Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemCultural perspectives, thinking, educators and globalisation: a critical analysis of the Future Problem Solving Program( 2012)Globalisation in its modern phase has inevitably included a strong educational element, in which learning programs that originate in one part of the world have been transported to another. In concordance with economic trends in the contemporary era, this export trade has been primarily one-way. Curricula that have been devised in the industrialised societies of more ‘developed’ States - the so-called ‘West’ – have been introduced into regions that have very different cultural, socio-economic and educational characteristics and traditions. Contemporary models of teaching higher order thinking as a discrete curriculum focus have been part of this movement, particularly since the notion of thinking skills came to be perceived as central to an advanced school education since at least the 1970s. As a result, while a number of thinking skills programs have been developed in educational systems within economically advanced countries, Future Problem Solving (FPS) Program International remains one of the few that has adopted a deliberate line of internationalism, moving into regions beyond its initial base of the USA, Australia and New Zealand, such as Singapore, Malaysia and South Africa, with varying degrees of success. However, as with similar learning programs, the Future Problem Solving Program has been introduced into new territories on the premise that the notion of thinking does not vary across cultures, and that, regardless of the socio-economic and cultural background of the new FPS region, this form of educational transference is both possible and inevitably successful. This research project investigated the validity of transplanting thinking skills programs from one system to another on an international scale by focusing on a trinity of concepts that delineates the centre of this conundrum: culture, thinking and international education. The Future Problem Solving Program, along with the specific thinking skills on which it is instituted, provided the context of the investigation, which employed a comparative analysis of educators in the multicultural societies of Malaysia and South Africa, with a view to establishing the degree to which cultural background determined how thinking skills are conceived and enacted by educators. Using a grounded theory perspective, the findings of the project were threefold: first, that, different cultures do tend to conceptualise elements of thinking in different ways; that a converging spectrum of cultural dispositions towards thinking can be identified; and that those whose cultural dispositions of thinking are more towards the middle of the convergence, where a balance across cultural dispositions is more in evidence, tend to be those who are either more exposed to cultures outside their country of origin, or who are more inclined to support the cultural transformation of a society in the name of social, or national, stability. The implications of these findings for globalisation of thinking skills initiatives such as the Future Problem Solving Program are significant, for they suggest that such thinking skills programs need to be reworked to meet the pattern of cultural dispositions of thinking that exist within a particular region if they are to be successfully instituted in different places as part of a conscious program of international growth.