Defining The Curriculum

Histories and Ethnographies

Ivor F. Goodson, Stephen Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136716669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores some of the major processes involved in the definition of school subject knowledge. Using historical ethnographic methods, the contributors to the collection highlight and examine some of the factors involved at national, institutional and classroom levels in the making of school subjects. The first section of the book outlines the theoretical and methodological basis for the study off school subjects, and the reasons for and the possibilities of such a study are considered. In the second section some histories of school curricula are presented from a variety of settings – colonial schools in Africa, working-class schools of the nineteenth century, nursery schools – and the conflicting forces of determination and change in school subjects are identified and examined. The third section focuses on the contemporary school situation and the papers isolate and investigate some of the interest groups and social processes which enter into or affect the realization of school knowledge in the classroom.

Part One
Theory and Method

Making a Vice of Our Virtues: Some Notes
on Theory in Ethnography and History

Martyn Hammersley

Concern has frequently been registered, even by ethnographers themselves, about the ahistorical character of much ethnographic research. Stephen Ball, for example, has pointed out how we often neglect the temporal patterns operating in the settings we study and that this seriously threatens the validity of our accounts (Ball, 1983a). Others have pointed to the importance of biographical factors in sociological explanations (Pollard, 1982). Goodson (1983a) has noted how, over the last forty years, ethnography has come to be identified with participant observation, life history work suffering a serious decline. Fortunately though, there are now signs of a revival, Bertaux, 1981.) Lynch (1977) raises the issue in a particularly striking manner, criticizing ethnographers for a lack of interest in the ‘future history’ of the groups they study. He cites the case of Lofland’s work on the ‘Doomsday Cult’ (Lofland, 1966), suggesting that we can now recognize the latter as having been one of the seed groups of ‘The Moonies’. He bemoans the fact that we have no study of how this small cult was transformed into the widespread movement of today.

While these criticisms contain much truth, the days have long gone when ethnographers laboured under theoretical perspectives, notably anthropological functionalism, which specifically denied the importance of history. Indeed, recent anthropology seems to have become a major source of ideas for some historians (Walters, 1980; Stone, 1981). In this paper I want to argue not only that history and ethnography are complementary but also that they share much in common. In particular, they both display a primary concern with describing social events and processes in detail, and a distaste for theories which, as they see it, ride roughshod over the complexity of the social world. Often too they share a commitment to documenting ‘in their own terms’ the perspectives of the people involved in the events and settings they describe. Historians and ethnographers are often reluctant to move to general classifications of these perspectives, in which their uniqueness — and it seems much of their interest — is lost.

It is these characteristics which have sometimes led both ethnography and history to be criticized as empiricist. (For extreme examples see Sharp, 1982, and Hindess and Hirst, 1975.) They are accused of engaging in description for its own sake and of presenting their accounts of the world as if these provided theoretically neutral facts. Such criticisms have generally been rejected or ignored, and in many respects quite rightly. Often they have come from critics practising theoretical dogmatism and speculative excess. The theory demanded has simply been the critics’ a priori views about how the world ‘must be’; the task of the ethnographer or historian being, at most, to fill in the details.

In the face of dogmatic theoreticism, empiricism has definite virtues. In terms of method, systematic search for evidence and its careful handling must be applauded. Equally, the products of empiricism frequently have considerable value. The description of ‘other cultures’, whether of the past or contemporaneous, of other societies or of segments of our own, can often serve to challenge our routine assumptions about the nature of social life or about particular groups of people or social situations. This explains the popular appeal of historical and anthropological work like Montaillou (Le Roy Ladurie, 1978) and The Mountain People (Turnbull, 1973). But such description performs important functions for social science too. For one thing, it can challenge the preconceptions we bring to our research and which so easily get built into the accounts we produce.

Nor is the value of description limited to the ‘exotic’. We often discover that there are features of even the most familiar settings of which we are unaware, recognition of which may subtly, perhaps even dramatically, change our understanding of those settings. Much recent ethnographic work in sociology has been concerned with ‘making the familiar strange’ in precisely this manner. Historical research can serve the same function, for instance by documenting the origins of contemporary phenomena whose existence we take for granted as ‘natural’ rather than as the product of history. A good example is the way in which school subjects tend to be viewed as basic forms of knowledge, forgetting the struggles which were involved in their establishment, the alternative versions which were promoted by different groups, and the changes in content undergone (Layton, 1973; Shayer, 1970; Ball, 1982 and 1983b; Goodson, 1981, 1983b and 1983c).

However, while empiricism has its virtues, it is ultimately indefensible. Description is never ‘pure’, a direct and unchallengeable representation of the world. All ‘facts’ involve theoretical assumptions. Moreover, a description or explanation is only as good as the theory by which it was produced. We neglect theory at our peril.

While defending a conception of history as idiographic, Mandelbaum (1977, p. 6) points out that historians nevertheless rely on generalizations (for which in this context we can read ‘theory’):

It is my claim that any work we take to be historical in nature purports to establish what actually occurred at a particular time and place, or is concerned with tracing and explaining some particular series of related occurrences. However, this does not entail that in fulfilling such a task the historian may not, at certain points, have to rely on generalizations in order to offer a coherent account of some of the occurrences with which he deals. For example, in attempting to give an account of a particular revolution, a historian often has to make use of certain general assumptions concerning how individuals generally behave in particular sorts of situations, such as those that arose in the course of that revolution.

Hayek (1955, p. 72) makes the point even more strongly:

If the dependence of the historical study of social phenomena on theory is not always recognized, this is mainly due to the very simple nature of the majority of theoretical schemes which the historian will employ and which brings it about that there will be no dispute about the conclusions reached by their help, and little awareness that he has used theoretical reasoning at all. But this does not alter the fact that in their methodological character and validity the concepts of social phenomena which the historian has to employ are essentially of the same kind as the more elaborate models produced by the systematic social sciences.

Such generalizations or theoretical claims are not difficult to find in historical and ethnographic work. In his work on the development of English as a school subject, Ball (1983, p. 65) makes the claim that ‘both grammar and composition . . . served to impose and maintain the dominance of the patterns, structures and conventions of Standard English and received pronounciation.’ Clearly here he is drawing on a generalization about what the effects of teaching of the kind to be found in grammar and composition lessons would be in the conditions prevalent in late nineteenth and early twentieth century schools. Theoretical assumptions of this kind are also routinely made in ethnographic research. For example, in his work on teachers’ experiences of examining, Scarth (1983, p. 216) claims that if the practical solutions which teachers develop to cope with examining ‘work’, ‘they become synonymous with examining itself. Here we have reliance on a psychological theory about habitualization (Berger and Luckmann, 1966).

There has, of course, been considerable debate about the nature of the assumptions involved in historical explanations, for example about whether they are empirical generalizations or rational principles (for a discussion see Dray, 1964). In my view the most plausible account is still that of Hempel (1959 and 1963). On this account a theory is a statement which explains what will happen and why under given circumstances, and whose validity can be tested by checking whether or not its predictions are accurate. The claims which theories make are conditionally universal. In other words, they hold generally, given certain conditions, and the latter must not refer to particulars, to limits of time and space (Wilier, 1967).

It seems that much of the reaction against this view of theory has been founded upon misinterpretation of its implications. Often, for example, the conditional nature of this kind of theory has been ignored. Leff (1969, p. 3), for instance, denies the applicability of universal laws to history because of ‘the absence of uniformity from human affairs’. But the positivist model of universal laws, in the form outlined above, does not presuppose uniformity in the sense that identical situations undergoing identical processes of development must be readily identifiable. It is not ‘historicist’ in the sense popularized by Popper (1957). Nor does it involve the claim that all social events are causally determined:

the covering law analysis of explanation presents a thesis about the logical structure of scientific explanation but not about the extent to which individual occurrences in the world can be explained: that depends on what laws hold in the world and clearly cannot be determined just by logical analysis. In particular, therefore, the covering law analysis of explanation does not presuppose or imply universal determinism. (Hempel, 1963, pp. 149–50)

Of course, Hempel (1959) also argues that many of the laws pertinent to history, and presumably to ethnography too, are likely to be probabilistic rather than universalistic in character.

Perhaps the most important misconception, though, is the idea that this model of explanation implies that conventional ethnographic and historical work must be abandoned in favour of attempts to develop and test theories. In reaction against this implication conventional modes of historical explanation have been defended on the grounds that explanation is pragmatic in character. It has been pointed out that in order to provide an adequate explanation of a phenomenon it is often not necessary to specify the underlying theory and the evidence which supports it. Often, for example, citing a particular fact about the events to be explained is enough in itself (Scriven, 1959).

Another line of defence has been the argument that historical explanation diverges from the covering law model because of the wide range of different factors which may be appealed to in explaining social events. Historical explanations draw, it is argued, not on a set of interrelated laws but on a collection of diverse assumptions about the way the world works, and in particular about why people act in the way they do. (Scriven, ibid., calls these ‘truisms’.)

These features of historical explanations have often been taken to reflect fundamental differences between the natural and social sciences. This, how-ever, is a serious mistake, as Hayek (1955, pp. 66–7) points out:

If I watch and record the process by which a plot in my garden that I leave untouched for months is gradually covered with weeds, I am describing a process which in all its detail is no less unique than any event in human history. If I want to explain any particular configuration of different plants which may appear at any stage of that process, I can do so only by giving an account of all the relevant influences which have affected different parts of my plot at different times. I shall have to consider what I can find out about the differences of the soil in different parts of the plot, about differences in the radiation of the sun, of moisture, of the air-currents, etc., etc.; and in order to explain the effects of all these factors I shall have to use, apart from the knowledge of all these particular facts, various parts of the theory of physics, of chemistry, biology, meteorology, and so on. The result of all this will be the explanation of a particular phenomenon, but not a theoretical science of how garden plots are covered with weeds.

In an instance like this the particular sequence of events, their causes and consequences, will probably not be of sufficient general interest to make it worth while to produce a written account of them or to develop their study into a distinct discipline. But there are large fields of natural knowledge, represented by recognized disciplines, which in their methodological character are no different from this. In geography, e.g., and at least in a large part of geology and astronomy, we are mainly concerned with particular situations, either of the earth or of the universe; we aim at explaining a unique situation by showing how it has been produced by the operation of many forces subject to the general laws studied by the theoretical sciences. In the specific sense of a body of general rules in which the term ‘science’ is often used these disciplines are not ‘sciences’, i.e., they are not theoretical sciences but endeavors to apply the laws found by the theoretical sciences to the explanation of particular ‘historical’ situations.

The distinction between the search for generic principles and the explanation of concrete phenomena has thus no necessary connection with the distinction between the study of nature and the study of society. In both fields we need generalizations in order to explain concrete and unique events. Whenever we attempt to explain or understand a particular phenomenon we can do so only by recognizing it or its parts as members of certain classes of phenomena, and the explanation of the particular phenomenon presupposes the existence of general rules.

It is important, then, to draw a distinction between what we might call theorizing and explaining and to recognize that this distinction operates independently of the nature of the subject matter. Moreover, as Hayek makes clear, these two activities are complementary:

Theoretical and historical work are . . . logically distinct but complementary activities. If their task is rightly understood, there can be no conflict between them. And though they have distinct tasks, neither is of much use without the other. (Hayek, ibid., p. 73)

Explaining a particular set or sequence of events is a pragmatic matter; what counts as an adequate description or explanation depends on the context (Scriven, 1959; Garfinkel, 1981). In explaining any set of events one may draw on many different theories, and which ones one appeals to will depend on one’s purposes, varying, for example, according to whether one is concerned with the ascription of blame or with identifying available remedies. Moreover, in producing explanations we tend to treat the truth of the theories we rely on as given. Our primary interest is in whe...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction: Defining the Curriculum; Histories and Ethnographies
• Part One: Theory and Method
• Part Two: Histories
• Part Three: Ethnographies
• Author Index
• Subject Index