New way to think 'Curriculum' in business education

Existing curricula and accompanying forms of pedagogy and assessment based on rigid borders and hierarchies between forms of knowledge, formal and informal learning spaces, individual and group identities, ages and stages of learning and between educators and learners seem increasingly outmoded in the global era. At the same time new spaces and possibilities have emerged for a creative re-imagining of what counts as relevant knowledge and of teaching and learning. Curricula must enable learners to participate in an increasingly and irreversibly global economy where new technologies have transformed the nature, speed and scale of production and exchange. They must also produce the capabilities to support sustainable livelihoods in a context where economic crisis has precipitated the production and reproduction of inequality along the lines of race, ethnicity, class and gender. At a political level the development of global and regional blocs and changes in the role of the nation state and of decentralization and localization have implications for how citizenship is defined and taught and for the politics and processes of curriculum reform.

Cultural globalization has also involved contradictory processes. On the one hand Western forms of culture and knowledge have assumed hegemonic status whilst on the other non-western, including indigenous and fundamental religious identities, have re-asserted themselves. Mass migrations have broken old associations between place and identity and created new, hybridized ethnicities and forms of difference. Curricula must empower learners to assess the relevance of different forms of knowledge, to negotiate new borders of group and individual identity and to understand and engage with diversity