Technology education in Saudi Arabia in comparison with New Zealand: a study of policy, curriculum and practice in primary education

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, Technology Education has been present in global curricula. It aims to prepare students to cope with the 21st Century where industrial and technological products dominate international economies. Technology Education has been taught either as a separate subject or integrated with other subjects, particularly with Science, and has been perceived as an area of learning combining knowledge and innovation. This research sought to obtain deeper insight into technology education implementation in New Zealand and Saudi Arabia in order to explore how this subject is implemented in both contexts that leads to identification of the similarities and the differences between them. The findings of this research could help to promote and enhance teaching science and technology in the Saudi primary education. A qualitative approach was used as a main approach supported by a qualitative approach in the Saudi context to obtain rich data on the status quo of technology education in the two countries. Data were obtained from documents analysis, interviews with technology teachers and technology experts, observations of practice, and questionnaires. The findings indicate that technology education has become one of the key subjects in developed countries. This has pushed New Zealand to make a good progress in implementing technology education in its curriculum by establishing a suitable strategy to include this subject in the curriculum. In Saudi Arabia, technology education has not been clearly defined and it has been implicitly integrated with science subjects. Therefore, there were significant differences in implementing the two subjects in both contexts particularly in terms of practice. Limited similarities between them were also found in this research.