How Collaborative Project Development Theory Can Be Used to Provide Guidance for International Curriculum Partnerships

Abstract

In this paper we explore collaboration in the context of the educational services industry (ESI). We look to literature from the communication field to consider ethical strategies and methods for ensuring the validity of the outcomes of collaborative working. Drawing on Collaborative Product Development and conversation theory we devise four principles that can guide the collaborative process within an education-based partnership project. We then use a case study to consider how these principles supported the outcomes of a cross-national partnership project. Finally, we draw on these principles to consider the lessons for project management in education public private partnerships.

The colonial governmentality of Cambridge Assessment International Education

“…CAIE’s ecology of expertise is a primarily enunciative assemblage in which technologies of colonial governmentality structure inequalities of authority and respect between Cambridge’s “international experts” and Southern educators, including those within its absent school system. By ennobling themselves with “higher epistemic status,” CAIE sidelines the critiques and concerns of Malaysian teachers, Indian school administrators, Pakistani examination boards, and other voices that CAIE subordinates under the designation of “jurisdiction experts” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 27). CAIE’s (2013a) ecology of expertise locates modernity within the cultural supremacy of British colonial education, employs essentialist stereotypes and othering to negatively reference East Asian educational spaces, and invisibilizes thousands of Cambridge Schools in the “low performing jurisdictions” of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.…”

“…CAIE’s (2013a) ecology of expertise locates modernity within the cultural supremacy of British colonial education, employs essentialist stereotypes and othering to negatively reference East Asian educational spaces, and invisibilizes thousands of Cambridge Schools in the “low performing jurisdictions” of Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. CAIE governs Southern educational spaces and discourses with the aim of “decreasing the dominance of post-colonial approaches” to education, thereby maintaining the “epistemic imbalance” of CAIE’s modern/colonial ecology of expertise (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 35–36). Spivak (1988: 280–281) indicates that “the clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.” CAIE mostly obscures its Other behind spectacles of modernity, development, performance, and competitiveness.…”

“…The correlative accumulation cycle is effectuated when CAIE’s collective assemblage of enunciation exerts that dispossessed authority over Cambridge Schools, their circumjacent educational discourses, and education policy in the global South. The Cambridge School system operates across a terrain in which, according to CAIE’s research team, “global education partnerships can lead to an increased risk of privatisation of education; unequal distribution of resources, neo-colonial pressures and the erosion of indigenous culture” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 25). CAIE does not see “indigenous culture” as a source of educational knowledge, instead recommending that in North-South public-private partnerships, experts are “respected for their higher epistemic status,” emphasizing that “an international education specialist may have a higher epistemic status when discussing international policy” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 27–35).…”

“…The Cambridge School system operates across a terrain in which, according to CAIE’s research team, “global education partnerships can lead to an increased risk of privatisation of education; unequal distribution of resources, neo-colonial pressures and the erosion of indigenous culture” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 25). CAIE does not see “indigenous culture” as a source of educational knowledge, instead recommending that in North-South public-private partnerships, experts are “respected for their higher epistemic status,” emphasizing that “an international education specialist may have a higher epistemic status when discussing international policy” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 27–35). CAIE seeks to reinforce inequalities of respect and expertise because “effective communication takes epistemic status into account .…”

“…. with epistemic imbalance driving the interaction.” Teachers, administrators, officials, and other “national stakeholders can be seen as jurisdiction experts, working collaboratively with international experts” (Fitzsimons and Johnson, 2020: 30). This instantiates the “vertical encompassment” often employed in transnational relationships of neoliberal governmentality, by which Northern actors claim hegemony over the global as a “superordinate scalar level that encompasses nation-states” (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002: 990).…”