelly, 1999; Whitty, 2002; Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998). As
a consequence of these events the national character and imagery of education are shifting to become more amenable to transnational or global influences. For this reason, apart from acknowledging the national roots of each of these discourses and their international influence, it might be equally appropriate to find discursive means of going beyond any single and/or set of alternatives in more adequate and novel terms of education. The ruptures and breaks in question concern the field of curriculum studies as well as other fields of human practice. In this context it is well to recognize the ideological interest of the and/or to reproduce the educational hopes of the civilized Western hemisphere, plagued as it is by the dynamics of upheaval in economic, social, cultural and identity structures. Research into international curriculum discourse in terms of two alternatives would decisively obscure some of the complexity of the problems of current educational practice if it were to restrict itself to this binary relation as subordinated versions of those supposed superdiscourses. In this sense, then, the division may rather be accepted for pedagogic reasons, as a historically conditioned point of departure in more nuanced and decompartmentalizing, deconstructive studies of education, teaching, and learning.
