Knowledge and the Future of the Curriculum

International Studies in Social Realism

B. Barrett, E. Rata, B. Barrett, E. Rata, B. Barrett, E. Rata

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137429261
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

This collection explores why powerful knowledge matters for social justice and discusses its implications for curriculum and pedagogy. The contributors argue that the purpose of education is to provide all students with access to powerful knowledge so that they acquire the means to move beyond their experiences and enhance their lives.

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Introduction: Knowledge and the Future of the Curriculum

Elizabeth Rata and Brian Barrett

The curriculum of the future should be the curriculum of knowledge.

(Moore, 2000, p. 33)

This book starts from the premise that one of the most fundamental inequalities in education is that of access to the most powerful knowledge. However, the nature of that powerful knowledge, its place in the curriculum, and the role of schools and teachers in promoting its acquisition have, for some time, been sidelined in education policy developments and debates. These, depending on the national context, have tended instead to emphasise performance standards, accountability, competencies, and skills aimed at producing ‘lifelong learners’ for the twenty-first century global economy.

Elsewhere, the field of sociology of education has been home to sustained efforts intended to ‘give voice’ to historically marginalised groups of students by critically debunking the ‘official’ curriculum as simply reflecting the experiences and reproducing the interests of dominant groups. However, such relativist approaches have served in part to constrain access to powerful curriculum knowledge, particularly among those very students for whom the field has often been most committed to advocate. As such, we suggest that the field requires a theory of knowledge capable of providing the argument for the centrality of concepts and content knowledge in the curriculum as a progressive option in support of social and educational justice. We recognise that any challenge to the sociology of education’s widely accepted positioning of knowledge and curriculum as instruments that simply reproduce educational and social inequality is likely to be read by many as reactionary, conservative, or elitist. Accordingly, it is essential to be clear with regard to what we mean by knowledge and how the knowledge we identify as ‘powerful’ is the means to enhance educational justice.

The social realist conceptualisation of knowledge that we seek to advance in this book has developed as an alternative to ‘critical’ accounts within the sociology of education that, in the words of Basil Bernstein, treat knowledge as ‘no more than a relay for power relations external to itself; a relay whose form has no consequences for what is relayed’ (Bernstein, 1990, p. 166). Social realism, as a research programme in the sociology of education (and as opposed to its longterm use in the field of aesthetics), recognises instead the emergent and objective properties of knowledge and emphasises that these qualities are rooted in social grounds. In combination, these qualities allow us to identify certain forms of knowledge as worth making available to all students through education policy, curriculum, and classroom pedagogy.

Like much critical scholarship in the sociology of education, a social realist understanding of knowledge begins by affirming that all knowledge is socially produced. However, the recognition that knowledge is socially constructed often comes to be presented within the sociology of education as the claim that it cannot be separated from the social conditions of its production; that it is in fact ‘a fabrication, and therefore an artefact, a fiction’ (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 26), undermining its status as knowledge. In rejecting this view, a social realist approach to knowledge concerns itself with establishing what the ‘social construction’ of knowledge actually entails.

Here a social realist approach suggests that knowledge, as a product of enduring socio-intellectual networks that are extensive in time and space, possesses emergent properties that allow it to move beyond the immediate social and historical context of its production. It can be known by people of any time and place. While knowledge is never infallible (in an absolutist and positivistic manner), its objectivity can be guaranteed. It is a guarantee of ‘provisional truth’ made possible through collective procedures for the independent evaluation of knowledge claims. The most important procedure is that of making the knowledge public so that it is available for criticism and judgement according to concepts and methods created over time by respective disciplinary communities. The concepts and methods developed by such communities, usually in universities and research institutes, are themselves subject to ongoing criticism and judgement as are the ideas that are continually developed in the discipline.

This position provides the grounds for making the claim that some forms of knowledge are more powerful than others in terms of the reliability of the explanations they provide and the new ways of thinking about the world that they promote. These are forms of knowledge or conceptual models that are unlikely to be acquired solely from experience in students’ homes or among their peer groups and communities. Rather, they serve the purpose of allowing us to explain experience, usually using empirically obtained material as illustrative evidence of the conceptualised model’s explanatory power.

Accordingly, we argue that the central purpose of schooling and the curriculum within it must be to provide students with equitable access to powerful curriculum knowledge that is ultimately capable of taking them beyond their experiences. Maton and Moore (2010) note that ‘[t]he impulse underlying social realist work is towards both the creation of epistemologically more powerful forms of knowledge and establishing the means to enable them to be accessible for everyone’ (p. 10). Therefore social realism works from the central problem in the sociology of education: the persistent inequality of access to powerful knowledge.

The ideas that have come to be expressed using the label of ‘social realism’ began to coalesce in the late 1990s (see Maton and Moore, 2010) as a result of discussions between, among others, many of the writers whose work is represented in this volume. These ideas include the social grounding of knowledge’s emergent and objective properties (see, for example, Moore, 2000) and a Durkheimian recognition of the specialised and differentiated nature of knowledge (see, for example, Young, 1998; Muller, 2000). However, it is important to recognise that the roots of social realism run deep in the sociological tradition; this is demonstrated, for example, by the many references to Durkheim, Vygotsky, and Bernstein throughout this volume.

The social realist research programme has continued to gain currency through the proceedings of both a First (2008) and Second (2013) International Social Realism Symposium (a third is to be held in 2015) at the University of Cambridge. Illustrating a key social realist principle, that disciplinary knowledge is itself socially and historically located, the acknowledgment of social realism’s history in the sociology of education in fact contributes to the integrity of the discipline for it is in the history of any discipline that its emergent concepts and methods are to be found. These tell us how a discipline justifies itself and provides the criteria by which its guarantees of truthfulness can be judged by others.

Social realism, then, may be best understood as a comprehensive research programme which continues to develop as it engages with the problem of educational inequality.¹ This book is a contribution to the wide range of ideas, debates, and research that make up the programme. It seeks to remain true to the intentions of its early developers that the approach will not confine researchers within the narrow walls of an ideological straitjacket requiring a belief-type commitment from its ‘followers’, but will retain a willingness to grow from criticism as it wrestles with the complexities of the problem that it serves.

The chapters collected in this book combine to develop a future-oriented argument for knowledge (Moore, 2000) and its place in the curriculum. They also endeavour to move beyond mere critique and to offer alternatives to other current and ostensibly future-oriented arguments regarding knowledge and the curriculum, such as those invoking ‘twenty-first century skills’. The contributors to this volume write creatively and innovatively about the principles of knowledge structure and demonstrate how they can inform curriculum and pedagogy. The book is divided into four parts, each dealing with a major concern of those who take a broad social realist approach to addressing the problem of educational inequality. Part I contains three chapters, each by seminal writers who place the issue of knowledge at the centre of the problem of educational inequality and who develop and refine the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ as a key resource for addressing it. In doing so, Rob Moore, Michael Young, Johan Muller, and John Beck each make major contributions to developing a theory of knowledge that can inform curriculum and pedagogy. In Part II, Elizabeth Rata, Brian Barrett, and Chris Corbel shift the focus to politics and policy in order to detail the wider political and economic forces that contribute to sociology of education’s central problem. Part III shifts the focus again and, by doing so, demonstrates the breadth of social realism’s explanatory range. The contributions by Graham McPhail, Barbara Ormond, and John Morgan each address the curriculum itself – what should be taught – with music, history, and geography used as examples of the issues involved. Part IV addresses the hard question. Jeanne Gamble, Karl Maton, Yael Shalem, and Lynne Slonimsky ask what a social realist understanding of knowledge means for pedagogy. How is the knowledge identified in the earlier chapters as ‘powerful’ to be taught?

In the final part of this introduction, we go into further detail about each of the chapters so that readers may choose which section best provides their point of entry into the social realist approach to the problem of educational equity. First, however, it is important to consider two other major issues touched on by each of the contributors to this volume. Each surfaces because of the social realist recognition of the central place of knowledge in educational access. The first issue concerns what happens to knowledge that is developed in universities and research institutes and then readied for teaching at school. Knowledge developed in the disciplines must be altered (or ‘recontextualised’, as Basil Bernstein would say) so that it can be taught as academic subjects at all school levels. This matter of recontextualisation raises questions about who is responsible for reworking the knowledge. Is it university academics, or curriculum officials, or associations of subject teachers, or even individual teachers?

The second issue of interest to social realists follows on from the process of recontextualisation. Disciplinary knowledge is altered in fairly significant ways as it is sequenced, paced, and reordered according to the ongoing evaluation of students’ understanding. This pedagogic task is essential if the concepts of the discipline are to be taught in progressive and cumulative ways to students at all levels, including very young children through to those completing compulsory education or taking part in vocational education. Teachers themselves must comprehend what they are teaching in order to understand their role in the cumulative sequencing of academic concepts and content. They must also turn to their students and mediate the relationship between knowledge and the student.

In those cases where such mediation already occurs in the home (most often in middle-class homes where academic subject concepts and language have frequently already been made familiar to the child), the teacher’s task is less about establishing the mediation and more about turning directly to building cumulative knowledge in the subject. However, when students have not encountered conceptual knowledge derived from the disciplines in their homes and communities, teachers have a double pedagogical challenge. Mediating the relationship between conceptual knowledge and the child’s context-dependent social knowledge in order to ‘interrupt’ (to use Rob Moore’s phrasing) the student’s orientation to knowledge is a core task. It is often thankless as students and parents exclaim ‘Why do we need to learn this stuff? I’ll never use it’.

On one level, that break or interruption takes the student into the world of powerful knowledge, where they can ‘think the unthinkable’ and imagine the impossible. It is this intellectual freedom that is the foundation of political freedom. Yet there is a price to be paid when we step outside the world of the known. The school’s role is to provide a way of thinking that separates the child and home so profoundly that, as Hegel (1820/1967) recognised very early in the gradual move to mass schooling in modern democratic nations, ‘education bears upon the child’s capacity to become a member of society. In its character as the universal family . . . society’s right here is paramount over the arbitrary and contingent preferences of parents’ (p. 148). Thinking about what is not encountered in experience by using concepts that themselves are not known in experience is indeed a real interruption to a child’s identity. Social realists do not underestimate the pedagogic difficulty faced by teachers in ‘imposing’ this interruption, but that is not sufficient reason for it not to occur. The recognition that the purpose of schooling is intellectual liberation is widely shared by groups including Marxists and liberal humanists alike. The pedagogic dilemma is finding teaching methods that link working-class children ‘with historically evolved, universalistic, and liberating humanistic cultures’ (Bailey, 1984, p. 220). For this reason, pedagogy is as much a part of the social realist research programme as is the interest in forms of knowledge and the curriculum.

The sociological project of those who have contributed to this book is to understand the interconnections between disciplinary knowledge, social knowledge, pedagogy, and the emancipatory implications of powerful knowledge. In Chapter 3, Young and Muller place the onus for developing such an understanding on the social sciences, noting that these disciplines, like all specialised knowledge communities, must ‘strengthen their methods, the better to strengthen their attendant theories and the coherence of their concepts’. It is to this task that the book is dedicated. Many readers, accustomed to other approaches in the sociology of education – including various forms of relativism such as standpoint theories, critical pedagogy, and other forms of Marxist reductionism, and the instrumentalism of the so-called twenty-first century ‘knowledge age’ – may meet the concepts and methods used in social realist explanations for the first time. For you, we suggest starting with Part I and working through the book in order to acquire a cumulative knowledge of social realist concepts and methods. Those already familiar with these ideas might pick and choose, perhaps beginning with Yael Shalem and Lynne Slonimsky’s defence of theoretical knowledge in teacher education as an illustration of what ‘powerful knowledge’ can achieve, before moving to the justification for this knowledge in Part I. Others may find the account of knowledge in the curriculum in Part III a more useful entre into the social realist programme. Asking questions about what should be taught in subjects like music, history, and geography will refer the reader back to Part I’s concern with what knowledge is and forward to Part IV which is about how that knowledge should be taught.

Part I: Powerful knowledge

The first section of the book develops the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ with chapters by Rob Moore, Michael Young and Johan Muller, and John Beck. Central to the idea of powerful knowledge is a theory of the sociality of knowledge. Rob Moore introduces the relatively new explanatory theory of social realism and explains the development of what has come to be called the social realist explanation of the sociality of knowledge, that is, an explanation of how knowledge can be both social (in that the knowledge is developed within a community of scholars) and epistemic (in that what emerges can become independent of that community).

In identifying the absence of a sociological theory that accounts for the sociality of knowledge, Moore draws attention to ‘the problem of the problem’, what he calls the ‘blind spot’ of knowledge in the discipline. Like other contributors, Moore’s concern is with how a social realist understanding of the problem of unequal access to education can break the stalemate caused by the drift towards relativism in the sociology of education. According to Basil Bernstein (1977), ‘[t]his may require a widening of the focus of the sociology of education, less an allegiance to an approach, and more a dedication to a problem’ (p. 171).

Moore stresses that students’ social and cultural relationships to education are not automatically reproduced in education (as evidenced in the significant number of socially disadvantaged pupils who manage to excel academically year in and year out). Therefore he argues that some of the attention that the sociology of education has long directed exclusively to implicating schooling in the reproduction of inequality must be dedicated instead to identifying the forms of knowledge students should be expected to encounter in school. This is knowledge that carries with it emancipatory power which enables individuals to have a degree of control over their life trajectory. He explains why social realism is an appropriate framework for a socially progressive sociology of education, detailing how it secures, contra postmodern and earlier constructivist relativisms, strong justice claims with strong, rather than weak, knowledge claims.

Moore’s chapter concludes by arguing that the sociology of education requires a positive account of powerful knowledge for all. This is taken up by Michael Young and Johan Muller in Chapter 3 and by John Beck in Chapter 4. They make the case for the development of ‘powerful knowledge’ as a sociological concept and as a curriculum principle. In establishing powerful knowledge as a sociological concept they note particularly that it is specialised and differentiated. Powerful knowledge is specialised in how it is produced in academic settings and in how it is pedagogised to be transmitted and acquired in school settings. It is differentiated, through conceptual boundaries between everyday knowledge and the school knowledge of academic disciplines and subjects, from the experiences and interests that students bring to school with them. This certainly does not preclude students and teachers from drawing connections between everyday knowledge and school knowledge. However, this is a process that has much more to do with issues of pedagogy than issues of curriculum (as the chapters in Parts III and IV make clear); these are terms with meanings that must not be conflated. While everyday knowledge is linked to the context-dependent particularities of everyday experience, powerful knowledg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Knowledge and the Future of the Curriculum
• Part I: Powerful Knowledge
• Part II: Knowledge Politics and Policy
• Part III: Powerful Knowledge in the Curriculum
• Part IV: Pedagogical Implications of Powerful Knowledge
• References
• Index