Does contemporary curriculum theory rest on a mistake?
Substantive vs disciplinary. Declarative vs procedural. Core vs hinterland. And sequencing. So much sequencing.
If you’ve taken even a cursory glance at what’s been written about the curriculum in recent years, you’ll have come across some or all of the terms above. They’ve become so commonplace that they’re no longer questioned. The distinctions are presented confidently as ‘Categories of Knowledge’ and advice on sequencing has been baked into Ofsted’s guidance for schools.
But what if they’re wrong? What if the things they’re attempting to describe don’t fit into such neat categories? What if the curriculum theory we’ve all been saturated with rests on a mistake?
Knowledge in the cognitive model
In a recent blog, I questioned the value of diagrams like the one below:
Such a diagram represents knowledge as something that’s taken from ‘out there’ in the environment, and transformed (somehow) into something connected (in the form of a schema) within our long-term memory.
The vagueness of my language here is deliberate. Such diagrams tell us little, either about the nature of the thing we commonly talk about as ‘knowledge’, or the way such knowledge is ‘connected’.
Diagrams like this, and indeed the theories they are supposed to illustrate, do little more than represent the common-sense view most of us have about knowledge already. They fail as theories of learning because they do not allow us to see what’s taking place in a new light.
The purpose of this series of blogs is to change the angle from which we view questions around knowledge and the curriculum. That means rethinking some of the categories and principles that are often taken as given.
The cognitive account of the curriculum
The simplistic assumptions the cognitive model holds about knowledge have important pedagogical consequences, as I discussed in recent blogs. They lead to problems around curriculum design too.
Put simply, the model above assumes there is stuff called knowledge that exists out there in the world. The first task of a teacher, according to this account, is to categorise it. One way of doing this is into subjects. There is geographical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, literary knowledge, and so on.
Within each of these broader categories, we can introduce sub-categories. Some of that geographical knowledge can be sub-categorised as ‘substantive’, the rest as ‘disciplinary’. The category we call mathematical knowledge can be divided into some which is ‘declarative’ and some which is ‘procedural’. In English, some of the knowledge accumulated can be thought of as ‘core’ while the rest is ‘hinterland’.
Once we have categorised the knowledge in each subject, the cognitive account runs, we must organise or ‘sequence’ it. This means deciding upon the order in which we introduce each ‘piece’ of knowledge in order that we can ‘build schemas’ in students’ long-term memories.
Disciplinary knowledge: different in kind
The trouble with categories like substantive and disciplinary, declarative and procedural, core and hinterland, and the whole idea of sequencing, is as follows. For such categories to exist, the thing being categorised must be codifiable. And the problem with knowledge is that much of it is not amenable to such codification.
Take the categories of substantive and disciplinary knowledge. As I argued in my previous blogs, on dual coding and modelling academic writing, the extent to which these pedagogical tools work in a subject depends on the extent to which they capture the logical connections between concepts in that subject. For example, dual coding is a much more effective tool in science than in history.
I attempted to show that the layout of a diagram drawn in a science classroom matters just as much as the content of the diagram. Likewise, the power of an historical argument rests on the choice of certain words that link together facts or concepts. Choosing these words judiciously is just as important as the ability of the author to recall those facts or concepts.
To have disciplinary knowledge is to understand these logical connections, which are made manifest through layout and word choice. This is not something that’s codifiable in the same way that a fact or piece of information is.
This leads us to an important conclusion. What’s often described as ‘disciplinary knowledge’ is not merely a different category of the same stuff as that which is called ‘substantive knowledge’. It is knowledge which is different in kind.
This distinction, along with its practical consequences, will be the subject of the subsequent blogs in this series. As we will find out, we cannot divorce pedagogical thinking from curriculum thinking if we are to realise a curriculum that is both rigorous and democratic.
Curriculum cannot be divorced from pedagogy
This is the mistake upon which contemporary curriculum theory rests. In considering the curriculum as entirely distinct from pedagogy — the what as distinct from the how — we have reduced curriculum design to sequencing, pedagogy to instruction and learning to memorisation.
What this leads to is a curriculum that is rightly rigorous, but that fails to appreciate the huge variety of starting points of students within our schools. It neglects the everyday knowledge and intuitive ways of thinking about the world that students already have when they enter school. It tells them: here is the best knowledge. If you don’t understand it, so much the worse for you.
This is why the highest performing schools rely on punitive behaviour systems to ensure that students remain ‘engaged’. In neglecting the importance of pedagogy, of the fact that the teacher must always begin with the student’s current worldview and change it one idea at a time, such schools have taken a short cut.
This approach takes us right back to where education was in the days before the progressive critique of the late 1960s and early 1970s, an education that implicitly branded large swathes of the population as ignorant or unteachable.
For all the current talk about curriculum and social justice, the mindset remains the same. Cognitive psychology has given us fancy new tools with which students can memorise information, but the underlying assumption is still: If you don’t understand it, so much the worse for you.
This series of blogs will seek to explain why the cognitive approach is a short cut, and why schools must take the long way round if they are to realise their broader democratic aims.
