Contextualizing Global Flows Of Competency Based Education

The new comparative research in this volume explores the global flow of competence-based education, curricular policy, and frameworks for instructional practice. Taking critical perspectives, the chapters trace the pathways through which educators and policy actors adopted and reshaped competence-based education as promoted by the OECD, the World Bank, and the European Union. The authors ask: What purposes do competence-based educational reforms serve? How are competence-based models internationally deployed and locally modified? What happens as competence-based reforms get re-contextualized and contested in particular cultural, social, and political contexts? In their nuanced examination of these global flows, the authors theorize how competence-based reform strategies variously produce hybridity, silent borrowing, “loud borrowing,” and new social imaginaries. Although entangled with other “hot topics” in educational research —skills and dispositions for citizenship and employment; higher-order and critical thinking; and socio-emotional learning—competence itself has multiple, fluid meanings. The authors dissect this polysemy while documenting the pivotal role of key actors in the development, design, and deployment of reforms in diverse international contexts. Contextualizing Global Flows of Competency-Based Education will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of comparative education, educational research, curriculum studies, sociology, and education leadership and policy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.

Abstract: Performance-based, or competency-based education (CBE) is a concept for teaching which applies to all learning levels, as presented in a collection of papers written by educators who support its theory, implications, and practical application. CBE evolved from a philosophy of education that specifies behavioral objectives for which criterion levels of performance, or competency, are defined; an instructional plan aims the learner toward achieving these minimum expectancies. CBE and traditional educational systems are compared from a psychological viewpoint. Topics explored in this sourcebook for the CBE program include empathy-competence, affective behaviors, instructional techniques, curriculum design, achievement testing, and teacher certification. The special issues of communications technology, the open classroom, and urban children examine the implementation of competency-based learning in the schools. An annotated bibliography reviews research efforts in performance-based teacher education.

Examines the implementation of competency based education and training in a number of countries.

Leading educators explore the meaning and development of competency and the competency-based approach; review complex problems and issues pertaining to program development; examine the role of instruction in achieving competency-based education; describe school and non-school programs being implemented; probe evaluation issues; and examine implications of competency based education for secondary school practice.

Abstract: The advantages of competency-based education and techniques for writing and operationalizing competencies and performance objectives are described. In these programs, desired learning outcomes are written as behavioral objectives. Objectives must be associated with the instructional delivery system. Such programs avoid content duplication and maintain consistency of competencies. Their success can be hampered by economic and political barriers.

As interest in competency-based education (CBE) continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the need for a practical resource to guide development of high-quality CBE programs led the authors to write this book. Until now, there has been no how-to manual that captures in one place a big picture view of CBE along with the down-to-earth means for building a CBE program.A variety of pressures are driving the growth in CBE, including the need for alternatives to the current model of higher education (with its dismal completion rates); the potential to better manage the iron triangle of costs, access, and quality; the need for graduates to be better prepared for the workforce; and the demands of adult learners for programs with the flexible time and personalized learning that CBE offers.Designed to help institutional leaders become more competent in designing, building, and scaling high-quality competency-based education (CBE) programs, this book provides context, guidelines, and process. The process is based on ten design elements that emerged from research funded by the Gates Foundation, and sponsored by AAC&U, ACE, EDUCAUSE, and the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN), with thought partners CAEL and Quality Matters. In short, the book will serve administrators, higher education leaders, faculty, staff, and others who have an interest in CBE by:• Giving context to enable the audience to discover the importance of each design element and to help frame the CBE program (the “why”);• Providing models, checklists, and considerations to determine the “what” component for each design element;• Sharing outlines and templates for the design elements to enable institutions to build quality, relevant, and rigorous CBE programs (the “how”).

This book offers a geographically unique cultural comparative lens to examine the issue of transnational curriculum knowledge (re)production. Prompted by the ongoing competency-based curriculum reforms on a global scale, this book examines where global frameworks like the OECD's core competency definitions are rooted and how they are borrowed, resisted, and/or re-contextualized in various European states with a Christian, foremost Protestant educational-cultural heritage and Asian countries with a Confucian educational-cultural heritage. It highlights the roles that various factors, such as history, culture, religious attitudes, ideology, and state governance play in nation-states' re-contextualization of global curriculum policies and practices beyond a simplistic and dualistic globalism/power and nationalism/resistance dynamic. In doing so, it provides a global context to better understand individual nation-state's continuing curriculum reforms and school practices. At the same time, it situates individual nation-state's latest curriculum reforms and practices within an international community for healthy dialogues and mutual sharing. By selecting two educational-cultural systems and wisdom-Christian-Protestant and Confucian-it also offers a springboard for international curriculum studies beyond the usual confinement of geopolitical nation-state constructs. It not only sheds new light on each nation-state's curriculum policies and practices, but also creates new collaboration spaces within similar and across disparate cultural-educational regions. With its wide geopolitical and educational-cultural scope, this book appeals to a global market and can be used in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative education, history of education, curriculum theory, school and society, and curriculum history.