Knowledge, Content, Curriculum and Didaktik

Beyond Social Realism

Zongyi Deng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351118927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Programmes d'enseignement

Bringing to bear a wealth of literature from curriculum theory, Didaktik, philosophy of education and teacher education, this book broadens and enriches the conversation initiated by Michael Young and his colleagues on 'bringing knowledge back in' (Young, 2007). Knowledge, Content, Curriculum and Didaktik is distinctive in providing a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of the role of knowledge, and in particular curriculum content, in relation to curriculum policy, curriculum planning and classroom teaching. It makes a case for linking knowledge and content to the development of human powers or capabilities needed for the 21st century and unpacks the challenges for curriculum policy, curriculum planning and classroom teaching. The book discusses, among other issues:

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• Educational aims and theories of knowledge

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• School subjects and academic disciplines: differences and relationships

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• School subjects and theories of content

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• Understanding the content for teaching

The book will be relevant for scholars, researchers, policy makers and curriculum developers who seek a more sophisticated, more balanced and philosophically better grounded understanding of the role of knowledge and content in education and curriculum.

1 Introduction

In curriculum no questions are more fundamental than ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’, ‘How is knowledge selected and organised into the curriculum for educational purposes?’ and ‘How is curriculum content taught in classroom?’ Such knowledge questions are at the heart of teaching and learning – the curriculum. However, knowledge questions have all but disappeared in current global trends in curriculum policy and practice. Over the last two decades there has been a shift in curriculum policy from a concern with what is taught in school to a preoccupation with competences and academic outcomes (Yates & Collins, 2010; Young, 2009a). Accompanying this shift is a move to bypass knowledge-based curriculum planning – centring on knowledge selection and organisation for teaching and learning in school – in favour of developing academic standards and competency frameworks (Hopmann, 2008; Karseth & Sivesind, 2010). Behind these developments is the pervasive rhetoric of the knowledge society, which, ironically, eschews knowledge in favour of generic competences – such as problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation and creativity – deemed necessary for the twenty-first century. The neglect of knowledge questions, too, has to do with the ‘learnification’ of educational discourse (Biesta, 2010) – in which teaching is construed as the facilitation of learning rather than the imparting of knowledge, with little or no regard for the ‘why’ (purpose) and ‘what’ (content) of education (Biesta, 2005).

Knowledge questions, too, have vanished from the horizon of much contemporary curriculum theory and theorising that has been fundamentally shaped by neo-Marxism, postmodernism and related discourses such as poststructuralism, deconstruction and feminism (see Deng, 2018). In neo-Marxist curriculum theorising schooling is seen as a mechanism for reproducing social and economic inequality in which the curriculum, a selection of knowledge, is a political construction reflecting the interest and ideology of those who hold power (e.g., Apple, 2004; McLaren, 2015). From this perspective, ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ is no longer an important curriculum question but ‘Whose knowledge is of most worth?’ – in terms of class, race, gender and power relation (Apple, 2004). ‘How is knowledge selected and organised into the curriculum for educational purposes?’ is replaced by the political question of how the selection and organisation of knowledge ‘reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control’ (Bernstein, 1971, p. 47; also see Apple, 1990, 2004). In postmodern, poststructural and feminist curriculum theorising knowledge questions as such have no place at all because knowledge is merely the perspective/standpoint of its producers and because there is no better or worse knowledge (Moore, 2009).

‘Bringing knowledge back in’ and social realism

Over the last ten years, UK-based sociologist of curriculum Michael F. D. Young, and his colleagues have embarked on a project of ‘bringing knowledge back in’ to the recent global discourse on curriculum policy and practice (e.g., Young, 2008a; Young, Lambert, Roberts, & Roberts, 2014; Young & Muller, 2015).Their project has given rise to the emergence of a distinctive social realist school – under the banner of social realism – a coalition of scholars in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and some Latin American and European countries, with seminal writers such as Michael Young, Johan Muller and the late Rob Moore. They have formed a distinctive research tradition, social realism, particularly concerned with the role of knowledge in education and curriculum.

Originating as a critique of social constructivism which has plagued the field of the sociology of education in the United Kingdom,¹ social realism provides a powerful defence of knowledge based on critical realism and the works of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Basil Bernstein (1924–2000). From the perspective of critical realism, knowledge, albeit socially constructed under given historical conditions, has an ‘objective’ character because it is produced by specialised communities that are ‘relatively independent from any particular social [experiential] base’ (Moore, 2013, p. 346). The objectivity is achieved through the employment of various methodologies for generating and validating knowledge claims. Furthermore, there are ‘criteria for differentiating between bodies of knowledge and for deciding that some are better than others’ (p. 339) – which are to constitute the basis for curriculum development.

For Michael Young and Johan Muller, such criteria can be found in the works of Durkheim and Bernstein. Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred and the profane provides the basis for differentiating academic, disciplinary knowledge from everyday knowledge:

the conceptual and social differentiation of the everyday world of survival (the profane) from the totemic systems which allowed people in primitive societies to speculate about the afterlife (the sacred) became the social basis of science and other forms of knowledge that could be developed free from the exigencies of everyday contexts and problems.

(Young & Muller, 2013, p. 234)

On this account, disciplinary knowledge is characterised by vertical discourse which is ‘systematically principled’, ‘specialised’ and ‘context-independent’ whereas everyday knowledge is by horizontal discourse which is ‘local, context-dependent’, ‘non-specialised’ and ‘common-sense’ (Young & Muller, 2013; also see Young, 2008b).

Drawing on Bernsteinian distinction between vertical (or hierarchical) and horizontal knowledge structures, Young and Muller further differentiate between two broad types of specialised disciplinary knowledge: natural sciences on the one hand and social sciences and humanities on the other.

The first is that they build cumulatively and progressively, with earlier formulations being subsumed by later formulations. Bernstein called this form a hierarchical knowledge structure, in terms of which different knowledge structures and their bodies of theory differ in terms of their degrees of verticality (Muller, 2007). This clearly describes the family of the natural science. … The second typical form is that the internal relations – theories and relations between sets of concepts – accrue not by one subsuming the other, but by the addition of parallel theories (languages, or sets of concepts), or in Bernstein’s terms, horizontally. These parallel languages (bearing in mind that variants like historical narrative also belong here) co-exist uncomfortably but necessarily, because the unavoidable context-boundedness of their concepts limits inter-translatability and hence their epistemic guarantees. This clearly describes many of the social sciences and, somewhat more ambiguously and in some cases in different ways, the humanities.

(Young & Muller, 2013, p. 239)

The vertical or hierarchical type of disciplinary knowledge is more exemplified by STEM subjects and less by social sciences, arts and humanities, which tend to exhibit the horizontal type.

By way of these distinctions, Young and Muller develop a theory of powerful knowledge that posits the characteristics and powers of specialised disciplinary knowledge. As a product of human achievement, disciplinary knowledge is powerful because it represents the ‘best’ understanding of the world human beings can develop. Developed by specialised communities of scholars, this knowledge is inexorably associated with specialisation: ‘Like human progress, better ways of knowing are always associated with specialisation, with the intellectual division of labour, and its relationship with the social division of work and occupations’ (p. 231). In specialised communities there exists a set of generally agreed-upon norms, criteria and procedures that can ‘distinguish the best proposition from other likely contenders’ (p. 236). Therefore, while produced under social conditions and contexts, disciplinary knowledge has value or power that ‘is independent of these originary context and agents’ (p. 237).

Disciplinary knowledge is powerful also because of the powers that knowledge gives to those who possess it. This knowledge provides students with ‘more reliable explanations and new ways of thinking about the world’ and ‘a language for engaging in political, moral, and other kinds of debates’ (Young, 2008b, p. 14). Acquisition of this knowledge allows students to move beyond their particular experience and to ‘envisage alternative and new possibilities’ (Young & Muller, 2013, p. 245; Young, 2013). Furthermore, the possession of this knowledge gives students control over their own knowledge: this knowledge ‘allows those with access to it to question it and the authority on which it is based and gain the sense of freedom and excitement that it can offer’ (Young, 2014, p. 20).

On the basis of this theory of knowledge, Young theorises about the central aim of schooling, curriculum planning and classroom teaching. The central purpose of the institution of schooling is to help students gain access to disciplinary knowledge which they cannot acquire at home. Access to powerful disciplinary knowledge is an ‘entitlement’ for all students regardless of their socioeconomic status, races and genders. It is therefore a social justice issue (Young, 2013). Curriculum planning involves a process of ‘recontextualising’ an academic discipline into a school subject – selecting, sequencing and pacing academic knowledge in view of the ‘coherence’ of the discipline and constraints created by the developmental stages of students (Young, 2013). Classroom teaching is a process of passing on, or helping students to acquire, a body of disciplinary knowledge that they cannot acquire at home and of taking students beyond their everyday experience.

Furthermore, based on an analysis of trends in educational policy and informed by their theory of powerful knowledge, Young and Muller identify three curriculum scenarios, Future 1, Future 2 and Future 3.

• Future 1 is represented by the traditional academic curriculum directed towards the transmission of academic disciplinary knowledge which stands for ‘the best which has been thought and said’ (Arnold, 1869/1993). Fundamentally uncontested, this knowledge consists of ‘sets of verifiable propositions and the methods for testing them’ (Young & Muller, 2010, p. 14). In the curriculum the boundaries between school subjects are given and fixed and knowledge is treated as given, absolute and unchanging.
• Future 2 is exemplified by a competences- or skills-based curriculum directed towards the development of generic skills or competences, with the adoption of a constructivist pedagogy which puts the learner at the centre and construes the teacher as the facilitator of learning. This curriculum ‘plays down the propositional character of knowledge and reduces questions of epistemology to “who knows?” and to the identification of knowers and their practices’ (p. 14)
• Future 3 is best represented by a ‘knowledge-led’ curriculum directed to promoting epistemic access to powerful knowledge for all students, in which ‘knowledge is seen as bounded [in that it is made within a disciplinary epistemic framework] but also dynamic [changing]’ (Mitchell & Lambert, 2015, p. 375). It is underpinned by a social realist theory of knowledge that ‘sees knowledge as involving a set of systematically related concepts and methods for empirical exploration and the increasingly specialised and historically located “communities of enquirers” ’ (Young & Muller, 2010, p. 14). As a result, knowledge is viewed not as ‘given’ but as ‘fallible and always open to change through the debates and research of the particular specialist community’ (Young et al., 2014, p. 67).

There are signs that the social realist school has been effective in bringing knowledge back into the current global discourse on curriculum policy and practice. There has been a ‘knowledge-turn’ in the recent development of the national curriculum in the United Kingdom and in South Africa (cf. Lambert, 2011; Hoadley, 2015). The turn leads to a revival of the discussio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Knowledge, disciplinarity and postmodern critiques
• 3 Aims of schooling, school subjects and knowledge questions
• 4 Liberal education, Bildung and theory of knowledge
• 5 Liberal education, Bildung and theory of content
• 6 Rethinking teaching and teachers: bringing content back into conversation
• 7 Pedagogical content knowledge reconceived: bringing curriculum thinking into conversation on teachers’ understanding of content
• 8 Conclusion: beyond social realism
• Index