The moral education curriculum in the United Arab Emirates: providing a framework for social cohesion

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Investigating ideologies shaping citizenship education in formal curricula and non-formal educational spaces

Proposal

Introduction
In an effort to promote social cohesion within their diverse society, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) began implementing a moral education curriculum in all K-12 schools. The UAE describes their curriculum as “an innovative, engaging curriculum designed to develop young people of all nationalities and ages in the UAE with universal principles and values, that reflect the shared experiences of humanity” (About Moral Education, n.d.). To show how the UAE aims to meet their goal of increasing social cohesion, this paper analyzes: (1) the paragraph at the beginning of each textbook explaining the overarching goals of this curriculum, (2) the discourse within the textbooks used in grades 1, 6, and 9, and (3) the multicultural aspects of this curriculum. Going further, this paper will also discuss how a similar form of education is becoming rationalized and legitimized by the United Nations (UN) in their Global Citizenship Education, as well as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in their Global Competence portion of their PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exam.

Problem/Issue
Braslavsky et al. (2007) point out that “never before [the last century] has humanity been able to kill so many of its members. In fact, during the twentieth century, more than 180 million people were killed by the deliberate actions of other human beings. Two world wars and hundreds of civil and interethnic wars took place, initiated and conducted in a great majority of cases by highly educated leaders (Braslavsky 2003a).” This quote emphasizes the scope of disunity present throughout the last century. Disunity continues into this century, as evidenced by the Syrian Civil War, in which the government is allegedly using chemical weapons against their own people (United Nations, 2017). It is further evidenced in the pushback to the reallocation of refugees into foreign countries (Poushter, 2016), and again in the rise of polarization in America politics (Pew Research Center, 2014) and in Western democracies in general (El-Erian, 2015).

Significance
Although some research provides evidence that society has become more peaceful throughout the centuries (Pinker, 2012) and killings are occurring with less frequency, the belief underlying this paper is that society should not rest on that laurel; rather, people should continue to strive for a more socially cohesive society. Although people may be killing each other less frequently, the aforementioned quote by Braslavsky et al. points out that the numbers of people being killed are still the highest they have ever been in history. Given this evidence, combined with the evidence of disunity within this century, it is clear that more can be done to increase social cohesion in the world. Amongst today’s highly interconnected, rapidly changing world, the UAE’s Moral Education curriculum seeks to create such cohesion in their country.

Theoretical Framework
The writings of the education and curriculum philosophers John Dewey, Franklin Bobbitt, James Popham, Elliot Eisner, Philip Jackson, and Maxine Greene will be used to provide the theoretical framework surrounding this curriculum. Drawing lessons from these educational philosophers can help to understand the theoretical milieu in which this curriculum may have come about. In particular, this paper relies on the educational theories of John Dewey, who believed that students should learn about issues that are relevant to their lives that will help to prepare them to fulfill their roles in a democratic society. Congruent with this theory, the UAE’s moral education curriculum seeks to teach students about issues that are relevant to their lives as students, as well as issues that will help to prepare them for life as an adult.

Research Methods
This paper will perform a discourse analysis of the UAE’s moral education curriculum in order to describe the aims of this curriculum. Several activities from the curriculum will be used as examples to provide a clearer representation of the evolution of the curriculum throughout the grades, its multinational nature, and how it uses the interdisciplinary and student-centered approaches. In addition, a quantitative analysis was conducted by performing a “Command + F” search of the moral education’s pilot-edition textbooks used in the pilot-testing phase in grades 1, 6, and 9. These grades were selected in order to provide a view of the curriculum throughout the years it is taught.

Results
From this analysis, it can be observed that the UAE’s curriculum for moral education seeks to foster engaged global citizens steeped in a variety of “universal values.” The curriculum is giving students a framework for understanding how the world they are growing up in operates, how it is changing, and how to overcome the challenges they will face. In doing so, this curriculum helps to fulfill Dewey’s stated purpose of education: “to give the young the things they need in order to develop in an orderly, sequential way into members of society” (Dewey, 1934).

Author

• Gregory V Massara, Lehigh University