Rethinking Schooling for the 21st Century

2. OVERALL DESIGN OF THE REVIEW
AND MEASURES TO ADDRESS THE
METHODOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS
The project consisted of five major phases: (1) project initiation; (2) primary data
collection; (3) coding; (4) national-level report writing; and (4) synthesis-report
writing. Overall, since its inception, the project has taken 2 years, from 2015 to
2017.
The process has involved:
(1) Project Initiation
Once the countries to be covered were identified, primary researchers were
selected with the help of UNESCO Field Offices, National Commissions, and
academic institutions, based particularly on language ability. Policy and
curriculum documents were not always available in UN languages, especially
in the Asia-Pacific region. Therefore, national researchers were chosen based
on both their understanding of ESD/GCED in their nation-state but also on
their fluency in both the national language and English. This was to ensure the
possibility of the coding of all relevant national documents, as the majority
were not in English. For many countries – Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India,
Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines,
and South Korea – a research team was established to work on the review.
The common coding scheme was developed based on the GEMR (UNESCO, 2016a)
and IBE-APCEIU (IBE-UNESCO and APCEIU, 2016) studies’ coding schemes, as well
as the preliminary coding scheme that MGIEP had piloted using the data sources
from India and Hong Kong. Feedback from representatives from UNESCO Field
Offices and national consultants, provided during the capacity-building workshop
(see below), was also taken into consideration. In particular, concerns were raised
regarding the possibility of subjective and context-based interpretations of the
concepts. As we were looking for meaning rather than specific key terms 3 , it was
imperative to ensure that a certain degree of objectivity was maintained in the
coding process through a shared understanding of the concepts amongst coders.
Thus, the coding guide – which also outlined the coding scheme and the overall
process of coding – included definitions of all categories and sub-categories.
Therefore, even though most documents analysed were not in English, a common
understanding left less room for subjective interpretation. The coding scheme
was not translated into local languages, with the exception of Uzbekistan where
the research team was not comfortable in coding in English.
3 Rather than an exact word match (i.e. looking for ‘human rights’ within a text), if a certain
example was referring to the concept of human rights it would be coded. See Figure A.2 for
examples.
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Appendices