The Diversity Conflation and Action Ruse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the OECD’s Framework for Global Competence

Abstract

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 includes a measure of global competence. In PISA, global competence is a cross-curricular domain that aims to measure a set of skills and attitudes that support respectful relationships with people from different cultural backgrounds and engage for peaceful and sustainable societies. This paper builds theoretically and empirically from previous research that investigates the framing and messaging of global education policy as well as the tendency to conflate local and global approaches to diversity and difference in research and practice. We critically explore the OECD’s framework of global competence in PISA 2018 by reporting on two key findings from a critical discourse analysis. We examine language use and discursive practices to consider how global competence in the OECD 2018 framework document is structured, messaged, and mediated at an international level, and to what extent it reflects critiques around individualization and conflation of multiculturalism and global citizenship. We organized findings on two major themes, namely encountering the “other” and taking action.