IB Research Notes Information for the IB research community Volume 2, Issue 2 April 2002 Welcome to IB Research Notes, Volume 2 Issue 2. In this issue This issue’s feature article is by Simon Murray. The Research Notes article considers the global economy from a Theory of Knowledge perspective. Mr Samir Chammaa, head of Ibn ~ Call for Articles Khuldoon School, and Mr Mike Clarke, subject area Feature Article: manager at IBCA, provide responses to the article. The Value(s) of Also included in this issue is an article outlining a Theory of Knowledge longitudinal study relating to Swedish IB Diploma in a Global Economy holders, and details of the research committee and its Simon Murray functions. Study Report: The research unit, in conjunction with the research Longitudinal studies in the committee, is actively developing a research strategy IBO: Swedish Diploma for e-learning as it relates to international schools Holders Research Study and international contexts. We are looking for 1971–1993 individuals and groups who may wish to become Annika Andrae Thelin et al involved in e-learning activities or who may wish to The Research Committee share their work through IB Research Notes. Please contact [email protected] if you would like further Research Noticeboard information. ~ Interpreting International We would also be interested in hearing from prospective Education conference authors of articles related to any field of international ~ Journal of Research in education. They can e-mail [email protected] to discuss their International Education ideas and suggestions for articles. ~ Research committee IB teachers can access IB Research Notes via news and ~ Research literature information on the online curriculum centre. To widen access to our research information, IB Research Notes ~ Research conference will also soon appear on the IBO public web pages, but ~ IBO public web site until such time as this occurs it can also be accessed at ~ Online curriculum centre www.bath.ac.uk/Departments/Education/CEIC/ibru/ index.html. IB Research Notes is published four times a year and is a joint publication of the International Baccalaureate Research Unit (IBRU) and the International Baccalaureate Curriculum and Assessment Centre (IBCA). Contact details: IBRU Department of Education University of Bath a Bath GB BA2 7AY Fax: +44 1225 323 277 E-mail: [email protected] © IBO 2002 2 IB Research Notes Research Notes This publication is intended to communicate the outcomes of small-scale pieces of inquiry and developments relevant to the IB community. The reason for publishing in this electronic form is that we wish to provide timely access to ideas arising from inquiries of current significance to the IB community. The general aims of the publication are to: 1. provide a forum for the publication of research related to the IB and international education 2. present research related to the IB to its community via the online curriculum centre 3. establish a forum for exchange of IB research-related comments and information, by providing a feedback column 4. provide the wider IB community with an outline of some of the current research being undertaken on IB-related topics 5. provide information about recent research articles relevant to the three IB programmes. Call for Articles We encourage anyone involved in any form of research within or on the IB programmes (PYP, MYP, Diploma Programme or all three) to contact IBRU at [email protected] if they wish to submit an article or report for publication. We are particularly interested in hearing from teacher researchers within the IB community. Please note that the IBO reserves the right to edit articles, in consultation with the authors, for length and style (articles should not exceed 2500 words). Should you wish to comment critically on articles published in IB Research Notes, please e-mail [email protected]. © IBO 2002 3 IB Research Notes Feature Article Simon Murray is Head of Sixth Form at St George’s British International School, Rome. He has taught English and Theory of Knowledge (TOK) in schools in Spain and Italy, has been a Middle Years Programme approaches to learning coordinator and Diploma Programme coordinator, and was an associate lecturer in arts and social science for The Open University in Europe. He is also a TOK assessor, and is currently researching the impact of globalization on issues of national and international education. The Value(s) of Theory of Knowledge in a Global Economy Simon Murray Abstract This article considers globalization as primarily a problem of knowledge. It goes on to suggest that the increasing commodification of knowledge is a central part of the operation of globalization that, when joined to an apparent liquidation of the difference between politics and economics, raises issues about a possible economics of epistemology. Finally, it considers the status of the national and the international in the context of the global, and tries to outline possible connections between Theory of Knowledge (TOK) and concepts of internationalism. Introduction Given the wealth, perhaps the surplus wealth, of comment on globalization, a further attempt to understand this phenomenon needs to justify itself. This justification is made easier by the fact that, as far as I am aware, education in general is grossly under-represented in the most influential debates, school education rarely mentioned, and international school education apparently a species currently too exotic to classify. Yet it is the provocation offered by globalization to the teaching of Theory of Knowledge, and its response, that might help establish an agenda which currently seems absent in thinking about the future of education in a global economy. And if I have already extended the apparent scope of this article, that extension is legitimated in part by the special role allocated to the teaching of TOK within the Diploma Programme. TOK is the proper place and space for the Diploma Programme to consider itself. And if globalization in turn asks TOK to reflect upon itself as a discipline and consider its own educational value, then the Diploma Programme is itself implied: the mirror of globalization reflects many faces, and at least the six of the current hexagon. © IBO 2002 4 IB Research Notes What is Globalization? Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself.1 These remarks, made during Lyotard’s 1979 report on knowledge for the government of Quebec, probably exceeded his original brief, which was to assess “the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed countries”.2 But, with remarkable prescience, he described our own times very well indeed, I think. Twenty years before the term became fashionable and ultimately indispensable, Lyotard identified the phenomenon that we have come to know as globalization. That he diagnosed it as essentially a problem of knowledge and not just an issue of sovereignty, market economies, communication technology, time–space compression or social justice (though it is certainly all of these and more), makes it particularly relevant to TOK. Thus, we need to examine the impact of globalization as it ramifies across a variety of ways of knowing, itself a wide-ranging research project.3 More pressingly though, we need to assess where it leaves TOK as an educational discipline, and ask ourselves what is its value and what are its values. If knowledge has ceased or is ceasing to be an end in itself, and is now bound increasingly within a process of commodification, then our students need to reflect on this, and we as teachers need to work out how we cope with this situation.4 Recently, a limited debate has been conducted within the IBO about the significance of globalization.5 Thus, Gautam Sen raises the central question that “[b]y omitting a closer scrutiny of globalisation itself, the [strategic] plan seemed to regard it as a process which the IBO could see itself supporting unproblematically”.6 The subsequent exchange between Sen and Walker, albeit conducted in a limited context, did little to address this question, largely because both seemed to conceive of the globalization debate as working from competing social agendas rather than emerging from the more fundamental problem of knowledge identified by Lyotard. Now, while conceptualizations of globalization are remarkably diverse, they do tend to fall into two broad categories. The first of these is skeptical about presenting the reality of globalization as a genuinely new phenomenon, while the other, more radical, position asserts the need to recognize that the world order, and the relationships that structure it, have fundamentally changed. Then again, these classifications themselves break down, especially on the side of the radicals, according to how urgent is the perceived need to act on this recognition of change, and according to what they recognize as the locus of this change. One person responsible for making the term globalization fashionable and indispensable is Anthony Giddens.7 In the Reith Lecture series Runaway World,8 broadcast from around and to the world by the BBC World Service in 1999, Giddens took it as given that we are all in the grip of globalization. His themed lectures on risk, tradition, the family and democracy were notable for the cautious optimism characteristic of the so-called “tranformationalist” model. At the time I was surprised by the comparatively