International symposium exploring how educational innovation emerges in unregulated curricular spaces across four national contexts, in Asia and Europe.
This study day investigates how “soft skills” (with a focus on critical thinking and digital literacy) travel through global policy references and are reworked into curriculum realities in four contrasted systems: China, France, England, and Finland. The central hypothesis is that these competencies do not simply “add” transversal goals to existing subjects; they can reshape what counts as valid knowledge, legitimate reasoning, and teachable citizenship—often in under-regulated curricular “grey zones” where experimentation and negotiation occur.
The comparative design uses China and Europe as a structured contrast: France and England provide two distinct European governance traditions of curriculum and evaluation, while Finland functions as a Nordic “laboratory” often associated with high trust and strong professional mediation. Across the four cases, the day will track translation chains from policy texts to curricular formulations and professional expectations: how the same labels (critical thinking, digital literacy) are reframed, prioritized, or neutralized when they become learning outcomes, assessment objects, and teacher-education reference points.
Three cross-cutting questions organize the program:
(1) What meanings of “critical thinking” and “digital literacy” are foregrounded in each system (epistemic, civic, instrumental), and what gets backgrounded?
(2) Which actors and instruments perform the translation (departments of education, administrators, expert committees, teacher educators, school leaders), and where do negotiations concentrate (subjects, assessment, digital platforms)?
(3) What are the observable “curricular bifurcations” produced by soft skills—i.e., moments where disciplines, evaluation, and classroom authority are reconfigured rather than cosmetically updated?
Expected outputs are deliberately concrete: a sino-european comparative matrix (China/France/England/Finland) mapping translation patterns (adoption, hybridation, re-framing, resistance), and a short analytic grid to identify soft-skill “grey zones” in curriculum documents and reform narratives, designed for both research use and international dialogue within the Sino-European hub for Global Education Transitions.
