What kind of citizens? Constructing ‘Young Europeans’ through loud borrowing in curriculum policy-making in Kosovo

Bildung and Twenty-First Century Competences: In Need of Mutual Recognition?

“…In Kosovo, education policy has been largely shaped by international organizations that assisted in rebuilding Kosovo's education system after the war in 1999. Of interest here is the latest curriculum reform of 2011, which took a 'competenceturn' introducing six key competences as main goals of pre-university education, following the EU/EC recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning (Tahirsylaj, 2018(Tahirsylaj, , 2021aTahirsylaj & Fazliu, 2021). Traditionally, Kosovo's education system followed a Didaktik-based model adopted from former Yugoslavia, but the latest education policy reforms have moved the curriculum towards a social efficiency-based education tradition that promotes key competences and external assessments (Tahirsylaj, 2021b).…”

“…Traditionally, Kosovo's education system followed a Didaktik-based model adopted from former Yugoslavia, but the latest education policy reforms have moved the curriculum towards a social efficiency-based education tradition that promotes key competences and external assessments (Tahirsylaj, 2021b). A growing body of recent research has investigated the introduction of competence-based curricula in Kosovo and its various implications for public schooling, such as in citizenship education (Tahirsylaj, 2021a), the shift from content-based to competence-based curricula (Saqipi, 2019a;Tahirsylaj & Fazliu, 2021), critical thinking in curricula in comparison to other European nations (Tahirsylaj & Wahlström, 2019), and teacher education policy (Saqipi, 2019b). The findings reveal the influence that transnational education policies have had on Kosovo's education, which in turn followed 'loud borrowing' as policy adoption to signal Kosovo's aspirations to match its education with European trends (Tahirsylaj, 2021a).…”

From Content- to Competence-Based Curricula – An Educational Account of Curriculum Policy in Kosovo

“…As a 'post-socialist' context (Silova, 2010), Kosovo followed the education policy transfer path already established in literature regarding the transfer of policies to post-socialist contexts in line with Western-based education values, including for example student-centered teaching and learning approaches, introduction of curriculum standards, decentralization of educational finance and governance, privatization of higher education, standardization of student assessment, liberalization of textbook publishing, and many others (Silova, 2010;Silova & Steiner-Khamsi, 2008). To varying degrees, these policy solutions have been tried and are in place as part of education reform efforts in Kosovo over past 20 years (Saqipi, 2019;Tahirsylaj, 2010Tahirsylaj, , 2013Tahirsylaj, , 2018Tahirsylaj, , 2020. In this regard, Kosovo has been part of the transnational policy flows to education originating from an external (global) source and transferred to a national (local) context.…”

“…Next, the introduction of competence-based approaches to curricula seems to have been welltimed with the change in political situation after Kosovo's independence in 2008, when among other things, there was new political leadership in charge of education sector eager to be associated with the latest international trends in education (Tahirsylaj, 2020(Tahirsylaj, , 2018. Further, the findings highlight that the solution provided by competence-based framework marked the break of Kosovo's education tradition from being more didaktik-based, albeit not entirely Continental/Nordic didactic, toward curriculum tradition based on social efficiency ideology, specifically when considering the content component of the curriculum, while an array of all other curriculum and didaktik perspectives are evident when other curriculum components are taken into account.…”