Equity, Teaching Practice and the Curriculum

Exploring Differences in Access to Knowledge

Ninni Wahlström

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000571714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Currículos educativos

This book explores how different classroom discourses and concepts of knowledge permeate teaching in high- and low-performance classrooms. Drawing on empirical research from classrooms in Sweden, it presents a theory-based framework for classroom research.

The book examines the central concepts of knowledge, curriculum, pedagogy and equity to discuss differences in access to knowledge and the implications of these differences for students' future opportunities and well-being. It analyses the relationships between different teaching factors and discusses teaching from democratic perspectives developed within curriculum theory. Combining insights from curriculum theory with insights from sociolinguistic and sociocultural classroom research, this project breaks new ground in how knowledge from curriculum content is recontextualised into concrete teaching practices in the context of a standards-based curriculum.

Providing valuable insights into the intersections between classroom practice, student performance and teacher expectations, this book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of curriculum research, education policy, teacher education and classroom practice.

1 Introduction The Role of the School as the Promotion of Knowledge, Equity and Democratic Norms

Ninni Wahlström

DOI: 10.4324/9781003218067-1

Schools are important places for the maintenance of democratic norms. Meanwhile, schools are constantly exposed to policy reforms and changes that threaten to weaken their function of educating a new generation for democracy when one-sided priorities for education tend to dominate policy arenas. National constitutions and societal institutions cannot by themselves guarantee democracy. Instead, as Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018, p. 283) point out, democracy ‘is a shared enterprise,’ the fate of which depends on all of us. Democracies ultimately rest on shared, unwritten rules of accepted and unaccepted codes of conduct and standpoints. In short, democracy requires that values such as being knowledgeable, being able to negotiate, compromising, deliberating and showing mutual respect are appreciated and highly valued in society. It is hard to find any societal institution other than the school that has the capacity to take on the task of, for each new generation, offering well-founded knowledge and promoting democratic norms, with the potential to develop a democratic society struggling with the question of what can be considered the ‘common good.’

Critics of democracy often claim that politics is too important and complicated to be left to ‘ordinary’ people (Burman, 2021). An opposite way of reasoning is to emphasise the importance of offering citizens knowledge, a sense of tolerance and a habit of reflective thinking through education that enables individuals to form their own well-founded opinions. The term well-founded means examining a problem from different perspectives and considering which measures seem to be most favourable, considering the potential conflicts of the goals and social groups concerned. This is what characterises the adoption of a democratic stance. The school’s task of offering in-depth knowledge on various school subjects is necessary but not sufficient for developing and maintaining democratic values and norms. Teaching content also needs to include reflections on the consequences of varying perspectives of action regarding the utilisation of knowledge in society and how these perspectives can be understood from different social, physical and environmental perspectives. Therefore, teaching subject knowledge and democratic norms is intertwined and must be understood as two aspects of the same goal for compulsory education – to educate democratic citizens.

In this volume, the question of knowledge is discussed from three perspectives: how knowledge appears in policy and curriculum, how it is taught in classrooms and how it is assessed. The perspective from which the question of knowledge is understood and discussed is based on the concepts of democracy and equity (see Carr & Hartnett, 1996). The key question that permeates this book is how teachers can adopt a democratic stance in their teaching and how students can be offered the opportunity for reflective learning. The assumption is that teachers, in general, want their students to succeed. However, even if we believe that teachers are socially conscious, we do not expect teachers to build social movements (Anyon, 2014) or to conduct micropolitics at the classroom level for students ‘becoming revolutionary’ (Youdell, 2011, p. 139). Instead, our purpose herein is to focus on education perspectives and the fostering of a democratic stance. The aim revolves around the question of how the concepts of knowledge and teaching in everyday activities may include a way of looking at the world that instils a democratic attitude in the students and how the teaching conducted in various learning environments can be discussed from a perspective not only of knowledge achievements but also of equity and democracy. The policy rhetoric claiming that teachers primarily need to set high expectations for their students to succeed (e.g. OECD, 2012) is too simplistic because teaching situations are far more complex than that – as are all social situations that include individuals with different prerequisites, preferences and desires involved in a common activity. Instead, the authors of the following chapters have directed their focus on the aspects of knowledge, curriculum and teaching that the students encounter in diverse teaching contexts, both in schools considered high performing and low performing in terms of average grades. The aim is to highlight aspects of education hindering or promoting education of good quality, based on a broad understanding of compulsory school as a space for civic education.

Educating Democratic Citizens

At the beginning of the 21st century, democracy faces various challenges. One challenge is the neoliberal reform agenda that has characterised most Western countries from the 1990s onwards. Many Western countries have also experienced how right-wing populism has grown stronger as a political force that has influenced political values in society outside the specific party. A third challenge of democracy is the voluntary and involuntary isolation that affects people’s willingness and ability to get in touch with each other.

The solution for welfare services advocated in neoliberalism is usually marketed solutions, such as competition and privatisation. While the former “social” liberalism was characterised by political responsibility, regulation for equal treatment, state bureaucracy and trust in professional expertise, the ‘new’ liberalism, ‘neoliberalism,’ was closely linked to New Public Management (NPM). NPM is characterised by an ideology for the public sector based on efficiency, standards, competition and accountability (Gunter et al., 2016). With NPM as the governing philosophy for schools, concepts such as competition, freedom of choice, knowledge achievement and accountability of results became leading concepts. The political philosopher Nancy Fraser describes the neoliberal movement as ‘progressive neoliberalism,’ in that the movement developed from a contradictory alliance between progressive social movements pushing issues of diversity and the needs of minority groups on the one hand and strong financial interests on the other hand, expecting opportunities for the opening of new markets (Fraser, 2017). Neoliberalism views the state as a necessary partner to provide conditions for implementing the market orientation of the public sector in practice. This means that the state is expected to provide the tools required to regulate a public sector that includes both private and public actors (Olssen, 2009).

Sweden, where the referenced classroom studies have been conducted, is a good example of the shift from social liberalism to neoliberalism within the education policy arena. In 1991, the Swedish school system changed from being a state-run and state-funded national school system to becoming a decentralised responsibility for the municipalities. Meanwhile, a new regulation for free school choice was introduced, along with a system of what is called independent schools that allowed private actors, including individuals, organisations, and limited companies, to become owners of publicly funded schools. Thus, all schools are still publicly funded, but the responsibility for how financial resources are used is left to the individual organiser of the school. Thereby, the neoliberal policy was expected to promote individual freedom of choice and competition between schools aimed at stimulating pedagogical development and quality schooling. The democratic implication of a displacement to neoliberalism as the dominating force of international and national education policy is the changing way the individual citizen can make his or her voice heard. In a system of ‘social’ liberalism, the individual citizen expresses his or her opinion by casting a vote in the general elections and, thus, holding politicians accountable. In a neoliberal system, the political responsibility for the performance of public services becomes more unclear. Instead, the citizen expresses herself by ‘exiting,’ that is, ‘voting with one’s feet’ by simply changing providers in the public sector based on the freedom of choice. The democratic challenge is to maintain a common frame of reference that keeps society together and identifies who is ultimately accountable in a highly decentralised and diversified welfare system.

During the early 2000s, right-wing populism affected politics and government coalitions in several European countries. What the right-wing populist parties have in common is that they combine nationalism with value conservatism. They are critical of immigration and of the European Union (EU) and take conservative positions on issues of family policy, gender equality and sexual minorities (Jungar, 2017). Populism can be described as an ideology that views society as divided into two homogeneous and contradictory groups: the ‘people’ and the (corrupt) ‘elite.’ Populists argue that politics should express the genuine will of the people. While right-wing populist parties combine their views of the division of the people and the elite with nationalism, left-wing populist parties instead combine their populism with a socialist ideal (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). The democratic challenge lies in populism’s view of one people with a common will, which implies that the power in a democracy belongs to the majority, ‘the people.’ Thus, a populist approach to democracy lacks the characteristic hallmarks of liberal democracy with its protection of minorities and independent institutions for areas such as judiciary, media, culture and education.

A third challenge to democracy, finally, lies in the voluntary and involuntary isolationism that affects people’s interests and prospects of getting in touch with each other. Unlike the two -isms discussed earlier, isolationism is not a matter of ideology but of human conditions and behaviour. The pandemic in 2020 and 2021 can be taken as an example of involuntary isolation from other people. The threat of infection meant that democratic rights became downgraded when governments took action to stop the spread of infection. The democratic challenge lies in the fact that fundamental rights, such as the freedoms of assembly, demonstration, travel, and other freedoms in the private sphere, are restricted by temporary recommendations and laws.

Conversely, voluntary isolationism, for example, is evident in residential segregation as an effect of a tendency for different social groups to seek housing in different residential areas, mainly based on economic resources. In school systems that include the free choice of school, there is a tendency to choose schools where one’s social group dominates. On social media, new opportunities open up further voluntary isolationism by looking for social groups that largely share one’s own interests and ways of thinking and acting, which contribute to both confirmation and community. The democratic challenge is that voluntary isolation from other social groups contributes to a one-sidedness in perspectives and a reduced habit or willingness to listen to voices other than those that already feel familiar.

The examples of the challenges highlighted above point to the need for a reconnection of the tasks of compulsory school and civic education – that is, promoting a habit of acting according to democratic norms and values. However, challenges to democracy as a social governance system and a way of cohabiting in society go beyond what individual teachers can take responsibility for or actually influence. Nonetheless, what individual teachers can do is adopt a democratic stance in their subject-based teaching. I define teaching with a democratic stance as teaching that consciously opens up reflective thinking regarding various consequences for diverse social groups and society as a whole about the knowledge that is the subject of teaching. A democratic stance in education is characterised by an aspiration to reflect on different perspectives and conflicting standpoints about an issue, aiming at conversations with students on how to arrive at what can be considered ‘the common good,’ acknowledging the interests involved (Wahlström, 2020, 2021). An underlying interest of the studies presented in the chapters in this book is the students’ lives in the classroom: What enacted concepts of knowledge do they encounter, and what communicative discourses and teaching repertoires are formed in their classrooms? What are the implications of these factors for the possibilities for students to develop a democratic stance? An assumption is that dominating concepts of knowledge underpinning curriculum have implications for the teacher’s selection of the teaching content, the teacher’s choice of teaching repertoires, and the approach to knowledge and participation that students are offered. Thus, the nature of the concept of knowledge related to a curriculum has real consequences in real classrooms, because the kind of knowledge underlying curricular content constitutes the framework for the teacher’s pedagogical choices. Even if subjects’ traditions partly rely on different concepts of knowledge, foundational policy ideas of what counts as important knowledge for the next generation permeate the goals, subject content, requirements and standards that characterise a curriculum. This, in turn, has implications for how teaching and assessment practices are understood and carried out by teachers.

The content of this book, which I relate to the research field of curriculum theory, could be viewed as an empirically based contribution to the debate on the need for knowledge-based curricula. Regarding the necessity of promoting democracy, both as a form of governance and as foundational norms of living together in society, I argue that the knowledge concept based on transactional realism, developed within the philosophy of pragmatism, has the potential to foster reflective thinking and pluralism through the consideration of various aspects of an object, which forms the basis of the concept. John Dewey’s transactional realism places human beings as actors in an environment of physical things and social relationships. The term transactional means that there is always ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Role of the School as the Promotion of Knowledge, Equity and Democratic Norms
• 2 Policy, Knowledge and Promoting a Democratic Stance
• 3 Equity in Education: Equal Opportunities for What?
• 4 Exploring the Importance of Teacher Feedback: Connecting Truthfulness and Student Learning
• 5 The Students’ Role in Standards-Based Education: Critical Reflections on Pedagogical Implications
• 6 Curriculum Coherence: Exploring the Intended and Enacted Curriculum in Different Schools
• 7 Principal Agency: Educational Leadership at the Intersection Between Past Experiences and Present Environments
• 8 Teaching Repertoires and Student Perceptions of Knowledge in High- and Low-Performance Classrooms
• 9 Pedagogical Segregation from Students’ Perspectives
• 10 Knowledge, Curriculum and Teaching on Matters That Concern: A Concluding Discussion
• Index