Subject Knowledge

Readings For The Study Of School Subjects

Christopher J. Anstead, Ivor F Goodson, J. Marshall Mangan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135712051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

School knowledge has been a subject for historians, notably in the field of history of education. concentrating on the educational aspects of particular historical periods, however, links with contemporary education have often remained undeveloped.; This text attempts to account for the growth of increased interest by sociologists and others in school subjects since the 1960s. Goodson's analysis of his own work in the UK and North America examines the range of insights afforded of the nature of schooling and teaching through the study of school subjects.

1 Introduction: Studying Subject Knowledge

My interest in studying subject knowledge first surfaced in the early 1970s. In Britain at this time there was a wave of change in secondary schooling from a previously selective ‘tripartite’ system towards a fully comprehensive system where all types and abilities of children were grouped under the roof of one school. This transformation in the organization of secondary schooling led to an interesting series of curriculum debates both within schools and outside schools about the form that the comprehensive school curriculum should take. In addition to comprehensive reorganization, the regime of school examinations was fairly liberal at the time and a good deal of work was done to define ‘mode 3’ examinations. These examinations were set up and partially conducted by the teachers themselves in association with examination boards (the Associated Examining Board was a pioneer in developing this mode).

My own teaching began in a comprehensive school in 1970. Significantly, I had trained under Basil Bernstein, Michael Young and Brian Davis at the Institute of Education in 1969/70 and hence had already begun to think around issues of knowledge and control. When the opportunity to develop new school curriculum courses, which aimed at the comprehensive clientele, arose I became involved. A series of new mode 3 examinations were developed in new subject areas such as environmental studies, urban studies and community studies. These new subject areas seemed to offer the chance of better patterns of motivation and involvement for the children of working people than had been on offer from the more ‘traditional subjects’. Certainly the levels of interest and engagement that these syllabuses facilitated seemed to imply that here were new approaches to learning which may well improve on or at the very least complement the traditional subjects of the secondary school curriculum.

In becoming so systematically involved in the production of courses on environmental studies and urban studies, I began to reflect on the genesis and genealogy of school subjects generally. Quite by chance, an advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement alerted me to the possibility of studying the question ‘whatever happened to environmental studies?’ There was a research project funded by the Leverhulme Foundation which had begun at the University of Sussex in 1974 and I was offered the chance to work as a research fellow on the project for two years beginning in 1975. Alongside the project work, I began a PhD which looked at the battle over environmental studies and ruminated about ‘subject traditions implanted in school budgets and resources, nurtured by advisors over several decades, located in special school buildings and rooms, living in its teachers. This subject tradition would seem to act as a kind of curriculum investment: an investment offering the chances of continuity, evolution and of holding a gap in which innovations might be conceived, defined and grow.’ At the time, I produced a position paper which stands as a reasonable statement of the research project I was tentatively trying to define at the time, so it is carried here in its original form. The paper was written in 1976 at the beginning of my doctoral studies.

Relevant Traditions

School knowledge has long been a subject of study for historians; a significant body of research has been completed, notably by specialist scholars in the field of ‘history of education’. Much of the work concentrates on the educational aspects of particular historical periods, a focus that is probable where the historical tradition pursues understanding of ‘the uniqueness of each individual event’ (Burston, 1996, p. 31). However, this rigid periodization of educational history poses severe problems since links with contemporary education often remain undeveloped, or a kind of continuity thesis is assumed to operate.

Geoffrey Barraclough (1967) has drawn up a similar indictment of modern European history, where

Historians of the recent past have assumed for the most part that, if they explained the factors leading to the disintegration of the old world, they were automatically providing an explanation of how the new world emerged, (p. 9)

Barraclough explains this partly by

the tendency of historical writing today to emphasize the element of continuity in history. For most historians contemporary history does not constitute a separate period with distinctive characteristics of its own; they regard it rather as the most recent phase of a continuous process, (ibid, p. 11)

Whilst historians of education have often failed to link insights into the past with our knowledge of contemporary education, many sociological studies have inverted this problem. Blumer (1969) has drawn attention to the problem when studying large-scale organizations and argues a need ‘to recognize that joint action is temporarily linked to previous joint action’. He warns that ‘one shuts a major door to understanding any form or instance of joint action if one ignores this connection’. This ‘historical linkage’ is important because

The designations and interpretations through which people form and maintain their organised relations are always in degree of carry-over from their past. To ignore this carry-over sets a genuine risk for the scholar, (p. 60)

Paradoxically, since Blumer wrote this in 1969 some developments in sociology have tended to move in the opposite direction, thereby involving the ‘genuine risks’ of which he warns. Interactionist studies have focused on the perspectives and definitions emerging through interaction and have stressed situation rather than background and history. In this work the backcloth to action is often presented as a somewhat monolithic ‘structural’ or ‘cultural’ legacy which constrains, in rather disconnected manner, the actors’ potentialities. But in overreacting to more deterministic models, interactionists may be in danger of failing to present any clear connection with historical process. Of course, ‘any process of interaction is never fully determined by social, structural or cultural forces’ and ‘social structures and cultures emerge out of and are sustained and changed by social interaction’ (Hammersley and Woods, 1976, p. 3). But the danger of such stress on personal potential—‘actors always possess some degree of autonomy’ (ibid)—is that historical linkages will remain undeveloped or, at any rate, underdeveloped.

In studying school knowledge the dangers of such an approach have been clearly evidenced in the past decade. Classroom practice, a crucial and often neglected area, can, by interactionist overreaction, be presented as the essential context wherein patterns of knowledge transmission are defined. One unfortunate side-effect of this focus is that when attempts to reform classroom practice fail, the teacher, who is the immediate and visible agency of that failure, may be presented as exclusively culpable. In seeking to explain attempts at reform in school knowledge, we need a strategy that is curative of the classroom myopia exhibited in such accounts.

Another major development in sociological studies, the sociology of knowledge, has laid claim to one such curative strategy. Knowledge is seen as evolving in response to the promotional and presentational agency of particular subject groups who act to defend and expand their ‘interests’. Similarly, knowledge patterns are viewed as reflecting the status hierarchies of each society through the activities of the dominant groups. Very often, however, in spite of appeals from M.F.D.Young (1977) such work has not presented the evolutionary, historical process at work (pp. 250–62). Studies have developed horizontally, working out from theories of social structure and social order to evidence of their application. Such an approach inevitably obscures, rather than clarifies, those historical situations in which ‘gaps, discrepancies and ambiguities are created within which individuals can manoeuvre’ (Walker and Goodson, 1977, p. 223). As Herbert Butterfield (1951) once wrote, theories of causality are ‘by no means sufficient in themselves to explain the next stage of the story, the next turn of events’ (p. 94), and Barraclough (1967) has noted that ‘at every great turning point of the past we are confronted by the fortuitous and the unforeseen’ (p. 11).

The historical elements of recent interactionism and the sociology of knowledge may partly be a reflection of the historical period in which these ‘new directions’ have developed. A review of the documents and statements of the curriculum reform movement inaugurated in the 1960s reveals a widespread belief that there could be a more or less complete break with past traditions. At a time when traditions were thought to be on the point of being overthrown it was perhaps unsurprising that so many studies paid scant attention to the evolution and establishment of those traditions. In the event, radical change did not occur. We left in the position of needing to reexamine the emergence and survival of that which is seen as ‘traditional’.

Towards a History of School Knowledge

Historical study seeks to understand how thought and action has evolved in past social circumstances. Following this evolution through time to the present day affords insights into how those circumstances we experience as contemporary ‘reality’ have been negotiated, constructed and reconstructed over time. Short-span interactive study on ‘static’ theoretical work, whilst of inestimable value in other ways, approaches the understanding of cultural and structural factors in a manner which is methodologically (and often in aspiration) distinct. The historical studies in this collection have a common intention: in following the evolution of thought and action through historical time, they seek to understand that which constitutes the contemporary reality we experience as ‘school knowledge’.

The human process by which men make their own history does not, as Marx noted, take place in circumstances of their own choosing. However since both men and circumstances do vary over time, so too do the potentialities for negotiating reality. The human process takes place at different levels and, though in a sense falsely dichotomous, there are two basic levels that are amenable to historical study:

1. The individual life-history. The process of negotiation and change is continuous throughout a person’s life and occurs ‘both in episodic encounters and in longer-lasting socialisation processes over the life history’. (Blumer, 1976, p. 3)
2. The group or collective level: professions, subjects or disciplines, for instance, evolve as social movements over time.

Bucher and Strauss (1961) have developed the notion of professions:

as loose amalgamations of segments pursuing different objectives in different manners and more or less delicately held together under a common name at a particular period of history, (pp. 325–34)

Layton (1972) has discerned three stages that school subjects go through: firstly, justify their presence on grounds of pupil relevance, taught by non-specialists who bring ‘the missionary enthusiasm of pioneers to their task’ to the final stage where ‘the selection of subject matter is determined in large measure by the judgment and practices of the specialist scholars who lead enquiries in the field’. This last stage, where the teachers of the subject ‘constitute a profession with established rules and values’ (p. 11) leads to the situation Norwood described as long ago as 1943:

Subjects have tended to become preserves belonging to specialist teachers; barriers have been erected between them, and teachers have felt unqualified or not free to trespass upon the dominions of other teachers. (Board of Education, 1943)

Similarly, Kuhn (1970) has developed an evolutionary, indeed revolutionary, model of ‘paradigm’ change in scientific disciplines. In a sense his work complements that of Ben-David and Collins (1966) who have scrutinized the social factors in the foundation of psychology. They note that whilst ‘the ideas necessary for the creation of a new discipline are usually available over a relatively long period of time’ and in ‘several places’, growth occurs only when people become interested in the idea ‘not only as an intellectual content but also as a potential means of establishing a new intellectual identity and particularly a new occupational role’ (pp. 451–66).

So far studies of the history of contemporary knowledge, let alone school knowledge, have tended to resemble the pre-paradigmatic stages of disciplines. The studies have been conducted in several places at different times and have often been undertaken by non-specialists who have brought the ‘enthusiasm of pioneers’ to their work. (This collection of papers may mark the transition to a new stage for an increasing number of educational researchers are undertaking historical work.) Macdonald and Walker (1976) have recently argued that in school curricula ‘by extending our sense of history we can develop a different way of viewing the species’ (p. 86). Mary Waring’s work on Nuffield science was developed from a similar perspective:

If we are to understand events, whether of thought or of action, knowledge of the background is essential. Knowledge of events is merely the raw material of history: to be an intelligible reconstruction of the past, events must be related to other events, and to the assumptions and practices of the milieu. Hence they must be made the subject of inquiry, their origins as products of particular social and historical circumstance, the manner in which individuals and groups have acted must be identified, and explanations for their actions sought. (Waring, 1975, p. 12)

The justifications for historical studies of the evolution of school knowledge can be found at the level of thought and action.

Firstly, such work will improve our knowledge of school knowledge. Historical studies can elucidate the changing human process behind the definition and promotion of school subjects. Employing this strategy shifts the emphasis from questions of the intrinsic and philosophic value of subjects, from their existence as objective realities, to the motives and activities immanent and inherent in their construction and maintenance. Further, historical scrutiny offers insights into the existence of patterns and recurring constraints: why, for instance, certain ‘traditions’ in school knowledge survive and others disappear. Whilst historical studies do not as their major intention seek to prove particular theories, nonetheless they may u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction: Studying Subject Knowledge
• 2: The Need for Curriculum History
• 3: Becoming a School Subject
• 4: The Micro Politics of Curriculum Change: European Studies
• 5: On Explaining Curriculum Change: H.B.Beal, Organizational Categories and the Rhetoric of Justification
• 6: Subject Status and Curriculum Change: Local Commercial Education, 1920–1940
• 7: Subjects and the Everyday Life of Schooling
• 8: Subject Cultures and the Introduction of Classroom Computers
• 9: Computer Studies As Symbolic and Ideological Action: The Genealogy of the Icon
• 10: On Curriculum Form: Notes Toward a Theory of Curriculum
• 11: ‘Nations At Risk’ and ‘National Curriculum’: Ideology and Identity