Embedding disciplinary knowledge into a history curriculum
The theme of this series of blogs is that we cannot divorce curriculum thinking from pedagogical thinking.
The example I focused on in my last blog is the distinction between substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Failing to understand that disciplinary knowledge is different in kind to substantive knowledge, and that it can only really be understood with reference to subject-specific pedagogy, risks leading subject leaders into taking short cuts when designing a curriculum.
This blog will attempt to explain why, using the subject of history as an example.
Mapping historical knowledge
Ruth Ashbee, in her book Curriculum: Theory, Culture and the Subject Specialisms, maps out historical knowledge within the history curriculum as follows.
A subject leader attempting to use such a diagram to aid them in designing a history curriculum would face two main problems. Firstly, the disciplinary knowledge is framed within another box on the right-hand side of the diagram, as if it is just another category of substantive knowledge to be memorised and retrieved.
As we have seen, however, the disciplinary knowledge of history, (the set of so called second order concepts like continuity and change), governs the relationships between the concepts that make up the subject’s body of substantive knowledge. It sits in the background of historical reasoning; it can be glimpsed only if a skilled teacher draws one’s attention to it.
These second order concepts are thus too abstract to be useful to students. They are almost meaningless to a non-historian; the only way their meaning can be made clear is through examples.
To put them in a box is misleading; it tempts teachers into thinking that clever sequencing and targeted retrieval will be sufficient to allow students to learn such concepts. But this is not the case.
The importance of examples
The meaning of second order concepts can only emerge through repeated examples: seeing again and again how they manifest themselves through a shift of tone or emphasis during an oral account, the careful choice of words when writing an essay, a comparison of the fine detail of two sources.
This is why teacher modelling is so important. By making explicit the thought process of an historian, teachers can draw students’ attention to how second order concepts are incorporated into historical argument. I attempted to write about this in a previous blog.
The only danger of teacher modelling in history is adopting the kind of I do-we do-you do model that focuses on procedure rather than on the unique nature of historical reasoning. This was pointed out in a recent blog post by Jonathan Grande.
Another way to highlight how second order concepts link historical arguments together is to introduce students to examples of historical scholarship throughout the curriculum. This is the approach taken by Ben Walsh and Nasim Ahmed at Bobby Moore Academy in East London. I’m sure many other history teachers do this too.
In short, designing a history curriculum that gives students the opportunity to acquire meaningful disciplinary knowledge requires subject leaders to move beyond the model of categorising and sequencing.
It requires a wealth of experience regarding which pedagogical tools and which contexts are most effective for explaining a variety of first and second order concepts. This explains why teacher subject communities are so important, as I shall discuss in a later blog.
(In fact, I’m sure the history subject community is already way beyond me in understanding and apprehending the issues I’ve raised here!)
The role of theory
The second problem is that the diagram fails to take us very far beyond what we already know by intuition. Just as the dots and lines of the cognitive model of knowledge leave the nature of the connections between concepts unclear, this diagram uses boxes and arrows that tell us little about how concepts are connected within the framework used by an historian.
Ashbee does offer us a suggestion about how to map out historical knowledge: the timeline. But, as I pointed out in my blog on dual coding in history, this is the very simplest of representations. It’s the kind of visualisation that students could come up with intuitively from their everyday experience.
As useful as Ashbee’s diagram and accompanying account are, they offer teachers little in the way of practical advice about how they can make the second order concepts of history manifest to students.
She rightly suggests, “What are the components of disciplinary knowledge and how should they be developed through the curriculum?” as a question for discussion, but I would go further.
I would argue that this is the question for discussion if we are really to bring disciplinary knowledge to life for our students. It is not just a curriculum question: it is a question of history-specific pedagogy too.
