ECS 210 SEPTEMBER 23 , 2014

Who Decides What Knowledge Is Worth?: Curriculum, Power

and the Social Order

Objectives:

Exploring through the proposed K-12 financial literacy school curricula “the politics of curriculum”

Practicing approaching school curricula as texts filled with contrasting ideological stances, different visions of a good education and a good society”

Benjamin Levin

Deputy Minister of Education, Manitoba, 1999 – 2002

Deputy Minister of Education, Ontario, 2004 – 2007 and from 2008 – 2009

Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy at OISE, University of Toronto

Teaching

Educationa

l

Politics

Curriculu

m

The Politics of Curriculum

Policie

s

Politics

Edu

cati

onal

Po

lici

es

Curriculu

m

Who Decides What Knowledge Is Worth?: Curriculum, Power and the Social Order

Your turn: Practicing approaching school curricula as texts

K- 12 Financial Literacy

Curriculum

World Economic Forum (Davos, Switzerland, 2011)

“The increase in inequality is the most serious challenge for the world… [and] I don’t think the world is paying enough attention”

Min Zhu, Special Adviser at the International Monetary Fund

Canada Income Growth Distribution in 2010 (Conference Board of Canada, 2010)

Should financial literacy teach about socio-economic inequality, of the complex causes and consequences of what it means to be poor?

Financial Literacy: Our Critique

What role does financial literacy seems to play in the provincial government economic growth plan?

How do the Junior Achievement and the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce understand financial literacy? What perspectives/understandings seem to be missing?

What view of a financial literacy person does the Ministry seem to endorse and to educate for? Why?

What curriculum orientation (i.e., product, process, and/or praxis) does this proposed curriculum seem to endorse? Why?

How does the introduction of the proposed K-12 financial literacy education becomes an instrument to reproduce a particular social order? How is that social order imagined?