Creating Curricula: Aims, Knowledge and Control

Dominic Wyse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315529998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Knowledge has been a defining focus for the curriculum studies field. In the early part of the 21st century convincing arguments were mounted that knowledge needed to be 'brought back in', both to the curriculum of schools and to the attention of curriculum researchers. This book is a result of these arguments, and what some regarded as a 'crisis' in curriculum study related to the growing emphasis on international comparisons between education systems.

The book's most important contribution is to build on seminal work in the sociology and philosophy of education in order to develop new foundations for curriculum study, using the importance of 'transactions' as the context for understanding knowledge in the curriculum. The contributors build on this importance to suggest a rapprochement in the field around the idea of curriculum knowledge as both constructed and real. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Curriculum Journal.

What is a curriculum and what can it do?

Michael Young

Institute of Education, University of London

Despite the widespread use of the term ‘curriculum’ in educational research and policy, the questions in my title are not easy to answer. Furthermore, as is indicated by the papers in this Special Issue, there is little consensus among specialists in the field. An attempt to answer them, however, is worthwhile because much writing and research about the curriculum is devoted to saying what it ought to do, and what its aims are, with less regard for what exactly a curriculum is that might fulfil those aims.

My starting point is that curricula are ‘social facts’ in the sense used by the French sociologist and Professor of Pedagogy, Emile Durkheim (Durkheim, 1938). What this means is that a curriculum as a ‘social fact’ is never reducible to the acts, beliefs or motivation of individuals; it is a structure that constrains not only the activities of those involved – primarily teachers and students, but also those who design curricula or attempt to achieve certain goals with them. However, curricula are not only constraints on our actions. They make some things possible to learn that most of us would find impossible to learn without them; at the same time they set limits on what is possible to learn in schools or other educational institutions. In this way curricula are like other ‘specialised’ institutions – families and businesses, for example – they have particular purposes. It follows, as Reiss and White note in their paper, that contemporary curricula, and their constituent elements such as subjects, inevitably rely on earlier curricula, either because they are taken for granted as ‘the only way to organise the transmission of knowledge or because they have demonstrated their capacity to be effective instruments for learning. In a sense this merely recognises the central role of curricula in the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. A curriculum does not imply a particular model of pedagogy; however, they vary in the extent to which they pre-suppose assumptions about whether learners vary in their capabilities. Whether the focus is on the curriculum of an individual school or on the National Curriculum of a country, both are structures designed for particular purposes. The debates, which many of the papers in this Special Issue refer to and take sides on, are about these purposes. There is one question which runs through all the papers, albeit in very different ways. It is the extent to which assumptions about knowledge define the curriculum as a structure, and, as none of the papers deny the importance of knowledge, what exactly these assumptions are. In prefacing my brief comments on the individual papers, I want to suggest that seeing the curriculum as a ‘structure’ offering constraints and possibilities may be a useful way of considering the aims/knowledge debate introduced by Reiss and White and the more overtly political questions about how and by whom curricular decisions are made.

From their earliest days, and increasingly in modern societies, schools have been established as specialised institutions, which can realise some aims and not others. For example, it is possible for a curriculum to be oriented to students acquiring knowledge of mathematics or history or a particular set of religious beliefs; however, it makes no sense to conceive of a curriculum enabling young people to get jobs when the primary influence on whether a young person gets a job is the quantity and quality of jobs available. The logic of recognising the specialist role of schools and the curriculum can be illustrated in another way. No one could disagree with Reiss and White that schools should promote well-being and human flourishing in what they do; however, that is what we expect of institutions that do not have curricula such as families, towns and businesses. What distinguishes schools is that their primary concern, as embodied in the specialist professional staff they recruit, and in their curriculum, is (or should be) to provide all their students with access to knowledge. As Ruth Cigman has pointed out human flourishing pre-supposes access to knowledge (Cigman, 2012). It is a school’s curriculum that addresses the question ‘what knowledge?’; an issue explored in considerable depth in the first paper in this issue by David Scott.

The curriculum as a social fact, I suggest, acts as a constraint on what students can learn, not the least both through its boundaries or lack of them between subjects and between the curriculum and the experience of students out of school. However these boundaries are not just constraints, they are also a set of possibilities not only about what students can learn but about how they can progress in their learning. The extent to which these possibilities are achievable by a school and by what proportion of pupils will depend on a range of factors. Some will be internal to the school, such as the approach to curriculum leadership of the headteacher and her/his team of senior teachers and the range of expertise of the whole staff; and some will be external such as the wider distribution of opportunities in the society as a whole and in the local catchment area of the school. What uniquely schools can do for all pupils, and that is why the curriculum is the pre-eminent issue for all of us in education, is to offer opportunities for pupils at all ages to move beyond the experience they bring to school and to acquire knowledge that is not tied to that experience. It is this (relatively) context-free knowledge, which some of us have described as ‘powerful knowledge’ (Beck, 2013; Young, 2013; Young & Muller, 2013), and which, in Basil Bernstein’s words enables students to ‘think the un-thinkable and the not yet thought’ (Wheelahan, 2012). This is the promise that schooling and its main instrument, the curriculum offers. How this promise works out and for whom, and why it is un-realised for so many students is what the papers in this Special Issue are concerned with; I turn, therefore, to consider the papers, briefly, in turn.

The first paper by David Scott presents a systematic review of the different ways curriculum theorists have conceptualised knowledge. From the perspective developed here, his most important conclusion derives from his premise that all human learning is an ‘epistemic’ or ‘knowledge building’ activity. It follows that the curriculum can be understood as a structure or instrument for extending that epistemic activity beyond the ‘knowledge building’ that pupils are involved in their everyday lives. Any other rationale for the curriculum would be a denial, at least for some, of the entitlement of all pupils to extend their unique human capacity for ‘epistemic activity’ and ‘knowledge building’. This entitlement is limited, in principle, by two features of all curricula, the nature of knowledge itself and what we know about how it is acquired.

The second paper by Gert Biesta tackles the issue of ‘knowledge building’ from a quite different perspective. He makes the case for Dewey’s ‘transactional realism’ as a way of tackling the relation between knowledge and experience which he rightly sees as the key issue for curriculum and pedagogic theory and practice. Early in his paper Biesta states that he wants to avoid the recent tendency for educational theory to ‘lose’ knowledge and slip into what he has elsewhere described as ‘learnification’ (Biesta 2010a). To do this he introduces Dewey’s concepts of ‘coordination’ and ‘transaction’ as a way of bridging the separation of knowledge and experience that all pupils face on entering school and engaging with the curriculum. However, while the concept of ‘transaction’ identifies a process, it is not clear how it allows for a discussion of what is being transacted; this means that we are in danger of being left with a theory of pedagogy, or teaching and learning but with no curriculum. Second, Biesta reminds us that Dewey was concerned with how an ‘absolutist’ scientific world view (today, we might call it ‘positivist’) was colonising other alternatives in education; something one can recognise in much current educational research. However, as Biesta explains, Dewey was far from being anti-science and he tried to construct what he saw as a more adequate, ‘non-absolutist’ conception of science. The problem for curriculum theorists is that Dewey (and Biesta seems not to disagree) does not distinguish between his concept of science and ‘intelligent common sense’. For Dewey, we are or should be all, in this sense, ‘scientists’. This collapse of the differences between scientific thinking and common sense leaves one with wondering where this takes us in thinking about the curriculum. Whatever else it is, the curriculum is surely more than an extension of common sense.

In his concluding discussion Biesta suggests that the social realist approach to knowledge and the curriculum that I and others have developed from Durkheim can be located in what he describes as the ‘domain of certainty’ rather than the ‘domain of possibility’ and that it thus it leads to an inescapable determinism. However, as Moore (2011) expresses more clearly than most, a realist sociology of knowledge is committed to the ‘fallibility’ of knowledge not its ‘certainty’. In other words, even truth in the mathematical sciences is no more than ‘the best knowledge we have so far’. All knowledge, however reliable, is always challengeable because it is no more than our best attempt to make sense of that which is external to us – the real world. Hence it is in the ‘domain of possibility’ not the ‘domain of certainty’.

In the third paper, Priestley and Sinnema begin by questioning some of the assumptions underpinning the case for a knowledge-led curriculum. The strength of their paper is that they go beyond the theoretical debates and test some of these assumptions by analysing documents from two recently reformed National Curricula in Scotland and New Zealand. In asking the question ‘do these new curricula downgrade knowledge?’ they demonstrate that although the word ‘knowledge’ is frequently mentioned in the documents, it tends to be under-specified and the acquisition of knowledge is invariably associated with a variety of other educational purposes. In other words, the evidence from the two curricula studied gives some support to the ‘downgrading’ argument. This is an important beginning. However, to take the questions they raise further will undoubtedly require greater precision in defining the term knowledge than can be achieved by counting the number of times the word is used. This takes us back to the issues about what the word knowledge implies that David Scott’s paper raised.

Priestley and Sinnema’s paper raises a number of other questions about the idea of a knowledge-led curriculum which warrants further exploration. Both the New Zealand and Scottish curricula appear to put more emphasis how children should be rather than on what they are expected to know. This is consistent with the view that schools should not only provide opportunities for students to acquire knowledge but that they should develop ‘their attributes and dispositions… and teach everyday knowledge that has practical utility for everyday life’. However everyday knowledge is what all pupils bring to school and it is difficult to see why it would need teaching. There is a danger that such a view can slip into treating the role of the curriculum as repairing deficiencies in the pre-school identities of pupils, rather than taking them beyond those identities, as recent research in New Zealand shows (Sitein, 2013).

Priestley and Sinnema suggest that the distinction between everyday and disciplinary knowledge and the related distinction between knowledge and skills are not as clear cut as is suggested by those who argue for a knowledge-led curriculum. This may well be true; however, it does not negate the strengths of the distinctions provided they are treated analytically and not descriptively. They also suggest that it is perfectly possible to conceive of alternative but equally rigorous approaches to introducing disciplinary knowledge that are not framed as traditional subjects. However, even if we accept this possibility, the pedagogic problems posed by any form of rigorous knowledge, which cannot avoid being at odds with the experience that pupils bring to school, remain.

Reiss and White restate White’s now familiar case (Reiss & White, 2013) for an aims-based curriculum and apply it to the specific case of science teaching. The ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ of an aims-based approach to the curriculum have been extensively debated and are beyond the scope if this short paper. However, there are two crucial questions facing science educators that their proposal for an aims-based approach to the curriculum does not seem to address. The first issue is whether a science curriculum for all should be based on an introduction to the concepts and methods of physics, chemistry and biology. The counter view is that such a ‘foundational’ approach is only appropriate for those planning in the future to specialise in one or more of the sciences. The related question is, if such a ‘foundation’ is not appropriate for the majority of pupils who are unlikely to be future specialists, does this not imply that the science curriculum must be differentiated at some relatively early stage of secondary schooling? A differentiated curriculum raises the question as to the basis on which pupils are selected (or allowed to choose) their curriculum and the principles on which the curriculum is differentiated? The fate of the Schools Council’s Project Science for the Young School Leaver in the 1960s and 1970s is not a happy precedent for a differentiated secondary science curriculum.

Lingard and McGregor locate the ‘knowledge/curriculum’ debate in the broad context of the social changes associated with globalisation and the new demands that these changes are thought to place on the curriculum for the future cohorts of those leaving school. They compare two very different approaches to the curriculum developed in Australia; Queensland’s ‘new basics’ and the proposals by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) for a Federal Curriculum for all states. Broadly summarised, ‘new basics’ was a radical approach to a skills-led curriculum which gave considerable autonomy to individual schools and encouraged them to become more closely involved in their communities – a proposal not unlike the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA’s) less systematically developed Opening Minds curriculum in England. However, as Lingard and McGregor point out, the ‘new basics’ curriculum was only developed as a pilot for only 36 schools and with the massive swing to the Right in Queensland in the recent state elections, it is highly unlikely to be extended to the state as a whole. The ACARA curriculum signifies a ‘return to subjects’ but this is combined with basic skills testing in the early years of secondary schooling. The paper does not go into detail about the ‘new basics curriculum or the idea of ‘productive learning’ associated with it; its strengths are that it brings out clearly the complex interweaving of political and curricular ideologies as well as their links to broader political and economic changes.

Cain and Chapman’s paper addresses a familiar educational issue, the seductive popularity of such dichotomies as content/skills and formal/informal, and explores it in relation to two subjects, history and music as contrasting case studies. I do not have the expertise to comment on the paper’s accounts of the two subjects, so I will restrict my comments to their broader issue of the role of dichotomies in educational research. They begin with Robin Alexander’s argument that dichotomies ‘reduce complex educational debates to bipolar slogans cast in a state of permanent and irreconcilable opposition’ and go on to question his solution – replacing bipolar distinctions by a sixfold typology. In this they are surely right – such a sixfold typology can only complicate existing complexity. Their preferred alternative is a ‘middle-ground’ approach that frames dichotomous concepts as a tension between different, but not necessarily competing ideas. This is a important step; however, it might be taken further in clarifying the difference between their approach and the way dichotomous concepts tend to be used in educational research, by drawing the German sociologist, Max Weber’s concept of an ‘ideal type’ (Weber, 1949).

Weber recognised that dichotomies in the social sciences and in (by implication) educational research are in many cases all we have. We do not have concepts that are conceptually related in precise ways and have clear empirical referents – like mass and weight or temperature and heat in physics. Weber suggested that descriptive dichotomies could be reformulated in the social sciences as ideal types indicating tendencies. For example, let us take the curriculum/pedagogy dichotomy that a number of papers in this Special Issue refer to. Teachers draw on the school curriculum and their knowledge of pedagogy in their teaching; for them the two are not distinct. However, in designing curricula, training teachers or undertaking curriculum research, an analytical distinction between the two concepts (as ideal types) may be useful. As an ideal type, the concept ‘curriculum’ refers to the knowledge that it is hoped pupils will acquire by the end of a course. In contrast, pedagogy refers to the activities that teachers devise for their pupils to enable them to acquire the knowledge specified by the curriculum. This does not make the two concepts separate in the practice of teachers. What such analytical distinctions can do is to identify tendencies and question the way concepts are used as descriptions or even dogmas – an example is that between knowledge-centred and learner-centred curricula. No curricula can disregard the knowledge it is hoped that students will acquire. Acquiring knowledge always involves concepts (in other words, knowing something), but it also involves practical activities – using concepts to explain something or solve a problem (in other words, skills or doing something). The distinction between knowledge and skills is useful analytically, as a pair of ideal types, but not as a description or as a slogan to identify whether something i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Creating curricula: aims, knowledge and control
• 1. What is a curriculum and what can it do?
• 2. Knowledge and the curriculum
• 3. Pragmatising the curriculum: bringing knowledge back into the curriculum conversation, but via pragmatism
• 4. Downgraded curriculum? An analysis of knowledge in new curricula in Scotland and New Zealand
• 5. An aims-based curriculum illustrated by the teaching of science in schools
• 6. Two contrasting Australian Curriculum responses to globalisation: what students should learn or become
• 7. Dysfunctional dichotomies? Deflating bipolar constructions of curriculum and pedagogy through case studies from music and history
• 8. Curriculum and assessment reform gone wrong: the perfect storm of GCSE English
• Index