Wood, E.A. orcid.org/0000-0002-1027-1520 (2024) Curriculum in early childhood education: global policy discourses and country-level responses in Aotearoa New Zealand and England. Curriculum Journal, 36 (1). pp. 147-163. ISSN 0958-5176
Abstract
In early childhood education global policy discourses influence national policy frameworks for curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices. Although aspects of these discourses travel across national boundaries via policy borrowing, we argue that consideration is needed of the cultural-historical evolution of country-level systems, their epistemological foundations, and different goals or aspirations. We combine a cultural-historical perspective with critical policy text analysis to examine two curricular frameworks – England’s Early Years Foundation Stage and Aotearoa New Zealand’s Te Whāriki. Both nations share similar historical influences and similar timeframe for the development of early childhood education policies from the 1990s, but with different local responses, principles, and values. Three questions about curriculum inform our policy text analysis: how are children are positioned and understood; what knowledge is valued, and what outcomes are valued? The analysis indicates similar influences and discourses, but with dissimilar responses to these questions, and distinctive ways of understanding curriculum in each country. We argue that although global discourses promote generic policy drivers and goals, country-level policy responses need to be understood genealogically and locally in relation to cultures, contexts, and values. Taking a global-local approach to policy analysis also raises critical questions about the opportunities and limitations of policy borrowing across international contexts, and the importance of contextualisation.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). The Curriculum Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | early childhood curriculum England; New Zealand; policy borrowing |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Education (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Jul 2024 09:46 |
Last Modified: | 24 Feb 2025 16:24 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/curj.280 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:215007 |