School is the only institutionalised social arena in which the entire population is educated politically and culturally. School thus constitutes one of the most important spaces for the development of cohesion in society. In addition to ensuring that pupils acquire formal skills, school programmes must educate them in the practices of meaning creation that make them subjects capable of action in the culture(s) in which they live.
Today, educational institutions must prepare students to function in a society characterised by globalisation. This imposes radical changes on educational institutions, from a national to an international perspective. Of particular significance are increased ethnic and linguistic complexity, the knowledge society's demand for internationalisation of educational programmes and the development of the liberal national state's fundamental values as normative frameworks for negotiation.
The project reveals how these aspects affect processes of change in educational programmes on the basis of the following hypotheses, which are illustrated through an analysis of traditional culture-bearing and educative subjects from different but connected research perspectives:
It is possible to read how culturalised exercise of power takes place in the formal education system in the light of the processes of globalisation. In other words, to describe how the tension between cultural unity and cultural complexity is interpreted in the programmes, how various players understand adequate answers and what effects this has on reforms of cultural curricula and on teachers' teaching.
The project runs from 1 April 2008 to 31 December 2011 and is supported financially by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities.
