Abstract:

Curricular restructuring has become a necessity pointed out by several international organizations as European Commission, OECD, 2019 or UNESCO. The education systems are expected to respond efficiently to the preparation of new generations, in order to face the challenges posed by a global context of uncertainties, rapid changes and complexity. These organizations have produced guidelines that strongly influence the educational policy agendas of several countries in a very expressive way. With this, we have seen a change in the educational paradigm based on the teaching model of skills development. The first steps of this model were taken in the 1970s, but it is, above all, in the last decade that it gains greater impetus following the educational policies advocated by both UNESCO and the OECD. As the skills are identified as indispensable elements for the promotion of social inclusion, generating prosperity and transforming the lives of individuals (OECD, 2018) the challenge for countries is to indicate the knowledge, skills, abilities, attitudes and values needed by young people and define the how education systems will develop them through the curricular restructuring of their education systems.

This proposal intends to present the preliminary results of the analysis in a comparative perspective of the mother language curricula at the level of secondary education in six different countries - Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, Portugal, and the United Kingdom - with the objective of to achieve how in each of these countries the development of skills considered essential in the 21st century is structured, having as reference the models of skills development of UNESCO (2018) and OECD (2015). This is an exploratory study, with a qualitative approach, developed in the scope of the research project Language Why do I want you for?! We used the technique of content analysis of curricular programs in mother language. The analysis categories were based on UNESCO and OECD competence development models. As each country has different socio-political rhythms, the curricula analyzed date from different periods. The oldest, from Germany, is from 2004. The most recent, from France, dates from 2019.

The results reveal that the curriculum organization in the mother language in the countries of the study is structured based on the competence development model since all of them present an approach to language as an element of learning and social participation, with a predominance of cognitive and metacognitive skills, in face of those of social and emotional skills that are also present. Another interesting result is that there is a greater influence of the competence model of the OECD in the most recently reformulated curricula (Portugal and Brazil), therefore there is less approximation with the learning objectives outlined in SDG 4.

We conclude that despite the differences between countries in terms of governmental tradition - state-centered education systems (Spain, France, Portugal), federalist education systems (Germany), and liberal tradition education systems (United Kingdom) - the study reveals that school curricula are the results of what Dolowitz, Hulme, Nellis and O'Neill, 2000 called “convergence policies” in the relations between globalization and education, especially regarding the establishment of a “common world educational culture” (Meyer et al., 1997) or a «globally structured educational agenda»” (Dale, 2005).

Keywords:

Comparative education, Curricular Programs, Mother language, Secundary Schools, educational policies.