ABSTRACT
Discussions of the impact of globalisation on curriculum and pedagogy are concerned increasingly with two areas. One is those matters that need to be covered in learning (en)counters in which the aim is to enable learners to engage as global citizens or consumers-covering, for example, issues such as global values, sustainable development and environmental education (Gough 1998). The second is an examination of the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs), of space-time compression and of emerging forms of global education enabled by these developments (Mason 1998). Significant though these issues are in themselves, there is a danger that they can be constructed as encompassing all that there is to be said about the implications of globalisation. We would argue that it is just as, if not more, important to be able to locate the full range of contemporary and emerging curricular and pedagogical practices in relation to the play of globalisation. Thus, we would argue that attempts to tighten control of the curriculum at state level do not, as it is often suggested (Power and Whitty 1996; Green 1997), undermine the globalisation thesis but can be understood as a dimension of the contemporary inter-relationship between the global and the local. In this sense then it is not simply formal institutionalised practices which are subject to examination but also the location of those practices within a range of globalising processes and influences which include trends towards localisation and particularity. The emergence therefore of national curricula is as significant in a context of globalisation as the development of ICTs in pedagogic practices and the role of media and cultural changes more generally. This illustrates that globalisation is no single unidirectional and monovalent trend. As we have pointed out previously, the global and the local cannot be separated.
