Part I: Introduction -- Chapter 1: Euro-Asia Encounters on 21st-Century Competency-Based Curriculum Reforms: A Historical and Cultural (Re)Turn -- Part II: The European Picture: Christian Protestant Ideals and Curriculum Reforms -- Chapter 2: The Transformation of Christian Missions to Educational Colonization, or Motives of Speaking and Listening in the One-sided Euro-American-Asian Dialogue -- Chapter 3: From Knowledge and Bildung toward Competences and Skills in Finnish Curriculum Policy? Some Theoretical, Historical, and Current Observations Related to Finland -- Chapter 4: Historical Trajectories of the Contract-School Model in Norway -- Chapter 5: Globalization and Localization in the Shaping of the Danish Public Education System: Recontextualization Processes in Four Historical Educational Reforms -- Chapter 6: Fixing the Future: Public Discourse on the Implementation of Education Standards in Austria -- Chapter 7: A Critical Review of the Competency-Based Curriculum in Spain -- Chapter 8: Competence-Based Curriculum Reforms in the Context of University Engineering Education in the Post-Soviet Lithuania - Hope or Disappointment? -- Part III: The East Asian Picture: Confucian Educational Cultures and Curriculum Reforms -- Chapter 9: Nationalism and Globalism as Epistemic Entanglements: China’s Suyang Curriculum Reform as a Case Study -- Chapter 10: Unpacking the Global-Local Entanglements in Hong Kong’s Curriculum Reform -- Chapter 11: Competency-Based Curriculum Reform and its Making of Korean Global Citizen -- Chapter 12: A Holistic Model of Competence: Curriculum Reforms for Preschool Education in Singapore -- Chapter 13: The Global Inside the National and the National Inside the Global: ‘Zest for Living,’ the Chi, Toku and Tai Triad, and the ‘Model’ of Japanese Education.

This book offers a geographically unique cultural comparative lens to examine the issue of transnational curriculum knowledge (re)production. Prompted by the ongoing competency-based curriculum reforms on a global scale, this book examines where global frameworks like the OECD’s core competency definitions are rooted and how they are borrowed, resisted, and/or re-contextualized in various European states with a Christian, foremost Protestant educational–cultural heritage and Asian countries with a Confucian educational–cultural heritage. It highlights the roles that various factors, such as history, culture, religious attitudes, ideology, and state governance play in nation-states’ re-contextualization of global curriculum policies and practices beyond a simplistic and dualistic globalism/power and nationalism/resistance dynamic. In doing so, it provides a global context to better understand individual nation-state’s continuing curriculum reforms and school practices. At the same time, it situates individual nation-state’s latest curriculum reforms and practices within an international community for healthy dialogues and mutual sharing. By selecting two educational–cultural systems and wisdom—Christian-Protestant and Confucian—it also offers a springboard for international curriculum studies beyond the usual confinement of geopolitical nation-state constructs. It not only sheds new light on each nation-state’s curriculum policies and practices, but also creates new collaboration spaces within similar and across disparate cultural–educational regions. With its wide geopolitical and educational–cultural scope, this book appeals to a global market and can be used in a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative education, history of education, curriculum theory, school and society, and curriculum history.